Author of Be Ready for Anything and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course
We’re one week into the challenge and I hope you’re getting a lot from it. If you missed the previous challenges, you can catch up here:
Since it’s a weekend, today’s challenge will be a little more time-consuming.
Here’s today’s challenge!
I got up early to post today’s challenge so you’d have time to get it done. If you don’t have time. you can catch up on the other meals tomorrow.
If your pantry is well-stocked and truly ready for an emergency, this should be a breeze.
Today, make all 3 meals completely from shelf-stable foods.
Here are a few ideas for each meal.
Breakfast:
- Crackers with peanut butter and some canned fruit
- Cereal with powdered milk
- Oatmeal
- Or go hardcore with scrambled eggs with sausage crumbles and hash browns, all made from dehydrated foods
Lunch:
- Tuna and crackers
- Pasta salad with canned chicken and Italian spices
- Boxed macaroni and cheese made with powdered milk (I use Amy’s Organic)
- Veggies from the garden or farmer’s market as a delicious platter of freshness (not shelf stable, but in season so it’s possible you’d have this in an emergency
Dinner:
- A freeze-dried emergency meal from one of your buckets
- Soup made with various canned goods
- Homemade pizza with dough from scratch, canned sauce, and freeze-dried cheese.
For more shelf-stable recipe ideas, check out my cookbook, The Stockpile Cafe. All the recipes are made with non-perishable foods.
Let us know what you’re eating today!
Share your day’s menu in the comments and tell us how it was. Did you have the supplies you needed to get you through one tasty day? Were the kids on board with eating the food? Was everything tasty? And what changes will you make to your stockpile.
If you cannot do this today because you have other commitments, try it a different day, but please give this one a shot. It’s important.
Remember if you want to qualify for the free ebook, be sure to post your answers in the forum.
I put dehydrated strawberry slices in my cereal and milk
Breakfast – egg casserole made with freeze dried eggs, cheese, potatoes, sausage
Lunch – chili and cornbread
Dinner – freeze dried chicken spaghetti
Snack – freeze dried fruits
Dessert – pineapple cake (hopefully baked in sun oven, sunshine permitting).
We have a freeze dryer and I do try to use my sun oven once a week.
Breakfast: Oatmeal with wheat berries and honey.
Lunch – Canned chili and crackers that we had vacuum sealed.
Dinner – We ground rice to make rice flour with our hand grain grinder. I will make won tons and use my shelf stable veggies and canned chicken to make egg rolls. We will dip them in the Wild Plum Asian Dipping Sauce that I home canned a few days ago from the wild plums we foraged..
Beverages – Water and sun brewed green tea.
My wontons didn’t work out because I did not have an egg and used flax seeds and some olive oil Miracle Whip. Sooo…
I used the veggie chicken mixture and put it with rice and we had fried rice for dinner with the wild plum Asian dipping sause on top.
Not too shabby!
Breakfast : scrambled egg casserole from pantry. Freeze dried
Lunch : canned chicken on a bed of salad greens from the garden
Dinner :Freeze dried pork chops with Mac and cheese, green beans from garden.
Having a home freeze dryer is a big help in stocking the pantry. I meal prep every week, and make two or three extra meals to freeze dry.
Breakfast: Dehydrated strawberries on oatmeal. Used water and powdered milk.
Lunch: Canned chicken and crackers, along with powdered milk.
Dinner: Canned tuna, noodles from storage, dehydrated peas added to casserole.
Snacks: Honey on homemade bread.
Experience was interesting. Not disappointed in food. Would like to have a freeze dryer, but cannot afford
$2,000 on my fixed income.
I got my freezer dryer by putting it on layaway and made payments. They give you one year to pay it off. I don’t have anyone close to me, but maybe you have a friend or relative who could go half with you and both of you take turns. If you belong to a church group ask if they would go in and everyone takes turns using it. Just some ideas on alternatives.
could you mention where to buy a freeze dryer
Okay, I wouldn’t be able to eat like this every day because it’s way too many carbs but our pantry is a little bare after the hurricane and being without power for 36 hours.
Breakfast – oatmeal
Lunch – mac n cheese from a box
DInner – chicken noodle casserole using canned chicken, cream of mushroom soup, cream of chicken soup and noodles.
Snack – broke into our stash of twizzlers ????
I use lots of fresh from garden and mear by farm daily and use freeze dried and home dried foods in my meals routinely.
About that freeze dryer, and giving up because of affordability
Once upon a time I had similar thoughts about a Lamborghini, but in the end took care of my needs with a used pickup. As with many things, there is a scale of prices, features, and affordability. For example, once upon a time the French were well known for preserving foods by hanging them 30 to 40 feet up in the air where the wind would keep the bugs away and the sun heat could do its job. Today it’s easy to find plans to build a solar food dryer from a supply of wood, screws, hinges and a glass plate.
Moving up from that, there are many companies competing with their brand of electric dehydrators, just as there are companies with competing brands of vacuum sealers. A good website to learn from is
https://www.dehydrate2store.com/
You might not get quite the same shelf life of foods dried in an Excalibur dehydrator and vacuum sealed with a Weston sealer as you might get in a Harvest Right freeze dryer, but if you monitor the condition of whatever foods you’ve processed — and rotate through them as needed — you’ll be vastly better off than if you’d given up altogether because of that stratospherically priced freeze dryer. And you’d still want to store the output from either under the same cool, dark, and protected conditions.
–Lewis
Breakfast – banana oatmeal pancakes with raspberry-ginger-maple topping. Coffee with sugar and powdered creamer. Fruit was dried and reconstituted for use.
Lunch – canned chicken noodle soup, crackers and peanut butter, tea
Dinner – hash, green beans and canned peaches , water.
Bearing in mind we are English…
We had bacon ( canned) eggs ( from our fowls in the garden) with canned mushrooms and canned tomatoes, washed down with tea. What the world knows as a ‘full English ‘.
Lunchtime we skip, as breakfast keeps us going. A Sunday lunchtime beer in our local pub suffices!
Dinner will be a simple corned beef hash made of canned corned beef, dehydrated mashed potatoes and dried onions. Served with canned vegetables, gravy and Yorkshire Puddings made from shelf stable ingredients. Just do a Google if any of that sounds foreign!
Breakfast was breakfast scramble that I freeze dried (harvest right freeze dryer) and stored in Mylar bags. Made with eggs, potatoes, peppers and onions and sausage. Had freeze dried bananas and strawberries. Drank water
Lunch was sardines with pilot crackers, some canned tomatoes and okra, snack freeze dried apples.
Dinner was canned beef stew, crackers snack was trail mix drank powdered milk and extra water.
Meals or water heated or boiled on rocket stove.
Breakfast oatmeal with brown sugar , toast with blueberry jam , water, tea or coffee to drink
Dinner
Lunch canned vegetable soup and crackers and an Apple with water , tea or coffee to drink
Dinner Canned beef stew and fresh peaches from my pantry, water, coffee or tea to drink
Had a home made Chinese for dinner from the cupboard.
May give this a try over the weekend. We have all of those items except the sausage crumbles as not sure we can get them here. I would however prefer NOT to dig into the prepping store as I will then have to replace everything.
Cereal with shelf safe milk.
Tuna or canned beans and crackers, pudding, fruit cups. Canned soup, cookies, chips. Jerky. Boxed pasta, rice dishes. I could go on.
There is a German deli near my house. They have an assortment of canned herring with pull top lids. I did a taste test a few years ago and periodically I stock up on cans of my favorites. They also have different pickled vegetables and cabbages. I believe that older nations/cutlers are great to investigate on how they preserved food, especially if those preservation methods are still in use and those foods can be purchased already prepared.
That word should be ‘cultures’ not cutlers.