Where in the World WERE WE?

In case you’ve been wondering why the two of us fell off the face of the planet for the last 3 weeks, we will fill you in!

Usually when we take on big projects, vacations, and even having babies, we make sure to time it with each other. There’s always at least one of us who tries to stay relatively available. Well we mistakenly decided to take on the holidays, while one of us MOVED, and the other FINISHED A BASEMENT. Bad, bad idea folks! It left us merely capable of handling urgent emails and slightly comatose the rest of the time. Well, Jodi is mostly settled into her new basement (although her food storage is still inaccessible), and Julie has running water, gas, and internet at the new house, so we’re ready to get back in the saddle. We’ve missed you on facebook, and on the blog.

With it still being early January, we wanted to share with you our Food Storage Goals for 2012!

Put my food storage room back together after the move. I have my rotating racks set up, but the rest of the food is in open boxes. I moved across the street so I was spoiled in that, I didn’t have to “carefully” pack it. More on moving food storage later this month!
Now that I have moved into a different house, and I “practiced” a garden at my mom’s house last year. I’m going to try my OWN garden, in my OWN yard!
Make my own granola on a regular basis. I’m good at having my family eat oatmeal often, but I want to try and make a good multi-grain, sprouted granola to add variety in nutrients to breakfast time.
After living without gas in our new house for a couple days in the middle of winter (long story), I want to learn more about ways to STAY warm without power

Get a better system for my UPSTAIRS pantry situation. I have a great food storage, but I get a little tired of running downstairs for ingredients almost every single night. This has been extremely annoying the last few weeks as most of my food storage has been completely inaccessible. I would like to have a decent amount of things upstairs and have a good system for moving things up from the basement in batches every now and then.
I want to learn dutch oven cooking this summer. Last summer I had fun trying regular recipes in my Sun Oven, but that was pretty easy to do. I feel like dutch oven cooking will require getting some new recipes to try and learning to cook in ways I’m not used to. I think it will be fun!
I definitely want to get more into dehydrating this year. I like freeze-dried foods but it can save tons of money to dehydrate your own plus you can have a lot more options with the different foods you are dehydrating. It’s also great for preserving extra garden harvest.
My final goal is to start sale shopping/couponing again. Having three kids and another on the way, I haven’t done great at stocking up when things are cheapest over the past little while. It takes conscious effort and some planning to do this. I’m always buying extras of things when I run out, and my long term storage is well stocked and rotated into my regular foods, but I think I can get my 3 month supply a little more robust and do it cheaper if I am couponing. This may have to wait til things settle down after baby #4, but it is a goal for me this year!

What are YOUR food storage goals for 2011?