Again With The Planning

A big thank you to those who attended tonights boot camp! It makes me feel all warm and cozy inside to think that 5 more families will have food in their tummies if worst comes to worst.

Since you've found your way here, go ahead and look around, much of what we covered tonight is in the previous posts...they are in reverse order in case you aren't familiar with how blogs work. Since our group all decided Wendy Dewitt demystified things for them, your homework is to write out your menu plans and do your calculations. If you click on Wendy's name there, you will be taken to her information. If you go to pages 19 and 20, she gives you 4 breakfasts and 7 dinners, all family friendly, all food storage friendly, and already calculated out for a year. I assigned you to do 14 if you could, but if you just want to do 7 menus, the work is ALREADY DONE FOR YOU!!! How easy is that?! If you want to use some of these items for your menu's, you now have a great time saver. If you want more ideas, look on page 21. Don't forget, if you are doing 14 menu's, you can cut down Wendy's amounts by half.

Also, for information on your bread, look on page 9, she's already done the math for you. We've had a little heart to heart chat about wheat, and for my readers who didn't have the benefit of that discussion, you should know that you CAN have food storage and not store raw wheat. Your food storage plan can evolve over time, and for many people, the idea of learning to use traditional food storage items like wheat makes the process overwhelming enough that they put off starting at all. With that in mind, I'm giving you permission to spend your precious food storage money on nutritionally worthless white flour. Why would I suggest such a thing? Well, in addition to the fact that I love being a rule breaker, if you don't have a mill, you can't turn raw wheat into flour for bread anyway. Also, I'm betting we can add enough other grains to plain old white flour to make a reasonably healthy loaf of bread and delay purchasing a mill until you have enough to get you by for a year. One side note to the white flour thing: I wouldn't recommend buying wheat flour to store in place of white. Why? It's more expensive, and all the extra nutrients you get from the whole wheat start to disappear within about a week of the grain being milled into flour. You can slow the process by refrigerating or freezing, but you don't know how old the flour is to begin with and IMO, it just isn't worth the extra expense and is WORSE for storage than white flour because it will also go rancid due to the natural oils in the grain. So just go ahead and buy white flour and I'll make a special post with some information on grains we can add to that flour to up the nutritional value.