I love looking at online recipes, picture-perfect Pins, and colorful cookbooks. The meal ideas I get from gawking at food seem to be endless. However, there is one disadvantage to most of these recipes when it comes to preparedness…
What would that be?
It’s that most recipes found online and in cookbooks require ingredients that may be hard (or even impossible!) to find in a long-term emergency.
If you are truly seeking to be self-sufficient, you must either collect simpler recipes for what you would want to eat, or plan to store, grow, or produce what ingredients you would hope to be able to use.
Consider this…
Most of us wouldn’t think twice about reaching into our pantries for spices, condiments, sauces, or for other things often used in today’s recipes. But what if you ran out of those things and going to the store was not an option?
It doesn’t take Armageddon to get to that point. People in economic hardships often face this dilemma every day.
So what is one to do?
One option is to gather simple recipes for making ingredients such as soups, sauces, and spice mixes on your own. If you haven’t considered about how to make your own salad dressings, mustard, or even chicken broth, you may want to consider learning how to do so if you would wish to have those things on hand in an emergency scenario. Having a well-stocked pantry would, of course, cover the short-term emergencies, but longer-term problems could dry those supplies out. Then what?
To achieve this goal, you must plan ahead.
- Make a list of what you normally eat.
- Gather recipes on how to make those things from scratch.
- Learn how to make these recipes yourself…at home!!! (There is a chance that going to your favorite restaurants would likely not be an option in a serious long-term emergency. Going to the market would likely not be an option either.)
- Analyze those recipes. Do you have stored today what ingredients would be needed? If not, you would need to plan to store those things which would be required. Other recipe components such as sauces, condiments, etc. are some of the things you should learn how to make on your own.
- At the bare minimum, you should learn how to produce your own basic foods. It should go without saying that you should learn how to bake your own bread. But have you considered how to churn your own butter, produce your own cheeses, and craft your own yogurt? Do you know how to process meats? Of course, gardening would be a most important part of your own food production as well.
In addition to what was already mentioned above, you need to think through how you plan to make and produce your own food. If there was no power available, what would be your plan? How would you cook your food then? How would you plan to store your food? Alternative cooking methods and food preservation practices also need to be a part of your overall food storage plan.
We all need to eat. It’s not optional when it comes to survival. Thinking through your food storage plan needs to be a top preparedness priority. If you wouldn’t have access to something, you need to make preparations to store it, learn how to produce it yourself, or plan to do without.
Don’t wait until it’s too late.
The need to put these plans into use could happen at any time.
Are you ready?
You make such a great point. We take for granted that if a recipe calls for pasta, we reach into the pantry and grab pasta. I cook a lot from scratch, yet I wouldn’t be able to make my own pasta. I’d eventually love to get a wood fire and gas stove. I found some online (Heartland brand) but they’re EXPENSIVE. Not only that, the developers around here are hell bent on chopping every tree down. There would be no wood for fuel. Short of moving, which isn’t gonna happen, it’s definitely something to think about.