Living off of food storage: Meal planning, part 2

I talked a bit about not wanting to go back to the meals we had as newlyweds. I also do not want to go back to our meals from the few years after that. I graduated, we moved, we added two children. Every day, I seemed to forget that dinner doesn't cook itself. Suddenly, it was 4 o'clock and I had nothing planned, nothing defrosted, no energy left to come up with something brilliant. I would call hubby and have him pick up Taco Bell on his way home. Or Burger King, or Quiznos, or... you get the picture.

Then one night, I realized that I was causing myself undue stress. I like to cook, I know how to cook, all I need to do is prepare a little. Back then it was just hubby and I buying value meals, but it was still between 15-20 dollars for a meal. Now, there are four of us, so our fast food bills are closer to $30. When I have a plan, we don't do the desperation fast food meals so often. I love the feeling of having dinner ready to cook, or already cooking. When we are driving around town and hubby asks, do you have something planned for dinner, or should we stop and grab something, I can triumphantly say, "Dinner is in the crockpot!" We save so much money by simply cooking at home. Plus, I'm a little less fat. Win, win.

Knowing how much it helps me, I dove into my new meal plan. As I started working through it, however, I noticed that every once in a while, I found myself dreading the coming week. I felt completely uninspired to cook, something I truly enjoy doing. In trying to figure this out, I noticed that there would be one or two meals planned for the week that were very complicated or time consuming, or just not that great. We didn't want to eat them, or prepare them that often. For example, lasagna is not my forte. I don't have a great recipe, so I don't love the product. I just couldn't get motivated to make it. Maybe if I have tons of spare time one day, I'll make five pans of it and put them in the freezer. On the other end of the spectrum, I love schnitzel, but it takes time and work. That meal is more suited to special occasions, not a monthly making.

For my improved meal plan, I took another look at that list of meals. I made smaller lists, one for things that I like to make and we don't mind eating every month or more, and one for things we like, but may not want that often. Then there is another list- actually a pile of papers in my notebook- of things I would like to try or maybe improve on.

Now, I have a four week rotation of meals. Each week has 4-5 meals planned out. The remaining days, I choose from the other lists, or have a leftover extravaganza. This gives me a great start on the weekly plan, but still allows some freedom for variety. So far, I like it, but I am still tweaking things and adding new things. I had fun trying out summer harvest recipes, but now we're transitioning more into soups.

Figuring out how much I need of what has gotten interesting. I had already stored up most of the food for my first meal plan. I figure I'll still use the basics no matter what I make though, so instead of figuring all that out again, I'm keeping track of what I use from what I had stored. Hopefully this time next year, I'll have it a little more scientific-like. For now, I'm doing old fashioned subtraction.

Here's my meal plan, for now. I'll probably keep playing with it, and I need to add a few things, but this will give you an idea.

Week 1

Meatloaf

Pizza

Roast

Chicken

Stroganoff/ chops & sauce

Sometimes list

Week 2

Burgers

Spaghetti

Chops

baked potato bar

Chick enchiladas/

Sometimes list

Week 3

Tacos /Navajo taco

Stir-fry /Orange chicken

Steak

Meatball/ roll-ups

Chicken

List

Week 4

Sloppy Joes

Soup

Roast/ribs

Fry/grilled chicken

Crock-pot chicken

List

Sometimes List

German noodles

Crepes

Runzas

Brats

Schnitzel

Hamburger Pie

Shepherd’s Pie

Fajitas

Lasagna

Pasta Griffa

Chicken Parmesan

Alfredo Chicken

Cobb salad

Risotto

Stuffed Chicken

Chicken Dumplings

Rotisserie chicken

Soups

Calico beans

Spicy beef

Chili

White Chili

Cabbage

Onion

Stew

Baked Potato Soup

Chicken Tortilla

Tomato

To Try

Tamales

Gyro...

Living off of food storage: Meal planning, part 1

Okay, I talked last time about why I stockpiled food. Now I want to talk about what food to store. There are generally two ways to look at it. You can store things that will last a lifetime - an "in case of emergency" food supply, like my mother's fake meat. Or, there's the store what you eat mindset, where you buy a few extra items that you usually buy while at the grocery store. That one never works for me because I forget to easily, or I don't restock as I use it.

My plan was inspired by a woman from the Everything Under the Sun blog, although I didn't find her blog until after I had heard her plan. What she suggests is selecting 7 breakfasts and 7 dinners that you like and then figuring out how much of each ingredient you need for each meal and then multiply that by 52. Just like that, you know how much food to store for the entire year.

A nice idea in concept, but I don't want to eat the same food every week of the entire year. I've done that with frozen pot pies and it gets really old. I decided to write down every dinner that we like. It came out to be well over a month's worth of meals. It just seemed like a good idea to implement the weekly food idea as a 6 week meal idea.

I went to work scrawling out amounts. Had I followed her advice about writing each of those meals down on a note card, my life would have been easier. However, I seem to need to do things the hard way first. That's just the way I am. I wrote on my recipes, multiplying everything by 13 (threw that extra month in, just in case). Then I had to try to pull all those amounts together.
This is what I ended up with...

This is just one page. The scanner is so smart, it automatically crops the ugly edges off, so you can't see the other 5 pages stacked behind this one. This page is amazingly neat. Did I mention, I did this the hard way?

Finally, I got everything tallied and since we had a good 8 months till we would leave for school, I decided to start doing the meal rotation right away, and I'm glad I did because I found a flaw in my reasoning. This is where those note cards would have come in especially handy.

In the planning, I figured on using each meal about once a month. It seemed simple enough that way, but I found that some meals just don't want to be made that often. Like lasagna, or crepes. I ended up re-evaluating my meals and I came up with a system that I am pretty happy with. I'll let you in on it in my next food storage post, so you can hopefully learn from my mistakes.

Living off of food storage: Why a year supply?

Why a full year supply of food?

In my experience, people either understand storing lots of food or they don't. My mom has a large storage room, so I'm quite used to the idea of having extra food on hand. No need to drive to town if we run out of anything, just go downstairs and get more. I like that feeling of preparedness, plus, it cuts down on impulse purchases if you can stay out of the grocery store.

But, why so much food? People are starting to see the wisdom in having some extras on hand, but a full year? Many people stock piled food in fear of some huge catastrophe, such as the Y2K scare. But it seems to me that having enough food on hand would ease much of the burden for families struggling through this recession. Just having oats, pasta and beans on hand would insure healthy eating, even if it's not delicious. I know many families have been grateful for their storage while they are going through job changes, or unemployment. For us, heading off to school without much income, it seems like the best plan. With so many unknowns in the coming year... will we be moving again? Staying here? Finding summer work elsewhere? Staying for summer classes? Will we run out of money? ...I want to be sure I can feed my kiddos and feed them well.

I don't want a repeat of the first two years of my marriage. I was still attending college and my husband was working and taking evening classes. I was way too busy to plan meals, and our tiny apartment barely had room for our dishes, let alone any food storage. We ate frozen pot pies (the cheap ones) and pasta roni almost exclusively for those two years. Sometimes we shook it up with hamburger helper. While these meals were very cheap, they were also lacking. I can honestly say that I have not had a frozen pot pie since then. I want to be able to eat real, quality food.

Moderation, however. It seems that in my mother's day, storing for the long term was the thing. She has enough hard red wheat to feed an army, as well as can after can of pretend meat -textured vegetable protein- which will store forever. Good thing, because it will never be eaten.

I want to be somewhere in the middle. Enough for a year, but things we will use. But, how do I know how much of what? If I can figure out my scanner, I'll show you my crazy tally sheets next time.