Today we are highlighting two fun boards, the Meal Planning/Organizing board and the Saving on Groceries board. On our Meal Planning/Organizing board we are gathering great ideas for helping you to organize your recipes and plan out your meals. This can be very helpful for day to day cooking as well as for planning your three month supply. The Saving on Groceries board is full of tips on how to reduce your grocery spending so you can have more money left to buy food storage!

   

• PIN 1: This menu board has inspired Jodi to embark on a big new meal planning adventure that she is very excited about!
• PIN 2: Plan and track your 3 month supply inventory by inputting your recipes into this simple spreadsheet.
• PIN 3:See what service is saving us TONS of money on our groceries each month.
• PIN 4: Use this handy guide to know which months certain items tend to go on sale.

Make sure you check out the rest of the items on the Meal Planning/Organizing board and the Saving on Groceries board. We’ll keep adding to these boards as we find great stuff, and we’ll see you tomorrow to highlight another one of our boards!

Don’t forget you can Follow us on Pinterest so you don’t miss any of the great stuff we will be pinning in the future.

Whenever I go to the grocery store I try to grab a tub or two of sour cream, but considering I try to avoid going to the grocery store as much as possible, this never lasts for very many meals. The other day I really wanted to make poppyseed chicken, and I REALLY did not want to go to the store for sour cream, so I broke out my little pantry can of sour cream powder and decided to risk ruining the recipe with it. Well I have to say, it was a completely suitable substitution. Hurray!

Now knowing me, of course my next thought was “could I make this entire MEAL shelf stable”? That was quite the adventure but I’m happy to let you know that it is possible, and delicious. And your families will be thanking you in a powerless emergency that you can make something absolutely normal (and delicious). Please note, I do not pretend that this is a “healthy” meal, proceed with caution.

Here is the scoop on the recipe and the substitutions I made:

Poppyseed Chicken (original recipe)

Ingredients:
1 1/2 pounds chicken, diced and boiled
2 cans cream of chicken soup
12-16 oz sour cream
1/2 cup melted butter

Topping:
1/2 cup melted butter
2 tubes ritz crackers, crushed
2 T. poppyseeds

Directions:
Combine cream of chicken soup, sour cream, and butter. Pour over cooked chicken in a 9×13 pan or a slightly smaller oval casserole dish. Combine topping ingredients in small bowl. Sprinkle over top of chicken mixture. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes or until heated through. Cover with foil until the last 5 minutes or the topping may get browner than you like. Serve over rotini noodles.

Poppyseed Chicken (shelf stable version)

Ingredients:
1 qt jar home-canned chicken or 3 cups freeze-dried chicken reconstituted
2 cans cream of chicken soup (or 20 ounces bean flour cream of chicken)
1 1/2 cups sour cream powder, rehydrated with 3/4 cup water
1/2 cup butter powder, rehydrated with 1/2 cup water

Topping:
1/2 cup butter powder, rehydrated with 1/2 cup water
2 tubes ritz crackers, crushed
2 T. poppyseeds

Directions:
Combine cream of chicken soup, sour cream, and butter. I happened to be out of cream of chicken soup this day too, so I used the bean flour cream of chicken recipe doubled, and then only used 20 ounces of it. It seemed to work just fine in this recipe but I still like cans of cream of chicken for the ease on some days. Pour over chicken in a 9×13 pan or a slightly smaller oval casserole dish. Combine topping ingredients in small bowl. The rehydrated butter is a lot more runny than regular butter, but it doesn’t mix with the ritz like normal melted butter would. It ended up being more mushy rather than crumbly. Use your hands to sprinkle over top of chicken mixture as best you can. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes or until heated through. Cover with foil until the last 5 minutes or the topping may get browner than you like. Serve over rotini noodles.

As I am looking at this picture I realized that I think it is a picture of my ritzy potato recipe rather than poppyseed chicken, hehe, but it is quite similar ingredients and you can see the texture of the sauce and the topping made with powdered butter so I will leave it in here. That will teach me for taking a picture in my phone of a yummy recipe and then wait for months to get around to posting it on the blog! I blame my pregnant brain.

One great way to have information off line is through books, printed recipes, and your Food Storage Made Easy Binder.

Food Storage Books

We have done a number of Food Storage Book reviews that we wanted to remind you about, and encourage you to figure out which books would best fit your needs. These are great things to ask for as gifts, or to give as gifts. Here are some of our current Food Storage Book reviews, along with some books we will be reviewing in the future:

Emergency Food Storage in a Nutshell – REVISED review to reflect the new edition
Country Beans – Amazing book on all things beans
Cooking with Food Storage Made Easy – Cute book with tons of easy recipes!
Jan’s Fabulous Food Storage Recipes – Treasure trove of great information
Dinner is in the Jar – A different approach to food storage

It’s in the Bag – COMING SOON
The Dehydrator Bible – COMING SOON
Cooking with Sunshine – COMING SOON

Food Storage Recipes

Recipes is probably one of the MOST important things to have in print format. Not only will it save your laptop from tomato slime by having it in the kitchen, but you’ll be able to cook without power and internet!

For some great tips about building your recipes offline see these posts:
How to Organize Your Recipes – Jodi shares her approach to compiling recipe binders with a great little tutorial
FREE Shelf Stable Cookbook – Compilation of over 200 shelf stable recipes you can print out and add to your binder

Food Storage Made Easy Binder

As a part of our Food Storage Made Easy ebook binder, we’ve included tons of informative articles and recipes you can turn to in times of need. We also encourage you to print other resources you find online or at classes you may attend and put it into your binder. Use the binder as your main go-to resource for building and using your food storage.

Enjoy, and good luck keeping it together this holiday while USING your Food Storage!

MULTI-GRAIN PANCAKE/WAFFLE MIX

Grind in wheat grinder:
3 cups wheat
½ cup rye
½ cup sweet brown rice
½ cup barley
½ cup oat groats

Add to above:
2 cups powdered milk
1-1/2 tsp sea salt
½ cup Rumsford baking powder (Rumsford rises best)

Mix all above together and store in FREEZER in Gallon Ziplock Bag for best freshness.

When ready to use, mix together the following:
1 cup of the above mix
3/4 cup water
1 egg or 1 powdered egg (1 Tbsp powder and 3 Tbsp water)
2 Tbsp oil
1/4 cup sugar

After mixing together, let sit for about 5 minutes or so — then, ready to use as pancakes or waffles!

HOMEMADE CORNBREAD MIX

Combine:
5 cups flour
5 cups freshly ground cornmeal
3-1/3 cups white or brown sugar (I prefer brown) – YUMMY!
1-1/3 cups dehydrated margarine or butter
1/4 cup powdered milk or powdered buttermilk
1/2 cup dehydrated egg white or whole egg
2-1/2 tsp baking soda
2-1/2 tsp baking powder
2-/12 tsp salt

Store in plastic container or ziplock bag in fridge or freezer until ready to use. Makes 14 cups of mix.

For a 9 x 9 pan of cornbread (we prefer in pan rather than as muffins — for some reason, tastes more moist), mix 3 cups of above mix with 1 cup of water.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes. GREAT WITH HONEY BUTTER!

Well this week I wanted to share a silly reason why I am so grateful to have my food storage. On Saturday I had to bring “funeral potatoes” to a funeral for someone in my church. For those who don’t know, this is just a creamy potato casserole with a crumbly topping, my family likes to call them Ritzy Potatoes. My “pregnant brain” completely spaced this fact until about 45 minutes before the potatoes were supposed to be at the church. This was not enough time to boil potatoes and cook the dish. I started to panic when I realized, duh, I have some freeze-dried potato dices in my food storage. Might as well try them out now!

It took about 1/2 of a #10 can to make one batch of funeral potatoes, so they definitely aren’t a cost-effective way to eat potatoes on a regular basis, especially compared to my “free” garden potatoes I’ve been eating the last few months. But they sure saved me in an “emergency”!

Shelf Stable Ritzy Potatoes

So here is the funny part of this story. My husband was so sad when they brought back the empty casserole dish because he had been salivating over the smell of them all afternoon. So the next day I planned to make another batch for our family but realized I had used the last of our sour cream the day before. So I did what any good food storage blogger would do and decided to do an experiment and try the recipe with ALL SHELF STABLE INGREDIENTS. It actually turned out fantastic! And as we were eating it my husband kept giggling to himself thinking how funny it was that in an emergency we could have something so delicious and NORMAL to eat. So here is the shelf stable version of the recipe for you. Try it out, it will not disappoint.

Ingredients
4 cups freeze-dried potato dices
1/3 cup dehydrated onion flakes
2 cans cream of chicken soup (or 20 ounces bean flour cream of chicken)
1 cup sour cream powder, hydrated
3/4 c. freeze-dried cheddar cheese
1/2 c. powdered butter, hydrated
2 tubes ritz crackers crushed

Directions
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Soak your potato dices and dehydrated onions in warm water. In a separate bowl, soak your freeze-dried cheddar cheese. While they are soaking, mix up your sour cream powder with water. My can said 1/2 cup of water per 1 cup of powder, it made a thin sour cream which is good for this recipe. Stir in your cream of chicken soup. (I don’t store much cream of chicken any more as I prefer to make my own. So I made a double-batch of bean flour cream of chicken and then measured 20 ounces of it into the bowl with the sour cream). Drain your potatoes and pour them into a 9×13 casserole dish. Drain the rehydrated cheese and add it to the cream mixture. Pour the cream mixture over top of the potatoes and stir together well. In a small bowl mix up your powdered butter. My can said to do 1/2 cup butter powder and 1/2 cup water. This made a REALLY watery butter. Add the crushed ritz and mix well. It will be quite goopy but it still works (I would probably just use regular butter for this since I store a ton of it in the freezer but I was going for all shelf stable here). Using your hand, crumble the ritz mixture over the top of the potatoes. Cover the dish with tinfoil and bake for 30-40 minutes or until hot all the way through. You can remove the foil for the least 5 minutes to get the topping a little more brown and crumbly.

Summary

Now a lot of these ingredients are NOT cheaper than buying fresh. We do not encourage you to make it a habit of replacing all of your foods with powdered or freeze-dried versions. But we DO encourage you to buy some, try it, learn how to use it, figure out the recipes it works in, and then store it! You will appreciate being able to make a lot of your “normal” family recipes in troublesome times.

If you are looking for places to buy some of these more uncommon storage items, check out the different companies on our Useful Links page.

Learning to cook with your food storage causes a lot of people to use foods they aren’t used to, to try lots of new recipes using these new foods, and to tweak their own recipes to make them more food storage friendly. Having a good system in place can save you a lot of hassle, and it can also save your laptop from getting trashed by keeping it open on the kitchen counter while you cook. Not to mention you need your recipes in a usable format in case you can’t use the computer during an emergency situation.

How to Make a Recipe Binder

Step 1: Buy a few 1/2 size binders, depending on the number of recipes you will have.
I started with 2 binders of different colors. One for main dishes, one for sides and desserts. I got these ones at Wal-Mart. I recently added a third one specifically for “Food Storage Recipes” that I wanted to keep track of separately since they aren’t our normal family favorites. This binder is a little nicer and has the plastic around it that you can slide a cover or side label in so I liked it. I got this one at Office Depot I believe.

Step 2: Buy colored paper or card stock.
I color code my recipes so at a glance I can easily get to the right section. For example when I am doing my weekly or monthly grocery lists I choose a variety of chicken recipes or beef recipes depending on what’s on sale and how much meat I am buying. For chicken recipes I know to look in the red section. This works for me but you don’t have to do it that way if you don’t want. You could do all one color and just alphabetize them. Using card stock will make them a little more sturdy, but also makes less pages able to fit in one binder. Paper works just fine too. I chose my paper depending on the colors that were available at Wal-Mart, so one batch is paper and the other is card stock.

Step 3: Buy 1/2 page sheet protectors
These are a little bit hard to find. When we first came up with this idea they were not available at any local stores so we ordered a big batch of them online to share between a few of us and they were pretty cheap. I have found them at office stores recently when I have needed to buy more. They are a little pricy but I LOVE the half page size. They are perfect to keep on the counter and you can fit a lot of recipes in one binder.

Step 4: Make your recipe file
There are a few ways to do this depending on how computer savvy you are. My cousin decided to make an Access database for hers. I am not that ambitious so I made a few different word documents. You can just type up two recipes per page making sure you start the second recipe halfway down the page. This is easy, but hard to make turn out evenly. You can also set your document to be 2 “pages” per sheet of paper and then you can line up the text at the top of each page. This is how I did it for my first two binders. (You can download my file to get an idea for how this works, I can’t guarantee compatibility with your computer setup though).

I just figure out a way I think is easier that I am starting on for my food storage recipes binder. I set my pages to landscape and do one recipe per page, formatting them to fill up as much of the page as possible. Then when I go to print it I can simply choose “print 2 pages per sheet” and it will shrink the pages and print them two per page. It’s awesome! Make sure you can find that setting for your printer before you setup your whole binder file this way though. I like to put the product category at the top of each recipe, even though I use the color coded pages too. You can choose to do that or not.

Those methods make pages that sit horizontally in your binder, you can also make vertical pages if you like your recipes that way instead. You will just have to set up your pages differently.

Step 5: Print your recipes and cut the pages in half
Make sure you pay attention if you are doing the color coded pages. You will only want to print one category at a time to make sure that you are using the right colors. After you have them all printed, you can cut them in half with a little scrapbook paper-cutter or just use any scissors. Just depends how perfectly even you want them to be. Slide all of the pages into your sheet protectors. I put two recipes in per sheet protector so they show on the front and back. If you wanted to figure out double-sided printing you could get away with using less paper, but it was getting too complicated for me to do that so I just cut each one out separately and stuck them both in.

Step 6: Enjoy and SHARE!
I LOVE how my binder sits on my counter and I can wipe the sheet protectors clean if I slop on them. I love making notes with a dry-erase marker and updating my typed recipes next time I am adding to the recipe file. I love printing or clipping out recipes to try, and sticking them in temporary sheet protectors until I try them or have time to add them to my file. And best of all, now I can easily SHARE my recipe file with family and friends. They can put it together in a way that works for them, or I can make a cute binder for them for gifts

Here are some tips to keeping your kitchen organized, and clean to make cooking more enjoyable:

Keep your kitchen sink clean (and empty):

While you’re cooking, if you quickly wash dishes as you use them, you’ll end up with a much easier mess to clean. If you don’t do them one by one, try getting the bulk of the cooking dishes done before dinner. That way, after you’ve eaten, you don’t look over at the sink and think – oh great! I remember as a little girl right after we ate, was right when the family fight about whose turn it was would start! Have your kids help clean along the way if you’ve got them.

Get Tupperware/containers that stack:

Do your kids hate the job of putting Tupperware away because they’re worried they’ll get attacked by flying containers as soon as they open the cupboard. It’s worth investing in good containers that stack together so that you can save space in cupboards and feel organized about putting dishes away. Rubbermaid makes an easy find solution you can check out here.

Move appliances/dishes you don’t use OUT:

Often times cleaning can feel annoying because things don’t seem to fit anywhere. If every thing in your kitchen has it’s own place, cleaning up is much simpler. Move dishes you don’t use often out of the main areas of your kitchen. You can also move bigger appliances you don’t use regularly (like canning appliances) out so that everything else fits nicely in your kitchen. I have a shelf in my basement for things I don’t use that often, and it has really helped my kitchen feel cleaner and more organized.

Use kneading/mixing time:

When the recipe you are making calls for kneading or mixing, use those precious minutes and challenge yourself. Every time I make bread and it needs to sit for 10 minutes, then knead for 8 minutes later in the process, I get little organizing projects done. You can rearrange and tidy up pantries in 10 minutes. You’re going to be in there anyways. Make a list of all the little things that need de-cluttering or fixing in your cupboards and use that kneading time!

Get a spice rack/spice containers:

Cooking can feel so frustrating when you are digging through a cupboard trying to find the right spices. Half the time it takes a few minutes looking for a spice before you can find it, while you spend the whole time swearing you thought you had it wondering if you were going crazy. Getting your spices, and baking supplies cupboards organized makes cooking much more pleasant. This spice rack from Amazon.com would be so great to have inside any cupboard.

Clean out your fridge every grocery shop:

Every time your come home with groceries, get in the habit of cleaning out your fridge. Putting groceries away is a good time for you to inventory what is in your fridge, make sure things aren’t rotting, and make plans for meals based on what food you may have that are starting to lose their freshness. Cleaning out fridges more often is a lot less yucky, than finding mystery tupperware meals later.

Get good cleaning supplies:

If you don’t have the right cleaning supplies and scrubbers, cleaning can be more of a chore. I was a MAJOR paper towel user before I discovered some good cleaning rags. Have you heard of Norwex yet? Well regular cleaning rags always bothered me because of how much they stink, and how yucky they feel. Norwex rags, have special antibacterial agents IN them to kill off bacteria. You can clean counters and even windows using only water. You don’t have to worry about the stink. And you can store way less cleaning agents like windex, and other soaps. Norwex even has travel pack rags for your 72 hour kits. Use these rags with only water to disinfect and clean down any surface. I just have to show you a little video about how awesome the Norwex rags are. The beginning of the video explains how they work, but if you want to skip right to 2:00 mins in, you can see Andrea take BUTTER right off the mirror using only water. You may not have butter on your mirrrors, but I’m sure you have greasy areas around. Cleaning up the pam spray mess after I make bread has always annoyed me. Now I just wipe my counters clean using only water. Watch the video- it’s nuts! Andrea has started a fun blog where you can buy the rags and sign up for her helpful newsletter and receive a FREE basic cleaning schedule to download right away. This may help you stay on top of your cleaning.

Country Beans New ideas for “User Friendly Beans” in a hurry by Rita Bingham

Background: Learning how to use and cook dry beans was a major journey of mine last year. I was always skeptical you could do anything with dry beans before embarking on my “learn how to use beans” journey. If you’ve followed us for awhile, you probably were there when I made the “Magical Fruit” discovery on how to use dry beans to make cream of chicken replacements, and when I finally learned how to actually COOK dry beans. Most of my bean discoveries and learnings have come from the fabulous book “Country Beans”.

What I Liked: What I liked most about this book is how all-inclusive, and simple it is. Rita doesn’t assume that you’re an expert chef and gives you a lot of background information. Most of the time, when I get cookbooks I think to myself “Oh that recipe looks good, but I’ll have to go grocery shopping for half those mystery items”. When I opened the book and started looking at the recipes, I had a ton of them immediately tagged as recipes I could make right away. Rita also includes hundreds of GLUTEN-FREE recipes in this book. Using bean flours is a great way to replace gluten in a lot of recipes.

Sections: This book has more than recipes. It is full of information about using, storing, and cooking beans as well. Here are the sections the book contains. There are so many sections I’m going to do a screen shot of them because typing them out would take forever! Notice all the fabulous sections at the end! When I got this book I really needed education, not just recipes so it was great!

Feedback: The only drawback of this book is that there aren’t pictures for the recipes. Some people will only get books with pictures, but I felt like I didn’t really need the pictures with this book.

Summary: Quit being afraid of using your beans and get this book! “Country Beans”

My husband turned 30 this year, sometimes you have to make a big deal over a birthday I was especially happy over the fact that I am still a young wife in my 20′s so I had to rub in the fact that he is 30 a little bit.

Ever since he was a little boy, my husband’s mom always bought him a Baskin Robbins ice cream cake for his birthday. Well his birthday was exactly 10 days after our wedding and I faithfully went to try to buy him a cake and being the poor newlyweds that we were I left the store empty-handed and shocked at what they wanted to charge me. I decided I would try to make an ice cream cake for him to save us a ton of money. Here is how that first year’s adventure turned out.

The next year I was so mortified by my previous cake that his sister offered to buy a cake as part of her present to him. A year later I decide to try again but this time I tried only icing the top so that I wouldn’t have the huge frosting melting down the side of the cake problem. It looked pretty funny but it wasn’t AS embarrassing.

After that someone told me that I just need to use a butter cream frosting for ice cream cakes. This also happened to be a year that we had tons of family coming for the party so I tried a rectangle cake after hearing that they were easier … FAIL.

Well, FINALLY after eating a store-bought cake for someone else’s party one time, my husband and I analyzed the icing and realized the secret which I will share below. And by that time I had actually mastered the art of getting the cakes to turn out evenly so it all came together and I finally had success! It’s now been a few years and I can consistently get the cakes to turn out great every time. The only problem now is that as our family is growing the cakes are almost too small to feed everybody

I hope you enjoy this picture tutorial I put together one year after I was actually able to get the cake to turn out properly!

How to Make an Ice Cream Cake

What you need:
- 2 9 inch round cake pans
- Devils food cake mix
- Cookies and cream ice cream (1.5 quart container)
- Vanilla ice cream (1 pint is enough)
- 1 tub of chocolate frosting (for decorations)
- Whatever candles you desire (optional, but recommended)
- At least 2 cans of diet coke (or other beverage of choice) to keep you sane while you work

How to Save Even More Money

So even though my cakes are significantly cheaper than Baskin Robbins’ cakes, you can make them EVEN CHEAPER if you do a little couponing. Cake mixes and frosting tubs are things that quite often go on sale and/or have coupons associated with them. You can get them for cheap cheap cheap. I have about 10 of each in my food storage so I never have to scramble when I’m asked to bring a dessert to an event. One of the best ways we have found to do sale shopping for these types of items is using Deals to Meals (available in the Western United States). With the case lot sales going on these next few weeks you better believe we have been using this service like crazy to stock up on a lot of three month supply foods and “comfort items”.

Oh and I also just have to say I used eggs from my own chickens to make the cake, that was a first this year!

Happy Birthday to my handsome, handy, 30-year old husband who is very supportive of my obsession with food storage and the need to spend WAY too much time blogging about it

The theme of the pot luck was salads, so I decided to make a pasta salad. I’ve been using my freeze-dried chicken a lot lately. I admit, it’s a little bit due to how busy I’ve been. Having chicken cooked, and cut all ready to go, has saved my eating out budget a few times lately. Isn’t summer supposed to be less busy? Anyways, I made this pasta salad with chicken in it, and it was ready in the 25 (actually 24) minutes from start to finish. I love not having to thaw, cut, and cook chicken, when I’m making a quick summer dish. I’ll share the recipe with you, but you have to remember, I’m not the measuring type- so bear with me- and excuse the dark, after the fact iphone picture.

Julie’s “Healthier” Pasta Salad

Box of whole wheat noodles (can be macaroni, or any kind – my fav is bowtie multi-grain)
1.5 cups of freeze dried chicken (before it reconstitutes)
Chopped celery (you could probably use freeze dried, I just always have fresh on hand)
Light mayo made with olive oil (you can use regular mayo)
Couple of squirts of lemon juice
1 teaspoon or 2 of dill (this gives it a nice flavor)
Salt to taste

Directions:
Cover freeze dried chicken in water to reconstitute. While the chicken is reconstituting boil the noodles. If you’re in a hurry like me, put a metal bowl in the freezer to get it cold (you’ll understand this in a minute). While the noodles are cooking, chop celery and get the rest of the ingredients out. Drain noodles and chicken, paper towel dry and throw it in the cold bowl and put all of that in the freezer for 5 mins to cool everything down. The freezer step is only necessary if you’re working on a fast timeline… But of course you probably all plan ahead better than me? Right? Add mayo to taste- some like it creamier than others. Add the rest of the ingredients, and cool until you have to leave.

So no one even knew I snuck that chicken in there and we made it on time. Success. Remember if you’re looking for ways to sneak food storage into your families foods, or tips on how to substitute out regular ingredients in recipes for food storage ingredients, read these posts.

• Sneaky ways to feed your family food storage.
• Our best tips for food storage.