Need advice on food and the grubstake

[Modern Pioneer]

Im sort of confused what / how do go about this. Will be cooking for 7. 4 adults 3 kids. We want to start setting by more food preps for basically this winter, and/or for things unseen. Im not getting ready for the zombies to attack or anything such as that I just feel it be wiser to spend our allowance on foodstuffs now instead of buying it even a month later. I figure if something costs $1 now it might cost $2 at the end of the month???

We have been doing alot more home cooking now. Lots easier with running water, i might add I have been baking bread almost daily. Instead of buying stuff like packaged cookies and little debbies have been making homemade cookies/treats. Im no stranger in the kitchen , and i actually really enjoy all the cooking i been doing. Kids seem to like it more, other than there isnt much in the way of junk food and sweets that can easily had. I really just dont know where to begin with this grocery list. I guess what im trying to get at is how much flour , sugar, salt, spices, cans of green beans, corn what have you to buy? If all things being equal and nothing is really a great bargain how do i determine what to buy for the month and how much to set back in the pantry or cellar? Should i start with a monthly menu, listing breakfast, lunch, dinner as well as desserts and or treats. Then determine what i need to fill that list? For the month? Then go back and try to decide which items we use the most of and prep up for that. I guess im really talking bout basic foodstuffs, canned goods and basic ingredients?? Im just confused. Can someone set me straight? Where/how to begin. I think this should really be an easy task, and maybe im just making more out of it than what it is. I can remeber reading old camping/hunting books as well as passages out of old frontier diaries of the foodstuffs they carried with them. Some of the old stuff i remember reading especially in old hunting books was the "deer camp" grubstake for X amount of men for X amount of days. X amount of flour..X amount of sugar, X amount of this and X amount of that. I think i need a list like that. That way i can buy maybe for the month ahead and if im lucky and frugal maybe i can buy enough for 2 months or even 3 months. I dont know with the cost of everything if that will be plausable or not.
Another question i had was on the age of canned goods. In my moms basement she has quite a bit of canned goods mostly veggie stuff but also some canned beef,chicken, pork, tuna etc. The dates on alot of the cans is about up. How long will this food be good for? another 6 months? Less? What are the biggest risk factors in using these canned foods.
Ive searched on the net for food lists and such but can not find decent info. Maybe im typing the wrong set of words into google, i dont know. Any info you all good give me to help get me going would be fantastic! Thanks in advance

Keep your powder dry.

[Callieslamb]

Here is a calculator for basic food items and amounts per person - I believe for a year.
http://www.providentliving.org/conte...1116-1,00.html

Here is another one that let's you put in the number of people and it calculates it for you. - again, I believe the amounts are for a year.
http://lds.about.com/library/bl/faq/blcalculator.htm

Both of those are for very basic items - flour, wheat, oats, powdered milk, etc. Some people concentrate on just the basics and fill in luxuries later. Others concentrate more on what they normally eat. Write up a menu of meals you would normally serve your family. Figure in amounts of each item for 1 meal for all of you. Then multiply it out for the amount of time you want your stores to last. For items like fruits and vegetables - I know I need 2-3 bottle/cans every day. So I just can or buy a variety of different ones that we eat.

I find it good to run through a scenario in my mind of meals I can fix -what is missing? Oil? Baking powder? Spices? Most people don't think of it all at once. Or after 30 years, as in my case.

Do a google on "food storage amounts" or come down to the survival and preparation forum on this site - it is down further on the menu page, under General Chat.

[Madame]

Allan,
Scroll down to the Survival prep forum and you'll learn a lot. Here's a few things to get you started.
1)Perishables are rotated. Put veggies on a shelf, older stuff in front, newer stuff in back. With ongoing rotation the food won't go bad.
2)Set aside money saved from sales and use it for preps.
3) Some nonperishables - wheat berries, sugar, salt, rice, beans, etc - can store for years if kept in a dry place. Be sure to use sealed containers!
4) The foods I just mentioned can be bought in bulk, thus saving money.
5) If you don't already have canning equipment, get what you need to can your own food (list a request on www.freecycle.org and with luck get some jars or whatever free. Also, this time of year a lot of people have extra produce that they are willing to share.
6) Keep an inventory of what you have. That way when you see a good sale, you'll know whether you need Product X or not.
7) Go to http://lds.about.com/library/bl/faq/blcalculator.htm for a food calculator. It will give you some excellent guidelines. I don't use everything they list (ie I buy wheat berries that I can grind instead of flour which has little nutritional value) but it's a starting place.
Hope that this gets you started!

[Lynn Bodoni]

You don't mention if you have a freezer. That will open up a lot more possibilities for you. However, I'm guessing that you don't have one. Also, if you and yours are really into the pioneering lifestyle, you will be burning a lot more calories that most people, so take this into consideration when you're planning meals.

For now, I would say to save your grocery receipts. Keep a notebook and keep track of how much flour, sugar, salt, etc. that you use each month. This way, you can tell if it's worth it to buy that 50 pound bag of beans that's on special (it very probably is). In this notebook, you might also want to keep track of what meals DON'T work...for example, that turkey meatloaf. Women and cooks used to keep kitchen books, so that they could be sure they were using their resources well. For myself, I have a "pantry list" that I check over before making my grocery list. I want to make sure that I have enough of various staples. For example, we eat a lot of tuna, so I want to make sure that I have between 3 and 6 cans of tuna in the pantry.

Take a look at www.hillbillyhousewife.com . Scroll down and look at the left hand side, where you'll see $45 emergency menu and $70 low cost menu. She has weekly shopping lists for each menu, which will at least give you a starting place. She also has a lot of low cost recipes, which you will find useful.

I would suggest trying to serve beans or rice as either a side dish or main dish at least every other day. These foods are cheap, filling, versatile, and nutritious. Anyone who complains can be invited to think up new cheap menus, while they clean up the kitchen for the day!

[mpillow]

You really can't go wrong with beans and rice. They store easy and are filling.

Canned tomatoes are great for chili, spaghetti, soups, tenderizing tough cuts of meat.

I tend to buy sale items within my allowed $$ budget once staples are stocked. Flour, sugar, beans, rice,oats(in bulk @ healthfood store) yeast(try sourdough to save here), spices and baking supplies (oil, soda, powder).

Buy veggies/fruits on sale and in season and can/dehydrate/freeze.

Look for a liquidation store in your area.

[Kathleen in WI]

Lots of excellent advice! I would also add that it is very helpful to match up sales and coupons. Some people think it isn't worth the effort, but I find that I can consistently save more than I spend at the grocery store each week.

There are several sites that can help you to do this:

http://www.couponmom.com/

http://www.thegrocerygame.com/ This one offers you a 4-week trial for $1 and if you stay on it is billed based on how many store list you subscribe to. This is what I use and I save WAY more than the fee. To me it is well worth it to have a list of sale items for each store in my area along with each coupon circular and what coupon goes with each sale item. They even color code it so you can easily see the rock-bottom deals in order to stock up.

I am sure there are tons of others as well, but these are the ones I am aware of. Hope that helps some.

[Kathleen in WI]

Oh! I forgot to mention: sometimes freecycle requires you to post an "offered" post first. So if you want to post that you are looking for canning jars, be sure to check the rules first. I'm not sure if they would just not approve your post or what, but I'd be really bummed if I couldn't use freecycle for some reason.

[mpillow]

Somethings I forgot...

Bullets, shells, fishing supplies

I buy a box of shells or .22 bullets anytime I'm in Walmart. Ammo prices have increased lately as well. And, availability could become an issue.

[mnn2501]

Keep in mind, you need to buy things your family uses on a regular basis, there is no sense stocking something you don;t eat just because some list says you should.
The basic advice is this "Store what you eat and eat what you store"
You say you are baking bread, cookies, etc. Figure out how much; flour, yeast, sugar, etc you go through in a week and start buying extra, try to get up to having a years supply stored -- do this with other things your family uses, don't forget things like toilet paper, tampons, diapers, etc - whatever your family uses.

example: if you use 10 lbs of flour in a week, times 52 weeks in a year means you need 520 lbs of flour. Don't worry that you can not afford to go out and buy 1 years supply of everything today, buy a bit extra each payday and soon you'll have what you need. Go for a 3 month supply of everything first, once you have that work on a 6 month supply .....and so on.

Also don't forget to protect your storage items from; bugs, water, heat, cold, humidity, etc -- ask if you need help with this, there are a number of threads dealing with proper storage of preps.

[Nevada]

If you have the space and budget to keep a large quantity of food on hand to rotate then that's fine, but there is another approach to keeping emergency food on hand.

You can get dried beans for very little, under $15 for a 20# bag of pinto beans. Dried beans store well for many years at room temperature. To prepare the beans all you really need is some kind of fat (margarine, lard, bacon fat, etc.), which will most likely be available in even the most severe of food shortages. I did an essay on dried beans for survival purposes at my forum.

http://homesteadworld.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1131

The investment in dried beans is modest, perhaps a 20# bag for each month for a small family. That's about $100 for each 6 months of preparedness, or around $200/year. You have a large family so it might take more.

In the event that your survival beans never become necessary to be consumed in an emergency, leaving you with more beans than you can eat yourself, you can always soak them in water overnight and feed them to livestock.

[Lynn Bodoni]

In the event that your survival beans never become necessary to be consumed in an emergency, leaving you with more beans than you can eat yourself, you can always soak them in water overnight and feed them to livestock.

I would advise ROTATING your survival stores, eating the oldest first. For that matter, rotate all your food.

[Nevada]

Originally Posted by Lynn Bodoni

I would advise ROTATING your survival stores, eating the oldest first. For that matter, rotate all your food.

While I'm not arguing that rotating the beans is a good idea, my suggestion was to have an inexpensive stock of food for emergencies. Following my suggestion, a small family could have 6 months of food on hand for under $100. However, that's not to say that your family will enjoy eating beans for every meal, month after month, but it sure beats starving.

The only way to fully rotate the stock of beans is to rotate them as they are consumed. So realistically, how long will it take for a small family to consume 120 pounds of dried beans? And that's just a 6 month supply. Now imagine 240 pounds for a year, or about 500 pounds for two years. The beans are eventually going to become a little backed up, don't you think?

Let's be reasonable here. If your entire SHTF food storage is in dried beans, you are going to have a very difficult time maintaining active rotation without feeding some to your livestock. But hey, beans are cheap, which is the whole point.

[stranger]

B]We have been doing alot more home cooking now. Lots easier with running water, i might add I have been baking bread almost daily. Instead of buying stuff like packaged cookies and little debbies have been making homemade cookies/treats. Im no stranger in the kitchen , and i actually really enjoy all the cooking i been doing. Kids seem to like it more, other than there isnt much in the way of junk food and sweets that can easily had. I really just dont know where to begin with this grocery list. I guess what im trying to get at is how much flour , sugar, salt, spices, cans of green beans, corn what have you to buy?[/B]
I alway read store what you eat and like, but don't go along with that idea, i love shrimp, salmon a a few other things that i know won't be available if the SHTF. I would go along with what Nevada said, get the long time storage items amd even plenty of wheat-baking powder ect.. rice,beans tomatoe sauces.
get your kids involved in cooking things now, it makes a kid happy when he grinds his own flour, makes a small pizza and tosses it on the grill and cooks it by them selves, they seem to eat things that don't taste so good but still has the nutrition.
my GKs would only eat junk (Alfredo) till I got them over here. for quite a while they wouldn't even eat here because we eat real cooked food in our opinion, no junk food.
now they will eat pizzas cooked on the grill even with baked beans on for a topping because they cooked everything, they'll eat corn bread and most everything we eat because they have a hand in it, we even let them make old time candy. let the kids do it them selves and tell them, what they cook, they eat, you'll be suprized how much they will eat. One GK just finished cooking school at Johnson and Whales and is in Ireland doing his internship til Dec. He at one time wouldn't eat anything but chicken Alfredo

[Madame]

This link might be useful. http://theideadoor.com/Preparedness/...rage_for_5.htm
The Mormons have lots of good stuff about prepping.

[hotzcatz]

We don't really prep and we don't shop according to recipes. We do keep a "well stocked" kitchen and pantry, though for frugality purposes and it is very similar to prepping. There is generally fifty to a hundred pounds of flour here, with four or five of those several pound packages of yeast. We also have sour dough starter. That takes care of bread, noodles, crackers, pancakes, toast, tortillas, etc. (A Kitchen Aid mixer is great for making bread.) There is twenty to fifty pounds of rice. There is a half case of tuna fish (in cans), a case or so of spaghetti sauce which is used for pizza, spaghetti, chicken with red rice, etc. etc. A couple cases of canned vegetables, fifty pounds of raw sugar, etc. An assortment of dried beans - probably twenty to thirty pounds worth, some we bought, some we grew and dried. We usually have ten to twenty pounds of oatmeal on hand, too, since we like oatmeal and it gets put into cookies and bread as well as eaten as a cereal. There is a garden out back plus hydroponic vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, banana and guava trees, coffee trees, bees and feral pigs caught in traps.

When shopping at the grocery, about the only things we buy are things on sale or a specific item or two. We get a lot of stuff in bulk at a food co-op and buy our herbs and spices (the ones we don't grow) from the bulk jars at the local health food store.

Rotate your food supplies and use the pantry to cook from. Every three or four years go through and pretty much toss out the oddball stuff you haven't used. Stuff is good past the expiration date if the container is still in good condition. The expiration date is the date to which they believe it will not have deteriorated in taste or texture. It can go quite aways past the expiration date before it gets inedible but use your own common sense.

Another item which should be on your shelf are a few old cookbooks which use basic ingredients.

Another way to prep is to list the ingredients of your top thirty favorite meals and then stock a lot of all those ingredients.

[Quint]

Originally Posted by mpillow

Somethings I forgot...

Bullets, shells, fishing supplies

I buy a box of shells or .22 bullets anytime I'm in Walmart. Ammo prices have increased lately as well. And, availability could become an issue.

I was looking through an old ad from a firearm and accessory supplier the other day and noticed a huge jump in prices. Back then I could buy a case of a particular ammo for around 100 bucks for 1000 rounds. Now that some case of ammo costs about 230. I use to buy 500 round bricks of .22 long rifle for around 10 or 15 dollars while now they're 23-30. That of course is just bulk ammo in 5.56, 7.72x39 and .308 etc. when you start pricing domestically produced quality hunting ammunition or target ammunition it has gone up even more. with the increases in demand, the increases in craw materials such as copper, brass and lead it isn't going to come back down in the foreseeable future in fact it will just go higher.

If a person has the means it wouldn't be a bad idea to buy a case lot of ammo every month or week if your budget allows. Even if you won't possibly shoot it all of it you can always find someone to buy ti at market price if you should ever need the money. If things really go south it would make a great barter item as well. Probably wouldn't be a bad time to think about reloading and stockpiling components either.

[coup]

if the dates are about up on the canned food,then that is what you want to eat,,buying back things you will eat..don't get so excited -worried about everything... there is a glut on apples,pears,nuts this year,gather put these up...dry the apples,great snacks for kids. mix with the nuts,,,many farmers will give away small potatoes,,...let hunters know you want deer meat,small game. church food pantries........ once when i was watching some kids in need,they would eat dinosaurs one day,deer burger and a baked potatoe the next.

[annethcz]

I agree with the idea of keeping track of your receipts and figuring out how much food you actually eat. When I first started prepping a few years ago I made the mistake of using online calculators and buying the items that they recommended. I really should have figured out what MY family eats and then stocked up on those foods, rather than buying foods that other people eat. It doesn't really matter if the experts recommend buying pasta and beans- because we don't eat pasta or beans very often. Several years after starting my mega-pantry, I still have 30 pounds of beans sitting on my shelf because we just don't eat them. So stock up on items that you use, and you won't go wrong.

[mpillow]

Originally Posted by annethcz

I agree with the idea of keeping track of your receipts and figuring out how much food you actually eat. When I first started prepping a few years ago I made the mistake of using online calculators and buying the items that they recommended. I really should have figured out what MY family eats and then stocked up on those foods, rather than buying foods that other people eat. It doesn't really matter if the experts recommend buying pasta and beans- because we don't eat pasta or beans very often. Several years after starting my mega-pantry, I still have 30 pounds of beans sitting on my shelf because we just don't eat them. So stock up on items that you use, and you won't go wrong.

Sometimes you have to change your diet to fit your budget and growing climate.

Beans are the world's most perfect food. Rice is second best. Anything edible is good if you are truly hungry.

[clovis]

I will say that we stock up whenever we can get a great deal, but we do not usually get more than what would be used in one month.

Stocking up too much can lead to waste, either in spoilage, or not being used at all.

To me, it is important to keep your cash flow positive. If you are tight on money, stocking up can save you money, but it also can tie up your cash too much.

I would rather have a little cash on hand than 157 boxes of macaroni.

At the same time, it is hard to pass up on a super sale with coupon for brand name bacon for $1 a package, especially since it freezes so well. I bought 14 packages since it freezes well.

I think with each person, it is a balancing act, and you will get better at knowing what to stock up on, and what to pass up.

I think if you look and study store/product sales, you will find that sometimes they are cyclical and routine. I might be waaay off base, but I find that canned veggies go on deep sale about this time every year, and may last for the next 3 months. Hot dogs seem to be on sale all summer, but harder to find in the fall and winter on super sale. Kroger runs 99 cent a pound ribs once or twice a year, usually in May. This may give you a better idea of what to stock up on, and when, if you see patterns in the stores. Please remember that this is off the cuff observation, and I could be wrong.

Here is something to remember, and I think is significant: Walmart will cost compare other store prices if shown in the ads. We cost compare ALOT at WM, and we take the competitors ads into WM with us. It has saved us ALOT of money!!!!! It has to be on like items, like store brand milk for store brand milk. Save $5 a week, and that is $260 for a year.

Hope this helps!
Clove