New Page

Hi all! I don't know if you've noticed, but I have a new page to my blog. You can click on the link to the right of my blog posts where it says Food Storage Resources. I've been impressed lately to do a better job of getting our food storage and emergency supplies organized. We've had a little bit here and there, but I really feel like we need to be better prepared for emergency situations. I have a first aid kit, I bottle my own meat, I love to do canning, but it just isn't quite enough. We've started storing water in a couple different ways. I've begun to fill up my canning jars with water when they aren't being used to store food. Rather than just have a bunch of empty jars on my shelves, now I can use them for water storage. When I need them for canning, I can just use the water for the garden, or anything I need. We've also started filling the heavy plastic apple juice containers with water and storing them underneath our extra bed. We don't have the recommended two week supply, but we are getting there, slowly.
I've always been a little intimidated by the popular form of food storage, where you buy 30 lb buckets of wheat, oats, rice, sugar, etc, because it just seems like a lot. We also don't have a lot of room to store large buckets like that. So, my idea of food storage has begun to change. Rather than thinking I need huge buckets of bulk food (I do have some buckets of wheat and oats, but I am using them for making bread, and other everyday things), I've started to stock up on the foods we eat all the time. Smiths grocery store just had another case lot sale, and it seems that they have one at least twice a year. When the case sale comes around, I make sure to buy a few cases of things we use all the time: cream of mushroom soup, cream of chicken soup, honey, canned tomatoes, macaroni and cheese, mandarin oranges, canned vegetables, etc. These are things I regularly use in our dinner meals, and won't require a lot of preparation. If necessary, a lot of them could be eaten right out of the can without needing to be cooked. When I combine these case items with my bottled meat, jams, jellies, canned beans, and other fruit of bottled, our food storage doesn't seem to be so lacking. Rather than having buckets of stuff I don't know what to do with, I can store the food we actually eat and I can rotate it better knowing that we will eat it before it goes bad.
I hope you check out the new food storage page, suggest any resources you like that I don't have, and I'll keep adding new links so that we can all be better prepared for those unexpected disasters and emergency situations!