A Recipe for Disaster

So, in truth you are searching for "recipes for disaster", or recipes that your family will be able to cook and eat with ease in case of a disaster.  What kind of disaster, you may ask?  I don't know!!!  I am not a "doomsday prepper"  and I don't believe the end of the world is coming tomorrow.  But I do believe we have been counseled for years and years to prepare our families in the best way we can.  So that's what this is about.  People always say..."I don't know where to start!".  Well, people HERE is where you start.  With your recipes.

Write it out!

Write out your family's Super Seven. I have recipes written out for my family and you are welcome to use those- I tried to choose recipes that were kid friendly but mainly I just wrote out our family favorites.  The best thing about this system is you can totally tweak it to your family!  If you like Spaghetti, you can plan for spaghetti...if your family likes Enchiladas, you can plan for that as well!

Test it out!

Be sure to test out anything "new".  For example, I NEVER buy store bought Pasta sauce. I prefer to make my own.  HOWEVER in my food storage plan I have discovered that a jar of pasta sauce is cheap and all inclusive!  It comes with lots of veggies and 1 26 oz jar will feed my whole family (2 adults 4 kids) one meal.  SO I am storing 52 jars of Walmart Spaghetti sauce.  However when it came time to test alfredo, which my family loves...I discovered they would NOT EAT the store bought stuff.  I tried 3 different brands before just giving up completely.  So for Alfredo I have to store ALL the little things to make a white sauce and I'm just not sure it would work in a "can't get to wal-mart for whipping cream" scenario.  So I am still working on that meal.  The point is, TEST those recipes out!  

Just take a week where you make each one and make sure you are only cooking enough for your family.  One of our family fav's is Broccoli Chicken Casserole.  When testing out the recipe I had written down, I ended up with enough food for 3 families!  Sometimes I package up the leftovers for my husbands lunches, or we eat some later in the week, but most of the time we throw a lot of it away- even if it was the BEST MEAL EVER- usually some of the leftovers get tossed.  So you will SAVE money if you cook by your recipes for your everyday meal planning- Because you will waste less food!

Calculate it out!

Use my spreadsheets to write out your recipe and it will calculate everything up at the end for you.  Then you will know how much you need of each ingredient to make that meal for 3 mo, 6 mo, etc.  Then all you have left to do is add up all of your meals and you will know EXACTLY what you need to store to feed your family.