Welcome to week two of our Summer Inventory Challenge. If you haven’t already signed up to participate you can learn more and sign up at this link.

This week we are focusing on Food & Recipe Planning so we won’t actually be doing a lot of actual inventorying (besides of your recipe books!). We are going to go through our same three questions this week but will tweak them a little bit since this is more of a planning week versus an inventory week.

1. What do you want to have?
2. What do you already have?
3. What do you still need to get?

Introduction Video

What Do You Want to Have?

For this week I highly recommend you watch the intro video as I go over A LOT of details about my thought process on this topic. You will really need to decide if you want to do your food planning one of three ways:
1. Just buy extras of everything you cook with now
2. Recipe-based (see BabyStep 3)
3. Calculator-based (see BabyStep 4 or my alternative food storage calculator)

If you are like me you may decide to do somewhat of a combination of these items. I really want to make sure to have enough of the staples according to my food storage calculator. But I want to know EXACTLY what I will be cooking with those staples. So I am going to be using my 3 month supply recipe-based spreadsheet to meal plan. I will go through all of my food storage recipe books to find recipes that use the staple foods I have in my storage along with meal in a jar recipes using freeze-dried foods for variety.

Helpful Resources:
What Foods Can You Make with YOUR Food Storage (blog post)
How to Create a Recipe Binder
Food Storage and Allergies
Alternatives to Wheat for Food Storage
Shelf Stable Recipe Book (free download)
Join my Meal-in-a-Jar group (email list)

What Do You Already Have?

This is where I want you to inventory all of your recipes. That means pulling out recipe books, binders, recipes you’ve printed to “save for later”, recipes on your pinterest boards, recipes you’ve bookmarked or saved to Facebook. If you are anything like me you are a recipe hoarder. I even collect old cookbooks from my grandmas. It’s a problem … I know.

Having thousands of pounds of food in your basement will NOT do you any good if you don’t have a plan to actually USE it. So let’s make that plan this week.

Don’t have enough recipe books? Here are a few that I recommend:
Meals in Minutes full color or black and white (freeze-dried food recipes)
Food Storage Made Easy (recipe appendix in the back)
Marlene’s Magic with Food Storage (grab a used copy)
Peggy Layton Books (oldies but good basic recipes)
I Can’t Believe It’s Food Storage
Country Beans (you will fall in love with cooking with beans!)

Have any books to recommend? Shoot them my way via email or social media!

What Do You Still Need to Get?

In line with the rest of this challenge, you DO NOT have to have your system figured out and implemented 100%. For this week make sure you have a PLAN for which method you are going to use to calculate how much you need. If you are going to go more recipe-based you WILL want to have those recipes input into a spreadsheet or you won’t know how much of each item you will need to store so upcoming weeks will be a challenge.

If you find you don’t have enough recipes to choose from, make a plan to get a few more recipes books. If you want to create a fancy recipe binder, make a plan for putting that together, but don’t let it hold you back from at least getting your calculator portion done!

Follow me on InstaGram (@Jodi_foodstoragemadeeasy) if you want to see more behind the scenese details about my week three plans and progress.

Week 3 Giveaways

Earn entries by participating in the challenge in the following ways:
– Post about your progress in the Facebook Group (share your want list or pics of your process)
– Comment on InstaGram on any of the posts for this week
– Email me photos of your project for me to share (I will keep them anonymous) (info @ foodstoragemadeeasy.net)

Winners will be announced in next week’s email!

-Jodi Weiss Schroeder
http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net