Food storage for beginners

With the recent and ongoing power outage in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan's 3rd largest city, I feel compelled to write a post on affordable food storage for beginners, as that is the level we were at when we started storing food - it had to be cheap and easy.

Here are some things to think about:

1. Pasta, rice, and wild rice, if left soaking in water long enough, will become soft. Rice is the better use of the water because you can add a little to start with and then add a little more as it gets soaked up. Pasta uses water but then what's left over isn't as awesome for drinking as fresh water.

2. Cans last almost forever. It's a good idea to rotate what's in your cupboards just to be safe. If you don't have anything in your cupboards, watch for things like 2 for $ or 3 for $ deals. Tomato sauce is a great one to have on hand because it makes everything awesome, even rice. Stewed tomatoes are almost better because they have liquid in them, which, in an emergency, would allow you to use less water for the rice.

3. Canned fruit is another smart buy, not only because it has vitamin C but because it is loaded with liquid. The more you can eat that is wet, the less water you'll need to drink.

4. Juice in tetra-paks is another item that is shelf-savvy. They last for a very long time and would allow you to further conserve water. Juice, too, is often on sale for really cheap, like 99 cents a litre, or sometimes even less. When it's that cheap and you would have normally picked up 1 litre for $2 or $3, pick up 2 or 3 litres for the same price. Store it.

5. If you know you're going to use something in your cupboard, buy a replacement for it and rotate it so that the oldest product is at the front of the shelf.

6. Protein storage is not impossible. Canned beans are fantastic for this. Busch's Beans even taste great cold, I think. Your other easy option would be dehydrated eggs. They don't exactly taste awesome scrambled like fresh eggs do, but you can put a teaspoon or 2 here or there and you won't even notice them. You could even mix them in with your tomato sauces if you found the idea of eating them plain vile.

7. A cheap camping stove is a really good idea. I'm talking literally the single burner that screws into the top of a bottle of propane. Those suckers heat stuff REALLY fast. I don't even think we went through a whole small bottle of propane on our honeymoon and we had hot beans with almost every meal. Also, it's easy to store the burner and a couple bottles of propane at home, and it's cheaper than a big bottle of BBQ propane, which is hard to acquire if you're poor and don't have a car (like we were when we went on our honeymoon). An alternate, which only works if you're willing to chop down your trees and share your food, is to make friends with the closest neighbour who has a fire pit. Another thing to keep in mind about propane is that you should keep it and use it outside, well away from your house. Chances are good you'll never have an incident with it, but it is odorless, accidents happen (especially if all hell's breaking loose and the apocalypse is striking), and you might thank me for that reminder in the end. And.... last thought on fuel: You probably shouldn't rely on your natural gas BBQ for an emergency situation. It might be awesome every other day of the year, and less of a PITA then propane, but if gas goes out with your power, you'll be glad for your portable alternative.

8.  Make sure you rotate something sweet in your food storage. Chocolate is good, something like pure chocolate chips, because chocolate doesn't really expire. It's still good to rotate it anyway but it will last for a very long time as long as it's kept dry and cool. Cookies are good too - Oreos have all kinds of preservatives in 'em (they make me itchy, which is lame) which means they'd be a good choice for longevity. Ritz crackers have the same sort of longevity. M&Ms are also known as pretty decent energy food, although lacking in nutrition. Things like nuts are good to have on hand for energy and mix well with chocolate, but only if you eat them often enough to go through them as they will go rancid faster than canned or sugary goods. Rum cake, if it's not against your religion, seems to last forever and is awfully tasty. It would make a nice treat in a crisis. I'm also under the impression that fruit cake, the Christmas kind, also lasts forever...

8 1/2: Foods high in acids and sugars have longer shelf lives. Maybe see how long a jar of pickled eggs will keep if you like pickled eggs (I do) or other pickled protein.

9. Whatever you do, don't stock up on an overabundance of junk food. It might seem cheap and easy but in a crisis situation you need real food and as best proper nutrition as possible in order to think straight and function properly.

10. It's not a bad idea to have a bottle of bleach on hand as well as it is useful for disinfecting things.

I guess the key to effective food storage is to find things that are cheap, healthy, and keep for a really long time. If you're stuck in an emergency, you probably won't care that you can't have T-bone steak and fresh veggies as much as you might think if you have a good selection of canned goods and a method with which to heat them. Remember too that variety is important - you don't want tomato sauce dishes for an entire week and you won't want beans for an entire week. But if you  have 5 or 6 kinds of canned veggies, 5 or 6 kinds of canned fruit, well, then you have options. And it might not be awesome if it goes on for more than a week, but when you think about the people who live near you who weren't prepared, you'll be glad you slowly acquired some basic food.