Food Storage

This is our basement food storage. What you see before you is our collection of beans, fruit, baking supplies, squash, wheat, juice and spices. Behind me is a fridge with a few (maybe 5) items in the fridge and freezer. Also behind me is a chest freezer full of meat. Under my bed I have boxes of #10 cans, full of the staples like beans and macaroni. Under a bed at my in-law's are more boxes of #10 cans, full of hard red wheat.

Some of you are thinking, "Wow, they're nuts!" and some of you might be thinking, "How did they amass so much?" and some of you might be thinking, "I could never do that."

Good news!

You can do it! It's not nuts and it takes time to accumulate. But it's possible, it's healthy and best of all--it's a way to live providently. So why do we have so much food storage and how in the crazy did we get there?

Let me start back, oh, about 6 1/2 years ago. See, that's when we got married. And we had a brilliant idea. At our reception in Utah, with all our poor, college friends, we asked that instead of wedding gifts, they each bring a can to start our food storage. We ended up with a smattering of items and enough for us to live on for 3 weeks or so. During our first four years, we were exceptionally poor. We're talking single digit living here. Not in our bank account (that was more like double digit), but on our poorest year we made $8000 a year. With a baby. Frugality and buying food cheaply became a way of life.

For me, it was hard. My husband grew up with parents who cooked a lot from scratch, had a food storage, used and rotated it. My parents bought it and never used it. My mom doesn't like to cook. But both our parents taught us how to manage money well and how to be smart. So we learned. We learned it was worth spending extra from our budget on a big sale of canned items. And that we could afford to buy one extra pound of spaghetti every week.

But it wasn't really until we moved to Ohio, two years into our marriage, that I really got into food storage. Remember, we were poor for 4 years, so when we moved to Ohio, we weren't definitely not in the money. When we moved to OH, my mother-in-law taught me the incredibly difficult and complicated art of canning.

Okay, it's not that difficult or complicated. In fact, it's not difficult or complicated at all. With a pressure canner at my disposal (best used purchase EVER!), I learned how to can. We never turned food down, even if we didn't know what to do with it. We bought pumpkins after Halloween for cheeeaaappp and canned that instead of buying store canned pumpkin. We found bushes of fruit and made our own jam, for only the price of the pectin. We grew our own tomatoes and accepted people's surplus. And among all this, we continued to buy a few extra cans here and there. With our tax return, we gave ourselves a few hundred dollars to go to Sam's Club and buy in bulk there. I always buy cans from the "dent and clearance" section at Kroger, as long as they're not rusty.

6 1/2 years later, we have this. It's not perfect. I still don't know how to use wheat except to grind it. I have never canned meat. And I have a hard time planning my meals from my "basement market". I love cold cereal even though it is expensive.

But I'm still learning. What I've learned so far has allowed us to save a significant amount of money. We only buy basic ingredients and make nearly everything (except cheese and sour cream) from scratch. We make several food storage meals a week that everyone enjoys. And the best part is that I'm teaching my children skills that I wish I had had before I got married.

So what does this mean for you? This means that I'm going to showcase recipes and techniques for food storage. So that you can start buying a few extra cans here or there and have a little extra. Because it's really not that hard or expensive. So go out there and buy an extra can this week!