Adding fresh veggies to the old soup is a good suggestion. I like the soups, etc that I buy, it’s just that I don’t eat them often enough.
See my reply 71; re rotation. While I don’t have a whole year’s worth of food stored yet, I’ve been loading up on more canned goods during the past couple of years (I also have a few months of freeze dried food stashed and am buying more as funds are available). My concern is that in a major SHTF crisis, grocery stores will quickly run out of everything and not be resupplied for many weeks or months. My thinking has been to use the canned goods (some bought in 2008) to bridge the gap between fresh foods (in fridge and freezer) and the freez dried. With enough canned goods, I can push the time to freez dried back. It’s a balancing act and I’ve still have a lot of work to do.
Thanks for your reply!
Having decided quite a few years ago to be prepped with necessities for whatever, here are a few things I’ve learned that work for my small household.
1. Do NOT buy what we don’t normally eat, or at least what we don’t like. For instance, spaghetti sauce...
2. Rotate, rotate, rotate. For instance, all beans get tougher the longer they sit. So with beans (or grains) (and we eat a variety of them), I store with bay leaves in 5 gallon buckets, and scoop out say a gallon or half gallon at a time and keep in the kitchen and use up.
3. I label every bucket on two sides and the top with contents and date of purchase. That way rotation is much easier, I use oldest stuff next.
4. I label glass jars with date if I need to.
5. Even glass jars I label contents if it looks like something else.
6. It’s vital to incorporate the kinds of foods you are storing into your regular meals. That way you can easily rotate, so nothing goes bad, and you are used to eating those kinds of food. Vital vital vital!
7. Cheese, if in sealed plastic thingies - I buy Tillamook 2 pounders - keeps forever. The cheddars do, they just get a bit sharper. Jack or mozerlla don’t keep quite as well (so they say, we’ve never had any go bad). So we go to the place that has much cheaper cheese prices, and stock up. I’ve used cheese one year past expiration date and it was perfect.
8. It’s cheapest to store basic ingredients rather than mixes, also mixes have oils and other ingredients in them that go bad much more easily. So I make everything from scratch. Still practicing with crackers.
9. A good water filter is essential. It’s impossible to store potable water for a long time, or for a long outage/disruption. A good water filter is real peace of mind. I have a Berkefeld that I’ve used for years and just a Katadyn as backup.
10. To help with appetite fatigue, things like mustard, good vinegars, salsa, as well as cooking herbs and spices in bulk and stored well (in glass, out of heat and light) are important to me.
Hope these are helpful. I really need to get my blog organized and ready for public viewing!