We will be back tomorrow with a regular post so make sure to check back. We have lots of fun and exciting things we will be covering this month so you won’t want to miss it.

Since cooking with food storage tends to cause you to cook a lot more from scratch, we thought this was a great question to address on our blog. Here are just a few of the great tips submitted. Thanks Facebook friends!

Does anyone have any tips for using less energy as we cook through the hot summer? Let’s all share and get ideas from each other!

Amanda: Crock pot and pressure cookers

Stephanie: We eat a lot of Panini

Toni : During the summer almost all we do is grill

Wendy: SOLAR OVENS ARE AWESOME!! We LOVE ours!!!!

Chelle : When I cook ground beef to go into recipes I cook a bunch all at once and then separate it into baggies for later use. It saves so much time and energy!

Carole Gentry In the summer, make only bar cookies, not drop. Use way less energy.

Lora : BBQ and crock pot! Great ideas!

Deb: I make a lot of pasta salads early in the morning, not on peak usage time. Tuna salads, chef salads, egg salad…BBQ once for several days, mooch off family..lol Pot lucks would give everyone a break in the kitchens though! Grilling pizza is WONDERFUL!!!!!

Linda: A crock pot on back patio!

Mary: Barbeque and crockpot!

Mercedes: Thermos cooking. More info on YouTube.

Misty: Here is an article about baking on. The grill: http://www.preparedpantry.com/How-to-Bake-Bread-On-A-Grill.htm

Elizabeth: pasta salad…any salad…and the microwave doesn’t heat up the house like stovetop and oven…:) I use my bread machine in the summer….much less heat in the kitchen when you bake bread:)

Mariana : Toaster oven. i put mine outside. Don’t even heat up the house.

Carole :We have dinner in the garden a lot!!! Just pick and eat and the grill

Carrie : We love our outside grill, George Forman grill, Crockpot, and lots of lunchmeat and veggies…

Nancy: Solar ovens, crock pots, grills. time to try out all those alternative cooking options, rocket stoves, soda can stoves, Dutch oven cooking in campfire. Don’t forget the bug spray!!

Martha: Cook outdoors more!!

Cleo: Plus, sometimes I just serve a meat and cheese try with fruit for dessert… cheese and crackers, and cold cuts are also summer favorites.

Michael : So as to not waste charcoal, I will fill my grill to capacity at least once every Sunday, more if the fuel lasts and then I have grilled goodies for the rest of the week for lunch or quick dinners. That really makes the charcoal last.

Delma : Green smoothie’s they are full of good stuff for you and easy to do.

Suzanne: I love my Electric Pressure Cooker, most meals take less than 20 minutes. Also use a teapot to boil pasta water, then pour into pot and you will take a lot less time and energy boiling water when making pastas. And I LOVE pasta salads in the summer!

Susanne: Yes, my husband has made me an outdoor kitchen, complete with gas stove/oven, and also a lot of BBQ. I do a lot of my canning out there and cooking in the summer so I don’t heat up the house.

Rise’ : Grilling over the fire, potatoes and veggies cooked in the ashes. Lots of fresh salads from the garden. Also, cook enough meat on the grill to have leftovers to go on a big salad the next night.

Becky : Grow gardens and eat salads, wraps and green shakes!

Do you have any ideas that aren’t listed? Feel free to share in comments.

p.s. If you check on Facebook later today you just might notice a SURPRISE SALE to celebrate something exciting!

Or how about when you get your food storage calculator all filled out and it says to buy 600 pounds of wheat and you have NO IDEA how many buckets or cans that equates to?

Well we just spent the day perusing the internet to come up with a handy chart for you that includes the most common items recommended for long term food storage and how many pounds you can store in both #10 cans and 5 gallon buckets. Please note these are estimates depending on how you are packaging (i.e. using mylar bags or not)

 
#10 can data comes from ShelfReliance.com and is what THEIR #10 cans contain. Numbers could be slightly more or less elsewhere.

We will be making this into a cute handout to include in our next batch of free binder updates, but in the meantime it’s a great info sheet to print out and keep with you when you are shopping or ordering your foods online.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday Season! We will be taking the next two weeks off from posting (however we won’t be taking a real break since we have too many fun things to plan for the New Year). Make sure you stay tuned on Facebook because it’s pretty likely we will be dropping hints about all the fun that is coming up in January over the next two weeks.

If you’re bored or have extra time over the holidays season, check out some of these great posts to refresh and get motivated on making 2011 a great Food Storage Year!

WHY FOOD STORAGE: A 5 PART SERIES
This fun series answers the question: “Why do people build a food storage?” It gives the different reasons people choose to embark in this aspect of emergency preparedness.

SEVEN DAY CHALLENGE
Each September we put on a 7 Day Challenge, in which we all test out our Food Storage and EPrep Plans. Join the fun, you’ll learn A LOT!

EXTREME MAKEOVER: FOOD STORAGE EDITION
Join us as we give Grandma Lori (Jodi’s mom) a Food Storage Makeover. We are having a blast, slowly walking her through all the BabySteps.

ONE SECOND AFTER: GROUP BOOK DISCUSSION
Whether you read the book or not, there is a lot of valuable information in the posts and in the comments where we discussed our thoughts relating how to get through an EMP attack.

HOW TO: A HELPFUL SERIES
Being prepared means you can take care of small emergencies that may arise in an everyday situation. Learn how to do common things around the house by yourself.

BOOK REVIEWS
Check out some of the books we have read and learn what we thought of them. This may help you in deciding which books to add to your library.

SELF RELIANCE
See all of the adventures we’ve been having as we learn the lost arts of self-reliance. It’s not as hard as you think to learn great skills like canning, dehydrating, gardening, and more!

On October 31st, our site will

DISAPPEAR!

Don’t get too spooked, or filled with fear.
The site will be back up, sometime next week
It’s not a trick, so don’t be saddened and bleak
It’s sure to be a treat,
you’ll think is sweet!

Let’s just say we’ve been up late almost every night this month getting this organized for you…

p.s.  While the site is down it would be a great time to make sure you are caught up on your reading of “One Second After” for our group discussion.  We are both going to get started on it this weekend! (Note: we have heard that there is some language in the book, but it was highly recommend by a lot of people during the 7 day challenge so we hope that it will still be a great read for us all).

Due to job loss and the slow economy, a family that you are close friends with was just evicted from their home. You offer to let them stay with you overnight. You must feed and provide shelter to a family of 6 on short notice. When they arrive, you also discover that they are vegetarians. Assume that they arrive shortly after breakfast.

Today’s Tasks:

• Cook lunch for your family plus two adults and four kids
• For a fun friday night twist (and to take their minds off their situation) play restaurant for dinner. Be creative how you want to do this (make some family members waiters, make menus, set the table nicely, have appetizers, whatever you want)
• Provide sleeping arrangements for two adults and four children in your home
• The family did not bring any hygiene items, provide them with toothbrushes, shampoo, soap, etc.
• Evaluate your tp, paper towel, laundry detergent, and dish detergent stores … do you have enough to last with this many extra people for a few days?
• Go over your own budget and/or financial situation (with your spouse if applicable) and think about how you can avoid having a situation like this occur in your own family (budget, financial reserve, minimize debt, etc.)

Today’s Limitations:

• For this day, and ALL days of the challenge: no spending money, no going to stores, and no restaurants.
• None of the meals can include any meat.
• You ran out of milk and eggs due to the extra guests. No using them for cooking!

Advanced Tasks:

• One of the children is a baby, make a batch of homemade baby food.
• The family needs $100 in gas money to travel to a relatives’ house where they will stay long term, do you have that much cash in your home that you can give them?

(Please note: Either freeze the extra food for later, give it to a family in need, or actually invite a family over for the day.)

REMEMBER, TOMORROW’S CHALLENGE WILL BE DIFFERENT.
How long would you have lasted under these conditions?
 

Make sure your fill out today’s Report Card to see how well you did, to keep track of areas you can improve, to remember things you need to do, and things you need to buy. Use the data to make a game plan to take you to the next level of preparedness, whatever that may be.

I learned so much! It brought back memories of when I first started food storage. I was a little overwhelmed, but this time I know through BabySteps I can slowly implement the things that I choose. So here’s a little disclaimer, this is not necessarily for everyone right now! I’m on a personal journey of trying to change some of the foods I eat. By doing this- I have to think about food storage a little differently. Since some of you asked to hear about what I learned I’m sharing this…

The speaker was Yvonne Salcido, who was from the School of Natural Healing. When she started speaking I felt excited as she seemed vibrant, and looked healthy. She started by giving some of her basic guidelines for eating. It’s amazing the more you learn about nutrition, the more some of this stuff keeps repeating itself. Anyways, here they were:

-Eat Foods in Wholesome State
-Study Nutrition and Herbs
-Avoid toxic habit forming habits
-Fresh is Best
-Staff of Life (wheat, soaked and sprouted)
-Eat in the Season thereof

After she talked about that, she gave us a little TREASURE! This is something I’ve been searching for and developing in my mind lately. When this slide came up, I did a little shout for joy! THE WORK HAS BEEN DONE. She gave a little calculator of what to store for “optimally healthy” food storage. I asked her if I could share it, and she said yes, so here it is….

300 lbs Organic Wheat
155 lbs Other Grains
50 lbs Nuts
50 lbs Seeds
75 lbs Organic Beans
60 lbs Raw Honey
20 lbs Oil (coconut oil, olive oil, wheat germ oil)
10 lbs Salt (real salt)
60 lbs Sprout Mix
5 lbs Seed Sprout mix
Garden Seeds (non hybrid)
Spices

Then she talked more about sprouts. The University of Utah did a study to find out the highest vitamin per storage space kinds of food you can store. The answer was…. SPROUTS. They came up with a mixture (that I couldn’t write down fast enough) but I’ll do a little digging and try to find it. I have a mix called Pro-Vita mix I got at a store called Kitchen Kneads, and I think it might be the same thing.

Next up was a topic we have never covered and I think we need to talk a little bit more about. Yvonne suggested we store herbs for medicinal purposes and then went through a bunch of different kinds of herbs you can store that help with different ailments etc. The first one she talked about was cayenne, which is good for circulation, and can stop bleeding etc. She then talked about a lot more that I wrote down, and couldn’t take notes fast enough on. I was really interested, but must admit I felt like I could have used about 10 hours of info on that stuff instead of 20 mins. I’m going to learn more about it, but in the mean time, know that its out there and start learning about it, if you feel ready and think its a good fit (Like I mentioned before these are just my notes- I don’t know much about this yet, you need to do your due diligence, research, and speak with your doctors about medications, and potential interactions with herbs).

So anyways, those are the notes I took. I know some of you readers were there because I recognized some of you from facebook . If I missed anything feel free to comment or shoot us an email. We’re all in this together!

It seems like just yesterday that we came up with this crazy idea to blog about food storage when we had absolutely ZERO food storage and had no clue where to even start. In fact according to our very first blog post, we originally wanted to call this blog “Food Storage For Dummies … and We’re the Dummies”. hehe.

We have come a long way since we started two years ago and we wanted to celebrate this anniversary with you by taking you on a humorous journey of our successes and failures. So let’s get started!

We didn’t fully understand blogs, the blogging community, or blogging software in the beginning. We were both web designers but didn’t catch the blogging vision yet. Needless to say, our first site design left much to be desired

We have to admit that we have a lot more fun with the blog now that it is PINK! (Sorry to our men readers, it’s just the truth)

Check back every day this week as we walk you through some of our hidden archives to highlight what we have learned about food storage over the past two years. There will be some funny stuff you do NOT want to miss!

	January 2009 - We launched our free BabyStep Checklists to make it even EASIER to accomplish our Ten BabySteps. We were so excited to give people tangible lists to follow as they gathered their food storage including what to learn, what to buy, and how to use it.
	Spring 2009 – We started a facebook fan page. We had no idea at the time how much fun it would be. We all get to know each other through status updates, fan pictures, and success stories. One of the biggest perks of the fan page is all our reader experts out there who help answer questions. We learn so much on the fan page through sharing and great discussion.
	April 2009 – As people began completing the individual checklists, we got numerous requests from people wanting to get all the checklists at once so they could move ahead faster or make substitutions depending on what was on sale. We launched our Food Storage Made Easy eBook Binder which includes all the checklists, and the majority of our site content in one printable file.
	September 2009 – The Seven Day Challenge was a mock emergency that we put together in September of 2009 in honor of it being Emergency Preparedness Month. Our readers all participated with us as we went through seven days of different emergency situations and we shared feedback and learning along the way. We’re excited to do it all again this year!
	June 2010 -One of our favorite additions is our Newsletter program that we JUST started this month! We now offer recipes, food storage news/events, blog features, tips, and information about giveaways to people who are in our checklists email lists (whether you’re done, or still in the middle of them). Just in case you only want the newsletter and not the checklists, you can sign up for that here.

We’re so excited for the posts this week. They will be fun for you to go down memory lane, or if you’re a new reader to get to know us better (just don’t laugh at us – we were REALLY just beginners when we started this).

If you’re following Grandma Lori’s Extreme Food Storage Makeover, you know that last time we left off with a “to be continued” after Julie made Lori her full shopping list based on her recipes she wanted to use in her three month food supply. The post was titled “We have a Plan”

Well last week Julie was running out of ideas for Mother’s Day presents so she called up Grandma Lori and said, lets get this shopping trip done! (Because once the shopping was done, she could do the real present – which is organizing the whole food storage room) Grandma Lori wanted to go ahead and buy all the food up front, then replace through normal use, and sale shopping…. So it made for a big shopping trip to say the least.

Surprisingly however, the shop wasn’t NEARLY as painful as we thought it would be. We took the excel file that had calculated exactly everything she needed and used it as our shopping guide. Before we went to the store, we took inventory of what she already and then we were actually in and out of the store fairly quickly.

So for Mother’s Day, Julie and her husband went to Grandma Lori’s and transformed that room into a BEAUTIFUL site with great shelves(donated from Can Organizers), some reorganizing, and CUTE LABELS – that you all are going to ask her to do a tutorial on how to make them….! Stay tuned because those pictures and video are coming later this week!