If you have decided that pantry cooking food storage is a good option for you, you may really love this method for storing your “pantry meals.” Even if you do a different type of food storage, you may like to adapt this method of storage to the foods that you have.
If you store your food by individual ingredients (like putting all of your jars of peanut butter in one place) you will have a few difficulties. First, you will have to keep a meticulous inventory of how many of each item you currently have. This requires a great deal of organization, making sure to record every time you add or use something in your food storage. In addition, you may have difficulty using the food before it goes bad.
Depending on the size of your family, you may choose to store an entire week of food together in a box. Determine all of the foods your family will need for one week and place these items in one box or on one shelf. Use your pantry cooking menus to help you with this. It is also a good idea to put items together that have relatively similar expiration dates. On the outside of the box, you will want a label including a list of the meals included and the earliest expiration date of the food inside that box.
If you store one week’s worth of food together, it will be so easy to simply count your boxes to see how long you could last on stored food. If you decide on a year’s supply of food, you will obviously need 52 boxes. If you are able to fit two weeks’ worth inside one box, then you will only need 26 boxes.
Depending on your family’s needs and your own preferences, you may also need to have supplemental boxes that contain your very basic ingredients, such as flour, sugar, and shortening. This might be because you know your family will not be able to go through a #10 can of sugar in two weeks’ worth of time. Thus, you would have your general meal ingredients in one- or two-week boxes, and maybe have a box of basic ingredients for each month that you choose to store food.
As this is the method that my family is currently working on, you can expect to see even more information for storing food with the pantry-cooking method of food storage. Check back for pantry-cooking recipes, tips, and resources.
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