ProvidentLiving.org

Our Heavenly Father created this beautiful earth, with all its abundance, for our benefit and use. His purpose is to provide for our needs as we walk in faith and obedience. He has lovingly commanded us to “prepare every needful thing” (see D&C 109:8) so that, should adversity come, we can care for ourselves and our neighbors and support bishops as they care for others.

Step #2 - Ingredient Calculations


After I have chosen a menu for the week, I make a list of all the ingredients and how much I need of each item for 1 week of meals. This takes a bit of brain power. I add up the water needed to cook items like oatmeal and boil noodles into consideration as well. I hope to not need to ration our water, but we may need to do that, so I make sure I know how much water is needed for cooking. An item might look something like this:

Shepherd's Pie
1 jar canned ground meat
1 can green beans
1 pkg. brown gravy mix
1 cup of water (gravy mix)
6 servings of mashed potatoes

1 1/2 tsp salt 2 Tbsp. Butter (if we have it) 3/4 C. of milk (1/4 c. dry milk + 3/4 c. of water 2 cups of potato flakes

1 tsp. Seasoning Salt
1/2 tsp. pepper

This is what is written on the recipe card. I re-write the items into my spiral food storage notebook. I do this for each meal.


Next, I multiply each item by 12, which gives me the amount I need for 12 weeks (3 months) of each item. I then combine items onto another list so that I only have one entry for each item. (see pictures)


Ingredient Conversions
If you need help figuring out how many tsp. of salt are in a container or how much wheat you will need to make your bread recipe, Everything Under the Sun has a table of conversions. I highly recommend you read all of Everything Under the Sun by Wendy DeWitt. She explains it so well.

Example: WHEAT........................... # 10 can=5.8 # =12 c=18 c flour when ground1 c wheat = 1 ½ c flour, 1#=2 ¼ c wheat=3.37 c flour

If my whole wheat bread recipe requires 8 cups of wheat flour and a #10 can of wheat kernels gives 18 cups of flour, then one #10 can gives me 2 1/4 of my bread recipe (18 cups of flour per can / 8 cups for my recipe = 2.25 recipes). Since I plan on making one recipe of bread each day (which gives me two 5x9 loaves), that means for a 90-day supply I need 40 #10 cans of wheat kernels to fulfill that ingredient requirement (90 days / 2.25 recipes per can = 40 cans of wheat kernels).

This post is a long time coming. I have not worked on food storage much in the past two years. Mainly because we have been eating what we had. I am SOOO thankful for the food storage we had because we never had to go on any type of assistance for food during Mike's layoff, subsequent lower paying job (which we are thankful for!) and move to the Midwest.

 
I wanted to share what we have done. We are back to trying to build our food storage back up. I have gotten a ton of great information from Everything Under the Sun by Wendy DeWitt. She inspired me to have a Global Sun Oven - Solar Cooker and prepare and store the foods that we really eat. I have to say that Glenn Beck's emphasis on what is happening with the economy has heightened my awareness of how short we are on time in order to be prepared.

The U.S. government is currently printing money just to survive. The Federal Reserve has held the Fed Funds Rate at 0-0.25% for nearly two years and just announced that it will be printing an additional $600 billion in new U.S. dollars by the end of June 2011. Since the beginning of September until now, just in anticipation of the Fed's upcoming quantitative easing, we have experienced the largest ever short-term increase in the history of agricultural commodity prices with corn rising by 32%, soybeans rising by 32%, orange juice rising by 12%, coffee rising by 19%, and sugar rising by 66%. These agricultural commodity price increases will begin to work their way into grocery stores nationwide in the weeks and months ahead, as food manufacturers and retailers are forced to raise their prices. - inflation.us - Nov. 10, 2010

Our financial situation, like many others, has been a bit on the shaky side. That said, I hope that Heavenly Father will continue to bless us with the ability to become debt free and have our food storage. This will be a series of posts, so I hope you will tune in for all of the steps. (Don't get overwhelmed! it is not rocket science, but it does take some time.)