Food Storage Meal

We keep our dried storage, and our spices in 1/2 gallon jars and 5 gallon buckets.  The jars are more for immediate use, while the buckets are for long term storage.

Could you make a meal just with your food storage?

We have a variety of storage ways in our food storage.  From bottled, to home dried, store bought cans, to commercially dried, and prepackaged meals.  This variety gives more choices than the average single storage choice, and also adds water to our storage for cooking, and possibly drinking.

Our family is very much a "throw it together" family.  Some of this, some of that, some spices, and good to go.

I've taught the kids this too.  It has it's advantages, as well as disadvantages.

The biggest advantage?  The kids aren't all that picky about it.  Especially when they are helping to cook it.  It seems that a bit of choice control is more appealing than just me telling them they're going to eat it or else.

There's also the advantage of being able to mix and match.  Missing an ingredient?  No problem with just replace it with this.  Admittedly this is the disadvantage too.  Sometimes ingredients just can't be replaced.

I think for a lot of recipes seasoning's are the key.  Especially in an emergency where you may be eating the same thing over and over again for several days, or even weeks.  Today can be salt and a bit of pepper, tomorrow can be cayenne pepper and a little garlic or onion.

The point is to get out of your own way and make the best of a bad situation.  Food should not add to your stress, it should remove at least some of it.

A well stocked pantry IS key, but what if your just getting started?

So one of recipes that we have done completely from our own food storage is a kind of chicken and rice casserole.  Basically this is what we did...

Ingredients:

home dried mushrooms
white rice
flour
home bottled butter
home bottled chicken
canned green beans
2 cans of chicken broth
and seasoning salt.

(The rice, flour, green beans, and seasoning salt are all part of our storage.  They have either been placed in buckets with oxygen packs, or purchased on the last big sale.  *Remember variety*)

In the casserole dish, (this will need to be adjusted for your dish.  Ours is a larger one approximately 8 x 10 in.  It's a bit more square than the typical rectangle.  Anyway.  in this dish we layered the bottom with rice about an inch deep.  Next a quart bottle of home bottled chicken (this was cubed before we processed it).  A can of commercially processed green beans, water and all.  Add the 2 cans of chicken broth, and then stir in the dish.  Finally add some seasoned salt and pepper.  Or what ever other spices you'd like.  Rosemary is a good one with this dish.

Now for this next part you could just use a couple cans of cream of chicken, or cream of mushroom.  But we didn't have any.  So...

In a sauce pot we poured in, a green bean sized can of water, and about a cup of our dried mushrooms.  Bring to a boil for several minutes until the mushrooms start to soften.

In a separate pan melt butter into flour.  We generally do about a half a stick of butter to about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour, depending on how thick we want our gravy base.  Once the butter and flour are mixed evenly, add the mushrooms and water.  Stirring thoroughly.  Season with a bit of salt to taste, and then pour over the top of the rice and chicken.

**Now for the sake of pans, you can do all of the gravy in the same pot.  The thing you run into is the clumping of the flour.  However, as long as it is seasoned and cooked thru, it will be like a dumpling.  (This mostly depends on taste, and convenience.)  There are a couple things you can do to avoid the clumping.  One is to very sparingly sprinkle in the flour until it's all been mixed in.  Adding in a bit at a time helps to reduce the clumping.  Or you can let your mix cool and then add flour.  It's the heat that prevents it from thoroughly mixing.  Or like I mentioned, do the flour and butter together first and then after those are mixed the other ingredients.**

We did the second, adding the butter and flour straight to the water and mushrooms.   We did get a little bit of the dumpling effect, but is was still nummy.

Then we baked it for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.  Once the 30 minutes was up we pumped the heat up to 375 degrees and 25  minutes.  (We made a check at 20 minutes.)

This is a dish that does not last long in our house.  AND if anything had gone wrong, i.e.; to much salt, not cooked long enough, to dry, we could have easily turned it into a soup.


What have you made lately?

Could you survive on your storage if you had to today?