Some of the best memories from my childhood are from when I was in the kitchen helping my mom, or out in the garden with my grandpa. I loved helping, and felt a sense of pride in the work I would do. Now that I am a mom, I try to remember those memories as I’m getting dinner ready and think “clearing the kids out” would be easier. We recently did a podcast on how “having no time” is one of the reasons for not building a food storage. One of the things we recommended for this problem, is to get your kids involved and helping so that food storage projects can become family activities.

This picture is of me and my dear Grandpa up in Northern Quebec twenty something years ago. My Grandpa had a green thumb. He could plant and harvest almost anything in the coldest weather. I loved going to visit him, to help him, and to learn from him. My mom was also an incredible example to me about teaching children how to cook (among other things). I remember pinching around the edges of hundreds of pies she would bake. That was my absolute favorite job. I tried to make those pies as beautiful as she could. I didn’t love grating cheese, but I loved making my own mini pizzas, picking strawberries, and mixing up the cookie dough.

A few months ago, two out of three of my boys were on growth spurts. I kid you not these little people were eating more than me and I felt like I was cooking ALL day, everyday just to keep up with them. I even said something about it on our facebook page, and several of our readers suggested teaching the boys how to cook so that one day I wouldn’t have to as much. I LOVED this idea. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of involving them more in the kitchen before that. Since then I try to make a new food each Sunday with my boys and have them help make it with me. The past few weeks have been pretty hectic with family parties, and dinners and the other day my older boy asked “When are were going to have cooking class again?”. Touche. My boys also love to garden. For Easter my son received gardening tools from one Grandma, and for his birthday a gardening kit from his other Grandma. He was thrilled.

Today I wanted to share a few tips I have thought of or learned from others. Please feel free to leave comments with your ideas as well.

Ideas to get your kids involved?

• Do age appropriate activities
• Have young kids dump ingredients into mixes, they love it
• Assign children to find ingredients off a recipe card and put them all on the counter
• Teach kids how to read recipe cards
• Relax about the mess
• Assign jobs to each kid that they do regularly and can be the expert on
• For older kids, test their math on some of the recipes and congratulate them on solving problems
• When working with dough, pull off small parts and let the kids make their own mini foods
• Teach kids basic cooking concepts as you go such as checking to see if something is done, or how to thicken things etc
• Kids love to push buttons, let them set the timer for baking things
• When making pies, or baked goods allow the kids to shape things
• Use your kids for kneading and mixing things
• Gradually let kids complete more and more steps of a recipe until they can do it themselves
• Have kids tear lettuce, peel hard boiled eggs, grate cheese (if old enough)
• When gardening, get kids their own gloves and tools
• Have the kids pull weeds (although they may not get excited about this one)
• Have your child keep a watering schedule for plants and help them take ownership

As a friendly reminder, when cooking with kids make sure to teach them some kitchen safety and always supervise them





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Last week, I shared with you the beginning of my sourdough journey. In that post, I talked about the basics of sourdough and how to make or get a sourdough starter. Today I am going to give you the recipe I have been using for the sourdough bread I have been making. It’s been a couple weeks now since I have been experimenting, and I really love it. I am finding out I have so much more to learn about sourdough and all the amazing things you can do with it, and how healthy it is for you. I promise to keep sharing as I go. The good news, is that I have an expert on this stuff as my neighbor and she is teaching me a lot.

I’ll start by giving you the recipe. Then I’ll do a little picture sequence to show you the steps. Hopefully this works for you!

Sourdough Artisan Bread:

Ingredients:
3 Cups Water
1 1/2 Tbs. Salt
1 1/2 Cup Starter
About 6 1/2 cups Whole Wheat Flour (ground in your wheat grinder)

Instructions:
Mix ingredients together, until the dough forms a ball. You will want it to be sticky.
Put ball of dough in a bowl with lid lightly covering for 12-24 hours
Pull half of the dough out of the bowl, place on pizza stone
Sprinkle with Sesame, Sunflower seeds and Flax (optional)

Bake on pizza stone at 400 for 40-45 min

	Gather all your ingredients and put the water, salt and starter in first. Then add the flour little by little so you can get the right consistency. You’ll want to mix and scrape the dough off the sides of the bowl as you add the flour.
	The consistency you are going to want is rather sticky. If you’re used to making yeast breads, I would say it’s quite a bit stickier than a yeast bread. You’ll want it to have enough flour that the dough can sit in somewhat of a ball, but it doesn’t have to HOLD the ball shape for long. Mix it in a bowl that you can cover. Once it is done mixing, cover for 12-24 hours in your fridge before baking.
	Once you are done with your dough, and its in the fridge, make sure you feed your starter so you can use it again. Mix even amounts wheat flour and water. Leave it out until it’s bubbled and grown about double in size, then keep it in your fridge with a lid on it.
	When baking your bread, you will want to bake it long enough. I made the mistake of not really believing it needed 45 minutes and there was a doughy ball in the middle of it. This recipe makes 2 fair sized loaves. My friend made the mistake of making one loaf out of the whole thing and let’s just say her doughy ball was BIGGER than mine.

So there you have it. Please make sure you give yourself a few tries with this. I felt really nervous the whole time and I had a friend holding my hand the whole way. The worst thing that could happen is it could be a big flop. I’m really proud of myself for getting the hang of this sourdough stuff. It’s an incredible tool for emergency preparedness since the starter is just wheat flour and water, and the bread is wheat flour, water, and salt. Talk about living on few ingredients and the bread is GOOD! I’ve also been making pizza and pancakes with my starter… and I must admit… it sits better in my stomach than regular yeast breads. There are reasons for it I guess. More on that later!

In the month of November we covered some important emergency topics such as 50 Last Minute Ways to Prepare For an Emergency and How to Create an Emergency Binder. We have heard feedback from a lot of readers who are anxious about how they can get their family and friends to feel the importance of being prepared. This is a great time of year to do just that! We posted about this with our “Don’t Say I Told You So” post, but doing this fun activity can be a much easier way to nudge people into thinking about it.

Share your love of food storage and the peace that comes with being self-reliant by doing our 12 Days of Christmas for a loved one this year. This has been a favorite feature of our blog for a few years now and we continue to update it with other ideas each year. There are tons of gift ideas you can do for FREE or very inexpensively to help people get started on their journey.

IDEAS FOR EVERYONE

You can chose to do all 12 days (you’ll have to start asap or you won’t be done before Christmas) or just choose a gift that you think would help make this a special preparedness Christmas for someone important to you. The point is to share your love of food storage, and the peace that comes with being self-reliant. Each “day” will have a theme, and have 3 gift ideas for you:

• An option that’s FREE or under $1
• An option that costs $5-30
• A more expensive option…

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

Day 1: Emergency Preparedness
Day 2: Shelves
Day 3: Water
Day 4: 3 Month Supply
Day 5: Long Term Education
Day 6: Grains
Day 7: Legumes
Day 8: Baking Goods
Day 9: Fruits and Vegetables
Day 10: Comfort Foods
Day 11: Non-Food Items
Day 12: Checklists

LABELS AND ACCESSORIES

We also have this pdf for you to print out that has tags for each day, name tags, and images you can print, and attach to the gifts. Feel free to use these whether you are doing all 12 days or just doing a gift or two.

We wanted to say thanks to all our readers for being so awesome, and hope you are getting ready for a wonderful holiday season. We’re so fortunate to be able to share what we learn with you all.

Well we hope you all had a great Thanksgiving weekend! We had some great family time, and Jodi and I even took a couple hours on Friday to go shopping together for house decorations and we didn’t even talk about Food Storage (ok we did). Jodi found a cute Christmas rug for her new house, and I found a cute picture frame that I’ll be using as an inspiration piece to decorate my kitchen. Yes it’s been a year since I moved and I haven’t faced decorating yet!

Alright, so what would Thanksgiving be without Food Storage? I bet you always think that. Here’s how we roll at Thanskgiving.

The Original Thanksgiving Great Cake Debate

A couple of years ago we tried fooling Jodi’s family (dad) with the Great Cake Debate. Jodi made one of their family favorite pumpkin cake recipes with whole wheat flour instead of white. The results were fantastic and the cake delicious. You can see the full post here.

Jodi’s Thanksgiving Double Layer Pumpkin Pie

This year Jodi celebrated with her in-laws and didn’t have a chance to make one of her other favorite recipes, but made sure to make it a few days later. You probably saw the picture and recipe over here on our Facebook page here.

The Great Bean Casserole Debate

This year Julie decided to try something sneaky with the green bean casserole. She broke every rule in the book on this recipe. Her original plan was the follow the recipe, but then just couldn’t help herself. Come back later this week for the full recipe, and a few tips on what NOT to do when trying to fool someone.

Well, we did it. We completed another 7 Day Challenge. The Seven Day Challenge is our way of celebrating National Emergency Preparedness Month in September. The Challenge was a week long series of mock emergencies with daily limitations and tasks to help assess your level of preparedness. On a surprise day in September, participants were notified that the Challenge had begum. Most of the learning and fun occurs as we shared our experiences through comments, surveys, and facebook.

This year we thought we could do something a little fun for our readers who either missed the Challenge, or wanted to share it with their friends. We compiled each day’s challenges and report cards and put together a document you could share with your friends, and encourage them to be more prepared as well. You can either forward this document along to them, share this post on facebook, or pin this post on your pinterest account.

Here’s a summary of the 7 Day Challenge this year. Thanks again for playing

Day 1: Economic Crisis – “Global Food Shortage”

• Daily Challenge and Comments on Day 1
• Facebook Discussion about Day 1

Day 2: Natural Disaster – “Water Service Interruption”

• Daily Challenge and Comments on Day 2
• Facebook Discussion about Day 2

Day 3: Health Benefits- “Medical Issues and Concerns”

• Daily Challenge and Comments on Day 3
• Facebook Discussion about Day 3

Day 4: Economic Crisis – “Helping Those In Need”

• Daily Challenge and Comments on Day 4
• Facebook Discussion about Day 4

Day 5: Everyday Emergency – “Power Loss”

• Daily Challenge and Comments on Day 5
• Facebook Discussion about Day 5

Day 6: Natural Disaster – “Evacuation and 72 Hour Kits”

• Daily Challenge and Comments on Day 6
• Facebook Discussion about Day 6

Day 7: Everyday Emergency – “Day of Service”

• Daily Challenge and Comments on Day 7
• Facebook Discussion about Day 7

Sign up to join

While the fun doesn’t start again until NEXT September, you can sign up at anytime to be included on our 7 Day Challenge email list.

 

Have you ever had 16 bean soup? Most often 16 bean soup has ham in it. Well let me tell you, my husband and I HATE ham. It’s so bad, on Easter we make our decision about which side of the family to visit based on who ISN’T having ham. Not sure how we ended up together, because I think we’re the only 2 people in the world I know who don’t like ham? I guess we ARE soul mates.

Anyways, a couple of years ago I decided I wanted to use the 45 bag of 16 bean soup mix I bought but was pretty distraught when I realized a lot of the recipes I found had ham in it. Not to mention, in a situation where you would have to live off your Food Storage ham maybe wouldn’t be that available. After tweaking the recipe around a number of times, I’ve found something we really like and we eat it a few times a month. Eating beans is so good for you, and this mix has such a variety of legumes in it, that it makes it so tasty, and healthy! Learn more about legumes on our BabyStep 6 Page. Also more specifically about beans here.

If you’re a little anxious about cooking dry beans, you are not alone. Read about Julie’s multiple failures with cooking beans in this post.

Alright, now that I’ve convinced you beans are good, here is the recipe:

16 Bean Soup

2 cups of soaked beans
5 cups of water
2 tsp of cumin
1/4 cup of dehydrated onions
1 tsp of garlic
1 tsp ground red pepper, or cayenne, or something spicy

Cook the beans in a pressure cooker, or in a crock pot. I use my electric pressure cooker and cook them on high pressure with natural release, for 45 minutes if I have soaked the beans for a number of hours. If I’m making a last minute meal and didn’t soak the beans, I cook them for 52 minutes. If you’re cooking the beans in a crock pot, cook on low for 6-10 hours. Do not add salt to uncooked beans – it will slow down the cooking process. Also the cooking time can vary based on how old your beans are.

When the beans are done add the following ingredients:

1 or 2 can of tomatoes blended (depends on how soupy you want it)
1 can of tomato paste, or some tomato powder to thicken it if you want it more chili substance
1 cup of salsa (I like Pace)
Salt to taste
Top with chips and cheese if you would like

Soaking Lesson Learned With a SURPRISE Discovery

So if we’re being completely honest here, I don’t always soak my beans. It’s way better to do this for digestion and other reasons, but sometimes I just forget and I’m in a pinch, and if I can throw the beans in a pressure cooker and have a meal quickly I’ll do it. Well lately, I’ve been trying to meal plan more and be on top of things and I have been soaking my beans more often. Well when I made this recipe a few months ago with soaked beans, I was totally thrown a curve ball. I opened my pressure cooker only to find a TON of water in the pot. The beans didn’t soak up the water, because they had been fully soaked before hand – duh. So I sat there – saddened – because there was so much liquid, and I figured after I added my tomatoes it would be even more of a soupy mess. I could have thrown away the liquid, but that liquid had a ton of the flavorings and spices! Well that’s when I remembered I had freeze dried tomatoes. I figured I could add the tomatoes straight in without hydrating them, and they could eat up the liquid of the soup. Well it worked AMAZINGLY! I was so happy I didn’t lose that work of making those beans and developed a new love for freeze dried tomatoes. Lessons learned…