Practice Using Only Your Long Term Food Storage

Here’s and idea… Once in a while, spend some time making yourself (your household?) meals for a day, but only using your emergency food supplies. If you’re into preparedness / prepping, you most certainly have a supply of specific extra foods stored back. Foods reserved for long term storage – or ‘deep pantry’ emergency food supplies. The foods that you may have acquired for ‘just in case’. The thing is, prepare these meals without electricity.

Practice your kitchen survival skills. Try making breakfast, lunch, and dinner whereby you only use your food preps, and/or “long term food storage” supplies. Challenge yourself. Even better, make all of the meals for one day in this regard. And you can’t use any electrical kitchen appliances.

Be creative. Utilize some of the typical prepper ‘staple foods’. Make some things from scratch.

[ Read: Survival Food Most Common In Preppers Deep Pantry Storage ]

Maybe you get out the hand grain mill, grind some wheat berries into flour, and make a loaf of bread from scratch with the other ingredients that you may need (how are you going to do that without electricity though?)… Maybe biscuits or dumplings instead on a portable gas stove top in a fry pan? Figure it out. Find ways to get ‘er done.

Why bother with doing this? It may help to uncover /discover holes in your kitchen preparedness. Maybe you will find that you need a particular manually-operated appliance or tool (because the electricity is off). Or a specific food item that you don’t have. Or an indoor-safe portable stove.

[ Read: Single Burner Butane Stove – Safer For Cooking Indoors ]

If you dare, go to the electrical circuit breaker panel and flip them all off. A dark house. Or at least no working appliances in the kitchen. Then try to make the meals. Oh, and lets say you can’t use things from the refrigerator or freezer (imaginary long term power outage).

Why? Because this will realistically resemble what could happen, and force you to deal with the variety of consequences and challenges.

One particular person here on the blog (NRP) has always suggested doing a ‘Lights Out Weekend” once in awhile. That’s a great idea to help find out what else you might need. My suggestion here is to focus on your kitchen and your food supplies in this way.

Maybe you open up a #10 can of that dehydrated (or freeze dried) ‘xyz’ or whatever… How does it taste? What about rice & beans? Do you have what you need to spice it up into a decent tasting meal?

I’m not talking about cheating and cooking up that frozen pizza in your freezer. Instead, imagine that you only have the food ‘staples’ or supplies that you’ve reserved for a longer term SHTF. What are you going to do with them?

And you know what? It could even be fun ;)