Food Storage

For as long as I can remember the prophets have told us to get our years supply; I haven’t really worried about that much in the past. I don’t know if it is because I lived at home or that I didn’t have my own home and when you are renting there is limited space to store food. But over the past year or so I have found myself more than once thinking about food storage. Early this year I purchased a chest freezer and then 1/3 of beef from my parents and in March/April of this last year I took the plunge and started getting more things together for me. I am now excited to say that I have several 5 gallon buckets that are full of food, as well as a large box of other items I might need. I have researched and found the nice air tight lids and am excited that I have something that I can call my food storage.

I find myself thinking about it more often then not and I realized that if the need arises there are other things that I will want to have on hand as well…so I purchased soap, laundry detergent, toiletries and toilet paper as well. I find that when I go shopping I will throw in 2 or 3 instead of just 1 so that I will have a supply at home. My disclaimer here is that I don’t have everything that I need, but I have started working on it and it is amazing how much it makes you feel better. I don’t want any of you thinking that I am totally prepared by any means! However, growing up my parents always had us saving all kinds of bottles that were empty and filling them with water. I started saving a few so that I have a little water supply as well. Even my old cleaning supply bottles are filled with water and in the garage just in case…

Anyway I was talking with my older sister one day and she was making jam. I did a quick memory check and I think I made jam a couple of fall’s ago…after looking I had only 4 bottles left. I also noted that I only had one jar of sloppy joe mix left. I decided right then on the phone that I would need to “beef up” my supply. So I called my friend "H" and told her that she needed to come early on Friday night so we could go to the farmer’s market. She wanted to come over and catch up since she was only home from Costa Rica about 5 days when I left for Greece. I am sad to say that we didn’t end up talking about our trips until late on Saturday. But…we got so much accomplished.

First I absolutely love my farmer’s market. We went there and I was able to get 2 cases of pears for $24 (3 lbs for a $1) the tomatoes were the same price and I had taken my recipe book with me so I bought enough tomatoes to make up a double batch of sloppy joe mix and a batch of salsa as well…why not right?!?

Much to my dissatisfaction the pears were not as ripe as I would have hoped, but I had to get them all made up and into jam since I couldn’t let them ripen too long (I was leaving for DC on Wednesday). So we pulled out my smoothie maker and my blender and went to work. After 4 batches of jam on Friday night we called it a night…then we got started early on Saturday. The salsa and the sloppy joe mix went really quickly since you just add it all together and boil forever. Then we started peeling the pears again. We had to keep stopping and go to the store for more jars. In the end I think we may have went a little overboard on the jam…95 jars, 16 batches and 15 flavors…yeah maybe a little over board, but hey…I will have jam.

The salsa was so good that we ate an entire pint the next day…I might have to make salsa on a quarterly basis. But the sloppy joe mix should last me a while (last time I made it was 2002 and I still have a quart left).

Anyway…I just wanted to blog about this so that those of you who don’t think that you have time for food storage will think about it again and realize that maybe you don’t have time not to have food storage. It really didn’t take that long and we had such a great time while preparing all of it…we might even make it a General Conference Weekend tradition going forward!