If you are not used to eating “survival foods”, they can be a real shock to your system if you rapidly switch to a diet that consists of only food storage items. Times of emergency are challenging enough, it’s not good to add the additional stress of a complete diet change into the mix. This is especially important for small children who won’t necessarily understand what’s going on. So hopefully your food storage doesn’t look like this – unopened, stashed in the basement, hiding from your kitchen.

Once you decide to start incorporating food storage into your everyday cooking, you should do so gradually or your family may get sick. Wheat and beans are high in fiber and if introduced too quickly can give your body a fiber overload and cause you to not feel so well when you eat those foods. Here are some ways you can add these foods to your diet slowly so your family has time to get used to them.

1. Start cooking from scratch and add little bits at a time and gradually increase it. This can work well for making bread. Start with only 1/4 of the flour being whole wheat flour. Work your way up to 100% whole wheat over the course of a few months.

2. Use food storage foods 1-2 times per week. Gradually increase this number over a few months. This works well for foods like beans. You can use dried beans in a few meals a week without your family getting tired of them or having adverse reactions.

3. Try your food storage items in desserts. This is a tip from Crystal over at Everyday Food Storage. By introducing them in desserts you can build up your family’s tolerance for new foods.

If you have a wheat allergy, please make sure to review our post about Alternatives to Wheat for Food Storage, and if you don’t have a wheat grinder, view our post called 7 Ways to Use Wheat Without a Grinder. Between those two posts there should be some tricks for everyone to be able to start incorporating their wheat and other foods into their diet on a regular basis.

Buttermilk Biscuit Recipe:

Ingredients:

2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup buttermilk (1/2 T. vinegar + 1/2 c. milk* and let sit for about 1 min.)

*You may also substitute this for powdered milk

Directions:

Combine all dry ingredients. Cut in butter. Stir in the buttermilk until the dough is moist. Knead 6-8 times on a floured surface. Pat out to about 1 inch in thickness. Cut with a biscuit cutter or glass rim. Place on a greased baking sheet and bake at 375 F for 17-18 minutes or until lightly browned.

Recipe adapted from one found on allrecipes.com

For other food storage recipes check out:

Our Food Storage Recipes Page
Our sister site EverydayFoodStorage.NET
I Can’t Believe It’s Food Storage book
Country Beans book

To enter, simply add our NEW button to your blog to help us spread the word about Food Storage. You don’t even have to write a post about us – well unless you want to…

Email us at info@foodstoragemadeeasy.net with your blog address so we can see the button, and we’ll put you in the mix to be a lucky winner. If your blog is private, send us the link and we’ll just trust you. If you don’t have a blog email us and we’ll give you another way to enter. Entries are due November 19!

<div align=center><a href=http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net target=_blank><img src=http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/fsme/images/newbutton.jpg border=0></a><br><b><a href=http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net target=_blank>Food Storage</a> Made Easy</b></p></div>

The first resource is our recently added 5 part series on “Why People Build a Food Storage”.  So many people have stumbled upon our site wondering what this is all about.  So feel free to pass along this link to people who are new to Food Storage.

The second resources is our “7 Day Challenge Report” pdf that we recently published with all our, and our readers findings on living 7 days of emergencies. We learned so much from each other and this pdf has incredible tips and findings anyone can benefit from.

Good Luck Everyone! Remember if you don’t win you’ll still have time to take advantage of the $30 rebate. It’s great timing with the Holidays around the corner to start asking for Christmas presents early…

1. Store extra of the other grains

According to food storage calculators, one adult should store 300 lbs of grains for a one year supply of food. Of this 300, half of it is supposed to be wheat. If you have a wheat allergy, obviously this is not going to apply to you. You may choose to store a lot more alternative grains which include oats, gluten-free quinoa, millet, amaranth, rice, or cornmeal. You can start to collect food storage recipes that use these grains instead of focusing on the traditional items like breads, etc.

2. Learn how to make substitutions

A lot of recipes that call for wheat flour can be modified for wheat allergies. For example, cream of chicken soup or any white sauce base recipe can be made using bean flour. You can make gluten-free bread using other flours such as rice flour, millet flour, oat flour, etc. If you own a wheat grinder then these types of substitutions are SO easy to make and you can store the bulk grains in your food storage, just like you would store wheat! For a great summary of different types of gluten-free flours check out this post on the Gluten Free Mommy blog.

We need your help!

We would love to compile some even more in depth resources for people who suffer from Celiac Disease or others who need to follow a gluten-free diet. If you have good food storage recipes or other tips on how to do gluten-free food storage please email them to info@foodstoragemadeeasy.net. We will be incorporating all of your feedback into a helpful handout that will hopefully benefit a lot of people who are trying to live gluten-free AND work on food storage!

At first I made this recipe with store bought tortillas, canned beans, and canned cream of chicken/mushroom soup – but I promised myself bit by bit I would make it using all the “advanced” techniques. Now that I have had a lot more experience using my food storage, I make it the real way and it tastes so much better – I wont make it any other way.

So here’s to sharing it with you and to giving you a special cooking challenge.

Ingredients:
1 can of black beans (*see below)
1 lg onion (*see below)
1 can of cream of chicken (*see below)
1 can of cream of mushroom (*see below)
¾ cup of milk (*see below)
1 (4oz) can diced green chilies
1 (8 oz) can mild enchilada sauce
1 pkg soft tortillas (*see below)
½ lb cheddar cheese, grated
½ lb monterrey jack cheese, grated

Directions:
Wash and cook beans. Mix next 6 ingredients with beans (Optional: add 3 chicken breasts shredded). Place tortillas in greased 9 by 13 inch pan. Top with half the bean mixture and half the cheese. Repeat the layers. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. Cool slightly and cut in squares.

Try each of these techniques one at a time or all at once. They are things that used to scare me and now I love doing them this way in all my recipes.

1 can of black beans with 1 1/2 cups of cooked beans from your food storage. Need to know how to cook them? Check out Crystals post on pressure cooking dry beans here.

Onion with dehydrated onion. These are not only a time saver, but are great to store to have added flavoring in your food storage.

1 can of cream of chicken, 1 can of cream of mushroom, and the milk with the bean flour cream soup recipe found here.

Store bought tortillas, with homemade tortillas made from scratch using recipe found here.

Again if you’re new – don’t get overwhelmed by these “weird” techniques – try them one at a time and one day you’ll be amazed at how much you have learned!

The recipe I’ll be sharing calls for whole wheat tortillas, so if you’re up for the challenge of trying it out when I share it, get a head start by trying these!

Ingredients:
4 cups of whole wheat flour (fine)
¼ tsp baking powder
2 tsp salt
1 cup of warm water (may need a little more – I usually do!)
¼ cup cooking oil

Jodi always mocks me for not being the “recipe” type, or having “clear” instructions when cooking (I’m one of those, a little bit of this and a little bit of that types…), so just to show I can be specific…

Directions:
1. Mix all ingredients together to make a nice pliable dough.
2. Knead 1 minute and let rest 5 minutes.
3. Roll the dough out so you can easily make equal pieces
4. Cut the dough into 18 equal pieces (I halved the recipe here)
5. Form into 18 balls
6. Roll thin (spray pam to help if there are sticking or dryness problems)
7. Fry on both sides, they cook quickly (no need to grease the frying pan at all)
8. Eat! It doesn’t take long to cook.

TRICKS:

I use a little hand roller that helps a lot and since I use tortillas mostly in recipes where they don’t have to look perfect, I don’t feel so bad when they don’t turn out in perfect circles… (Although I’m sure I could trace some lid from a bowl and cut around if I really cared)

My sister uses this kind of tortilla press and she says they are much faster and easier to make. I think one day I’ll get one. It’s only $13 on amazon, so to all my family members reading this… ahem ahem.  But for now, my handy roller works fine.


At a cooking class I was at once this lady had an electric press and cooker .  The thing was amazing! You threw a ball of dough in there and closed the lid, and voila! A perfect tortilla.  For people who love kitchen appliances (and have the room to store them) this could be something to check out!

Hope you like these!

1. Thermos Wheat
Recipe from author Rita Bingham

Bring 1 c. of wheat kernels, 2 c. water, and 1 t. salt to a boil in a medium saucepan. Pour into a heated stainless steel or glass-lined thermos bottle. Secure cap. Place bottle on side. In the morning, pour off any additional water, add butter and honey, and serve hot.

2. Wheat Berries
Add some of your plain dry wheat kernels to a pot of water. Bring it to a boil and cook for a few minutes. Then let simmer for about 45 minutes. Drain the wheat berries and stick them in a tupperware container in the fridge. These are delicious to add to yogurt or to use to replace some meat in recipes. You can also use it in place of brown rice in a lot of recipes.

3. Popped Wheat
Take 1 cup of your cooked wheat berries (see above) and add to a frying pan of pot with two tablespoons of oil in it. Cover with a lid and cook over a hot stove shaking the pan while it cooks. After about 4-5 minutes the kernels will be nice and toasted. Put the popped wheat on a paper towel to get the extra oil off, and sprinkle with your choice of seasonings. Try it with salt, seasoned salt, garlic, barbecue salt, onion salt, cinnamon and sugar or any combination you desire. These are delicious on salads as a topping, mixed with trail mix, or as toppings for a desserts or just as a healthy snack.

4. Wheat Grass
Most people have heard how healthy wheat grass is for you, but most people DON’T know that you can make your own wheat grass at home for free with just a little bit of your food storage wheat. Check out this step by step tutorial on Safely Gathered In if you want to try it yourself! It looks so easy. Then you can snip bits off and add them to your fruit smoothies, or if you have a juicer you can use them in other healthy juice drinks.

5. Cracked Wheat
You can crack wheat in a blender or a coffee grinder. To do it in a blender you simply put in about 1/4-1/3 cups of wheat and pulse it until it looks like little cracked kernels. These kernels will cook much faster than regular wheat, and cook up in the same way that you cook rice on the stove or in the microwave. You can use cracked wheat to make hot cereal, add it into bread, or cook it up and use as a meat filler. For more info in cracked wheat visit this post at Everyday Food Storage.

6. Wheat Sprouts
Making wheat sprouts is a different method than making wheat grass. You can sprout wheat just like any other vegetable seeds, legumes, or other grains. Make sure to review our tutorial on how to grow sprouts. Most people like wheat sprouts to be very small, just barely sprouted. These are delicious to throw on salads or to add into your whole wheat bread for a little extra texture and flavor.

7. Blender Wheat Flour
If you are cooking a recipe for something like pancakes or waffles, you can EASILY use your whole wheat kernels, mix the whole recipe in your blender, and pour it straight from there onto a griddle or waffle-maker. Just make sure to add the liquid for your recipe into the blender, then add in your wheat kernels and blend for about 5 minutes. Then add the rest of the ingredients. We blogged about trying Blender Wheat Pancakes and we also have a delicious Corn Cakes Recipe you could try in the blender too.

Please note: Don’t go trying all of these ideas all at once! If you add TOO MUCH wheat into your diet TOO FAST it can give you digestion problems, and we promise you don’t want to have that

Do you have any other ways you use wheat without a wheat grinder? Share them in the comments below!

Corndog Muffin Recipe:

Ingredients:
1 1/2 c. cornmeal (about 1 c. fresh ground popcorn)
2 1/2 c. flour (about 2 c. fresh ground wheat)
1/2 c. white sugar
1/4 c. brown sugar
4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2 eggs (can use powdered eggs)
2 c. milk (can use powdered milk)
8 oz shredded cheddar cheese
6 hot dogs cut in thirds

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix dry ingredients in large bowl. Beat eggs and milk in a separate bowl. Add to dry mix and add cheese just until moistened. Spoon mixture into muffin tins until 2/3 full. Add 1 hot dog chunk to each muffin. Bake for 14-18 minutes or until golden brown.
 
 

I cut my hotdogs into smaller chunks and it wasn’t as good that way. I also think next time I might try it with my buttermilk cornbread recipe and just stick the hotdogs and cheese into that batter. I LOVE that cornbread recipe better than any other. The kids LOVED this recipe and it is very filling so we had tons of leftovers.

For other food storage recipes check out:

Our Food Storage Recipes Page
Our sister site EverydayFoodStorage.NET
I Can’t Believe It’s Food Storage book
Country Beans book

Types of Cornmeal:

Steel ground: The most common type of cornmeal, it has the husk and germ almost all removed. Because of this, steel ground cornmeal has less flavor and nutrients but does have a very long shelf life. This is the type you will typically find at the grocery store.
Stone ground: This type of cornmeal retains more of the husk and germ but because of this it is more perishable than steel ground.
Cornmeal can be found in white, yellow, red, and blue varieties. Yellow and white are the most common.

Types of Corn:

The basic types of dried corn used for food storage are: flint, dent, and popcorn. All can be used fairly interchangeably but flint is a little better for cornmeal, dent is better for corn masa, and popcorn is the most versatile since it can be popped for a snack OR ground into meal or flour. Corn can also be found in white, yellow, red, and blue. Yellow corn is often recommended over white corn since white corn does not contain carotene (which converts into vitamin A). Yellow dent corn is very common at food storage stores, but popping corn can easily be found at any grocery store.

Corn/Cornmeal Shelf Life:

Cornmeal: Between 6 and 18 months. Store in a cool dry place to help prolong this.
Corn: 8 years or more if stored in a sealed airtight container with an oxygen absorber.

Corn/Cornmeal Uses:

Dried corn can be used as a vegetable in stews, popped into popcorn, or ground into flour or cornmeal. Corn flour is most commonly used to make corn masa which is a dough used to make tortillas. Cornmeal (fresh ground or store bought) can be used to make delicious cornbread or corn cakes. It can also be made into hominy or grits.
 

Recommendations:

We recommend starting by purchasing a small amount of cornmeal and try some food storage recipes out and see if your family likes eating those foods. If it turns out to be something you really like, then we highly recommend storing a lot of popcorn and grinding it fresh which helps with flavor and gives you more nutrients. If you don’t have a wheat grinder available to you, try to buy cornmeal in good sealed containers such as #10 cans to help prolong the shelf life.

   

All you have to do to get the rebate is purchase a Wonder Junior Basic or Deluxe of WonderMill Electric Mill from our Wheat Grinder product page anytime between September 1, 2009 and November 25, 2009. Once your order has been shipped we will send you the $30 rebate form from the WonderMill. Make sure to follow the directions carefully and submit your form by December 15, 2009.
 

At Food Storage Made Easy we always sell the electric grain mills and the hand grain mills at the lowest price available, so when you add the $30 rebate from WonderMill onto that (and our current free shipping promotion) this is the rock bottom lowest you will ever be able to get a WonderMill wheat grinder!

p.s. Make SURE to watch the blog later today (Wednesday) for one more BIG announcement and the HUGE list of prizes still to be given out. Don’t forget to check out the Day 7 Winners just posted!