Food Storage and New Recipes

WARNING: this is a long post, keep reading if you are interested in some great recipes and ideas for food storage including laundry soap. If you don't care you can skip it.

The last few years I have been so focused on Food storage but I have not had the financial resources to sustain building a food supply. Our tax return has blessed me with the ability to start our food storage. I have been so excited. So the first thing is I have been trying out new recipes and ways to save money and be more independant of stores supplies. I know I have told you all before that I am making my own laundry soap and I have a new way of making my own reusable dryer sheets. Not only is that a great help to the planet because I am not using waste but it saves a great amount of money because dryer sheets are not cheap. I have also been getting together with a few great friends these last few weeks to experiment with different recipes and ways to make my own foods. We have done Flour tortillas, corn tortillas, and tried our own granola bars. The flour tortillas were great. I did not get any pictures of those because I forgot. The corn tortillas we tried 2 different recipes. I don't eat corn tortillas for tacos but I like to fry them up and make my own chips out of them and then we dip them in salsa or eat them with our taco soup or taco dip. The first recipe we tried we got off of allrecipes.com !We chose this recipe to try because it uses corn meal and flour. The other recipes use corn masa mix. I thought that in a food storage situation you would most likely have corn meal not corn masa mix. I did think about it afterward and we probably could store corn masa mix just like you would flour so we may try another recipe with corn masa mix and see how it compares. Anyway, this recipe get mixed and then sits to rise. After that you roll it out and cook it. It came out funky shaped.. because I can't roll dough to save my life, but I did not need to worry about its shape because I was just going to cut it up and fry it anyway. I found this recipe cooked easy and when it was fryed it had a crunchier, thinner taste and acted more like a chip so it would be great for salsa or a taco dip.




The second corn tortilla Recipe was one I had in a food storage cookbook. It was mixed with almost an identical amount of ingredients but it was made into a very thin mix like a crepe mix. Then you cook it just like it were a crepe. My mistake was that I kept putting too much batter in the pan so the tortillas turned out thicker and more flour tortilla like. The interesting thing though was when I fried them they were slightly crispy on the outside but had a soft inside and when we dipped it in the taco dip it tasted just like a taco bell chalupa ( which I love) so even though I messed up it ended up being in our favor. So I will actually use this recipe again for taco dip because we liked the chalupa taste better than the chip taste.

Corn Tortilla Recipe
1 cup flour 1 cup corn meal 1 egg
1 tsp salt 3 Tbls oil water til thin. (about 1-2 cups )

This batter needs to be thin like crepes. You just heat up a skillet and cook like crepes.



I also took the time and found a taco seasoning recipe. I always buy taco seasoning pouches from the stores and they are always pretty reasonably priced at usually around 69 to 99 cents a piece. I thought that was pretty good and never bothered to try making my own. Well the other day I was making dinner ( tacos) and I got all the way to the part of putting in the seasoning, open up the cabinet and ..uh oh no seasoning. How did that happen? Anyway I was forced to make my own. I found the recipe on allrecipes.com again and I tried it. It is a little on the hot side so if you don't want it really spicey I would reduce the amount of chili pepper and red pepper flakes you put in. Otherwise it tasted just like the pouches ..if not better. So then I thought, price wise is it worth my time? So ( good teaching idea coming up) Chace and I used our math skills and put them to real practical use by calculating the cost of each spice serving in each homemade batch and figured out the cost of making your own seasoning pouch is only 26cents a pouch. The store is more than twice that. My smart son asked the question about my time and is it worth it so we decided to figure it out. I use a pouch a week on average because we love us some mexican food. Anyway when we took how much we saved ( based on a store brand at 89cents each)and mulitplied it out and found out that we will save on average about 81 dollars a year by making our own. WOW. How many more sauce mixes or spice mixes do I buy that I could actually make myself and possibly save a lot more money. I gaurantee I will be finding out=)The best thing was showing Chace that not only are there very practical ways to use all this math they are cramming down him at school but it also showed him very mathmatically that sometimes it takes a little more effort to do things yourself but it is definitely worth it. You should have seen his face when he realized how much of a difference it makes because before we multiplied it out he just saw it was only a 63 cent difference, why waste time..who cares right? Now he knows better.

The last thing we have done so far is our own Granola bars. I have to admit though that this recipe in my oppinion was not a success. It was too dry and when I tried another batch and increased the wet ingredients and decreased the cooking time it still did not make a difference. Too dry. So I was not going to bother giving you this recipe because we did not like it but I thought I would go ahead and show you the one we used so you would not bother or you could try and maybe I just did it wrong.(Granola Recipe)



I was trying to find a recipe that would equal the chewy granola bars from quaker. My kids love to munch on those and I hate all the extra suger etc. they add as well as I would love to save money and have a good recipe when we may not be able to go to the store and buy quaker. Anyway I just found another recipe from someones cooking blog ( new Granola Recipe)so I will try it and let you know if it turns out ok.

When we got our money the first thing we did was go to emergency essentials to get some food storage items. My first desire was a wheat grinder and the second was a quality dehydrator. We decided on the hand crank grinder because it was less expensive and lets be honest when it comes time to use food storage we probably wont have electricity so why pay hundreds of dollars for an electric one?



We went with a more expensive dehydrator hoping that it will work very well for what we need it to do. We want to dehydrate all kinds of fruits and vegetables and I had heard from friends and others that if you go cheap on the dehydrator it will probably not be able to do what you want it to do and that it is not a good resource for food storage.Cheap dehydrators also tend to have to run a lot longer to get the desired effect and therefore also use a lot more energy to run them.The biggest reason I wanted a dehydrator is because you see all these #10 cans of freeze dried foods from Mountain House and they want a good amount of money for them. So we would like to try and recreate their meals by dehydration and see if it works first of all and if it does, how much can we make and how much money do we save doing it ourselves. My 2 concerns are what can I safely dehydrate and how long is its shelflife. If anyone has a good resource for this information let me know because I am still looking for one.Our first experiment will be trying to recreate scrambled eggs with ham, gr pepper, red pepper and onion in it. It is obviously a breakfast item. Mountain house has it in a freeze dried 2 serving packet for 7.99 a pouch. I am hoping to make it ourselves for a lot less.



This is what we decided to purchase.This baby boasts " That it only costs 1 to 3 cents per hour to run. It has a unique computer-controlled heat sensor that analyzes temperature 60 times per second to ensure a stable drying environment.The Computer-controlled LEQUIP food dehydrator analyzes temperature constantly to ensure a stable food drying environment, and the temperature is adjustable between 93° and 158° F. There is no more technically advanced dehydrator than the L'EQUIP." That is the companys own words and part of its description. Amazing huh. Well it should arrive in the mail in the next few days and I will be trying it out. I will update everyone on how well it works and whether or not I would recommend it. It also comes with a 12 year warranty so hopefully that means the company stands by their product.

Anyway I have had requests before so I decided to add in the recipe for Laundry soap on my blog. This was in a food storage cookbook that my good friend from church got for me. We love it. It is so fast and easy to make and it really does save you a lot of money.

You need:
A 5 gallon bucket ( you can get them from Home depot in the paint department.When I got mine it was on sale for 3 dollars)
a bar of ZOTE soap. ( you can get this in the laundry isle of your local supermarket)
Borax powder ( this is also in the laundry isle)
Arm and Hammer Washing Soda ( this is not baking soda. I could not find this at walmart but I did find it at a local grocery store in the laundry isle)

Recipe:
1/3 bar of ZOTE
1/2 cup washing soda
1/2 cup borax

Instructions:
Grate the soap and separate it into thirds. Put 1/3 of the bar into a saucepan. Add 6cups of water and heat it stirring occasionally until the soap melts. Add the washing soda and borax and stir until dissolved.( I would add these gradually or they get stuck to the bottom of the pan and do not dissolve as easily.)Pour 4 cups of plain hot water into your 5 gallon bucket. Then add your soap mixture and stir. Now add another 1 gallon and 6 cups of water and stir again. Let the soap stand for 24 hours and it will gel. It will not be a solid gel but will look like an egg drop soup.It is also a low sudsing soap so if you don't see suds that is ok. You use 1/2 cup per load.

Cr and I use 1 cup per load and I make it in double batches.It is up to you how much you put in your load and how much you want to make at a time.A double batch of the soap fills the 5 gallon bucket and then you don't have to make it as often. It only takes about 15 minutes to make from start to finish and it ends up costing about 2 cents a load compared to 35 to 50 cents( depending on the brand soap you buy)per load.

This is the 5 gallon bucket I use



This is what the gel will look like. It really does look alot like egg drop soup.







I hope I did not bore anyone but if you braved the post and read it then you must have been interested. I hope it helps and I hope to have more posts with recipes and food storage finds.I have felt so strongly the last few years about this. I know it is the Lord telling me this needs to be a priority in my life so I have decided to make it one. So Happy food storaging to me and you=)