enough food in advance is practical, too. When news of an emergency such as a hurricane or blizzard is announced, people rush to the store and clean the shelves. If you’re at work or otherwise unable to get to the store, there may be nothing left by the time you get there. If you stock up in advance, you don’t have to worry about any of that, because you’re already prepared.
There are several different ways to build an emergency food supply, including buying canned and dry goods, canning your own food, and dehydrating products. This book will teach you how to stock your pantry using a combination of these methods.
Why Create Home-Prepped Food?
Home canning and dehydrating are great ways to build an emergency food supply with a minimal investment. The best part is that you can prepare your own delicious, nutritious recipes instead of relying on tasteless, chemical-laden, commercially canned foods. It’s also significantly cheaper to can your own foods, after the initial equipment investment.
Two huge advantages to making your own food include the fact that you’ll know every single ingredient that goes into your recipes, and although most commercial products have a two-year marked shelf life, your products will retain their edibility and nutritional value for many years. As a matter of fact, there are documented cases of people eating food 100 years after it was canned. Although certainly not recommended, it goes to show that if you do it right, your food will last.
A Quick Start to Prepping
The following short checklist is to get you thinking about your emergency-preparedness plan. While the focus of this book is preparing stores of food for emergencies, this list will help you with your overall planning. At the back of the book, also see a checklist for a bug-out bag. Bug-out bags, discussed in more detail in Chapter 1, contain small amounts of food and supplies for quick get-aways.
These basic points will help you start building your emergency food supply. The next section focuses on different food-preservation methods and how to properly use each. You’ll also find some great recipes to get you started.
SECTION 1
Preparing Your Supplies and Food Stores
• Chapter 1: Getting Started: Food Prepping 101
• Chapter 2: Deciding How Much Food and Water You’ll Need
• Chapter 3: Water Storage and Purification
1
GETTING STARTED: FOOD PREPPING 101
As already discussed, you may not have access to modern amenities during an emergency, so you’re going to need food that’s been preserved in a manner that doesn’t depend on refrigeration or possibly even cooking. There are several different ways that you can do this, and this chapter previews some of the most popular and successful methods of food preparation and cooking featured throughout this book.
Alternative Cooking Methods
Many of the foods that you’re going to prepare are ready to eat, but if the emergency event extends beyond a day or two, you’ll get pretty tired of cold food. Also, if you’re a coffee drinker or a person who likes to wash in warm water, you’ll probably want to have a heat source handy that doesn’t require electricity. There are several options out there, and all of them have their ups and downs. It is best to have more than one cooking method available, just in case.
Open Wood Fires
Without a doubt, this is the most popular way to cook without power, especially if you need an alternative source of heat for more than a day or two. If you plan to cook over an open fire, you can either use a campfire-type pit or you can build a fire pit that already has racks, a flue, and whatever other accessories you’d like to build into it.
If you decide to cook with wood, you’ll need to have a plentiful stock of dried wood and a way to light it. Wet wood won’t burn and it will create an excessive amount of smoke that can affect the flavor of your food. Also, you can only use it outside, so plan to cook in all weather conditions if this is one of your methods.
Tools that you’ll need:
Wood
Rocks
Rack, tripod, or special cooking rack with legs
Iron skillets, a Dutch oven, iron or copper kettles, or any combination of these
Wooden or metal spoons and spatulas with longer handles
Pot holders or towels to move your cookware
Cast iron or other metal fire poker or wooden stick
Barbecue Grill
You can always use your barbecue grill to cook with. Stock up on charcoal or fuel, and as with an open fire, be prepared to cook in inclement weather. The downside here is that fuel supplies are limited to what you store, although you can always burn wood in it if you run out of charcoal or propane. If you opt to do this, though, make sure you remove the fuel tanks completely prior to building a wood or charcoal fire in your gas grill.
Supplies that you’ll need:
Fire starter if you’re using charcoal or wood
Fuel
Barbecue utensils
Skillets, Dutch ovens, pots, or a combination of these to cook foods that you can’t prepare on the racks
Fireplace or Wood-Burning Stove
The advantages to using your fireplace or wood-burning cookstove as an alternative cooking method are many. The biggest two advantages probably are that you can cook inside in any weather and that as long as you have wood, you have a fuel source. However, if it’s hot outside, your house is going to become really hot from the residual heat. You’ll need the same equipment that you’d need for cooking on a campfire.
Camp Stove
The advantage to using a camp stove is that it’s portable. If you need to leave in a hurry, you have a heat source that you can toss in the car or strap to your bug-out bag without adding much weight. The downsides are that you need fuel for it and you can’t use it indoors.
