Author Archives: Jen

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Using Your Food Storage

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Sooner or later as you learn more about long term storage of food you’ll run into the acronym SWYE and EWYS. Yeah, I know. Alphabet soup. So before you get too frustrated, what it means is “Store What You Eat and Eat What You Store”, and it’s a very important principle in food storage. Here’s the idea: Your family is used to a certain way of eating. Think about breakfast. Over the last month, what has everyone had? Probably the same thing 90% of the time, huh? Oh, sure, you might get different types of cereal, but it’s still mostly … Continue reading →

Food Storage Basics: Salt

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One of the things you’ll need to have in your long term storage is salt. This might not make sense, considering how we’ve all heard over and over again that salt is bad for us, and it’s true that too much salt can cause all sorts of bad things to happen to your body. Too little salt, however, can be just as bad. Salt is so important that, of the only four basic tastes your tongue can recognize, one of them is salt. Fortunately, it is very unlikely that you will ever need to worry about getting too little salt. … Continue reading →

Emergency Kits: Part 3

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As you might have gathered from Part 1, for a long time I avoided putting together an emergency kit. I found it completely overwhelming. Too many things to keep track of! Too many things to think about! It seemed so complicated that I wanted nothing to do with the whole idea. Now I’m a little more comfortable with the idea. We finally have an emergency kit for our family, one for each person in fact. So here’s a look at what I’ve done. I hope you find it useful! Our kits are in backpacks, one for each member of the … Continue reading →

Emergency Kits: Part 2

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Planning for a simple family vacation. A car trip. That’s the approach we’re going to take to help you work out how to put an emergency kit together for your family. First, I want you to sit down with a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. Think about this family trip. It could be a three day car trip or a three day camping trip. Whichever level of preparedness you want to have, think about it in terms of simply packing. Now, consider these questions (this is how I plan for all trips and how I finally put … Continue reading →

Emergency Kits: Part 1

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Someone I know had to evacuate her house a few months ago. She lives near a busy road, and there was some kind of accident, nothing too serious except that the truck involved in the accident was carrying some kind of dangerous chemical. So there she was, with her small children and another child she was babysitting, when a police officer knocked at her door to tell her to get out of the house immediately. She explained that it would take her a few minutes to get everything together and the officer told her she didn’t have a few minutes. … Continue reading →

Nutrition: Wheat

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For those of you who like to know all the details, here’s the facts on wheat and why it’s so good for you. Wheat is a grain, which is to say it’s basically a seed. And like all seeds, wheat has everything it needs to sprout and grow inside a protective hull, called a husk. Just inside the husk is a layer of bran, which is where you’ll find a great deal of the nutrition as well as fiber. As you go further into the wheat kernal, the next layer is the endosperm. If you were to sprout the wheat, … Continue reading →

Cooking Wheat: Wheat Berries

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So you have your wheat, but what do you do with it? There are three ways to eat your wheat: Whole Cracked or ground into flour Sprouted Today we’ll be talking about the simplest way to eat it, simply cooking the wheat as you might cook rice. Although you’ll find that cooked wheat berries are far chewier than rice. You might like the texture, you might not. It’s a personal preference thing. This recipe makes a large quantity of wheat berries, but you can store the extra in the refrigerator or freezer and use in other recipes. Throw a handful … Continue reading →

Food Storage Basics: Wheat varieties

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With so much to say about wheat, it’s hard to know just where to start! As I mentioned in an earlier post, wheat has been called the Staff of Life, and with good reason. It’s been one of the foundations of the human diet since early in our history, providing the calories and nutrition that took humanity from the hunting stage of our development to the agricultural stage. We’ve taken full advantage of its ability to store well; wheat from the pyramids has been successfully sprouted by modern archaeologists seeking to test its viability. As you start to look at … Continue reading →

The benefits of being prepared.

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So what is this all about? What does it mean to be prepared? Life throws the unexpected at us every day. From the weather to traffic to the child who wakes up sick in the middle of the night, we might have to deal with any number of changes to our plans. When I was a kid, my dad decided to start his own business. He threw his heart and soul into it, but without success. It went under, and so did our finances for awhile. What kept us going was the fact that my mother had put together a … Continue reading →

How to read the codes on your canned foods.

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I find the best sites when I’m looking for something else! The other day, doing a search for something I don’t even remember now, I ran across this page at Mealtime.org on reading can codes. Now if you’re wondering just how long that can of beans has been sitting in the back of your pantry, you have a way to find out. But what, you might be asking about now, is a can code? Well, it’s a packing code used by the manufacturer for tracking purposes. That way they can more easily ensure their stock gets rotated, and if there’s … Continue reading →