Sunny 9 for 2008 March 20 (entry 0)

(1) Thu Mar 20 2008 15:37 Divorce Inheritance: I guess one good thing that came out of my parents getting divorced was the free stuff we got as a result. Having a family of 7 kids, and being good Mormons that my parents were, you can imagine the food storage stash. But when my mom moved with the rest of the kids at home, from the house of my youth back to the house of my childhood they were renting out and reclaimed, she did not have room for boxes and boxes of #10 cans. That's when I got about 10 boxes of 6 cans each. "Hey kids, were getting divorced but here's some free furniture and food storage."

The flour and sugar cans went first, but not fast. It took me a few months to even realize they were in there. Then it was the cornmeal. (I have a killer cornbread recipe, just ask Aaron.) Nowadays, I am looking around my house trying to do some spring cleaning and organizing and decluttering, and combining and consolidating...you get the picture. If you know me, you know how I love to use up and throw away stuff. At first I wanted to save my food storage if you will, in case I needed it for whatever natural disaster or faminine, but I recently realized that this stuff was canned in 1999. We are coming up on a 10 yr self life so far. My thinking now is I better use this stuff before it has to get chucked.

So I looked through our food storage boxes to see what might be useful. A few things surprisingly...oatmeal, lots and lots of oatmeal. So I have been eating it a lot for breakfast. Also, dried apples. I put them in my oatmeal and they are quite tasty. I opened up some dried carrots. They kinda make your pantry smell, but they go well in pastas and such. Soup mix is on the list to test out. It looks alright, but I am not a soup person so this will have to wait when I have no food in the house and I need to go to the grocery store since I put it off as long as I can. Powdered milk. I hate powdered milk. But it is wonderful because Gunnar doesn't know the difference. He likes it, so he gets it when I need more milk or every so often just for fun. I have enough beans to sink a ship. I am no good at cooking old beans, they always turn out crunchy it seems no matter how long I soak them or cook them. I just made some last week into bbq baked beans and they tasted great, but the texture was, well, crunchy a little. Brand new beans from the store I am better at, but it isn't the same as canned beans.

So it's kinda nice having this extra food around. I am glad it is being put to good use and that I won't have to move it in a year.

Comments:

Posted by Susie at Fri Mar 21 2008 11:17

I love using stuff up too, but I'm getting equally excited about building my food storage (working on our 3 month supply, although we have a few cans of rice and flour).
Check out this study the church (BYU) did - that stuff lasts way longer than they thought it did: http://providentliving.org/content/display/0,11666,7797-1-4222-1,00.html