Goal report #1

So we decided to go 30 days without making any purchases or buying groceries. I thought we should not be allowed to 'plan' for this and thus could not go to the store at all to stock up on anything. I wanted to simulate some sort of disaster or trucking strike where we can't go to the store at all. On the day we decided to do this, we had only one gallon of milk, 6 eggs, and no bread. Those are the staples we usually go to the store for. In way of fruits, we had 2 oranges, 2 bananas, and 1/2 cup leftover strawberries from a tea party. For vegetables we had a bag of carrots, 1/2 bag potatoes, a couple cloves of garlic, and a couple onions. In storage we also have dehydrated carrots, dehydrated apples, dehydrated onions, a variety of frozen vegetables, frozen figs from a friend, and the 'lifetime supply' of mashed bananas we froze earlier this year.

(For those of you who hadn't read that earlier post, we were given 400 POUNDS of bananas by a friend. I would rather use them than throw them away, so we froze them for banana breads. I didn't know that an entire batch of banana bread only takes ONE CUP of mashed bananas. Result? A freezer full of bananas, and friends who are sent home with bags of bananas whenever they visit.)

Other than this, we have our long-term food storage and canned goods stored away. I have always shopped in bulk, so we have several 5-gallon buckets filled with sugar, flour, beans, dried corn, farina, oats, dry milk, popcorn seeds, Ezekial mix, lentils, and rice. I think we'll be fine working with those basics. I'm excited to see what we learn, especially regarding which food items or miscellaneous supplies we wished we had more of.

I thought it might be interesting to give updates every so often regarding what we are eating or learning. The first week won't be too unusual, since we still have most of the food items everyone else has in their pantry. Nevertheless, here is our menu the past few days.
Day 1- Raisin Bran cereal, milk, toast
           Shepard's Pie, 'leftover' night, Monkey bread for Family Home Evening
Day 2-Steel-cut oats with chopped strawberries
           homemade meatloaf, cooked carrots, cornbread stuffing, jello and whipped cream
Day 3- Steel-cut oats with chopped apple
         Potato and Carrot Chowder with bacon, homemade bread, the rest of the jello
Day 4- Steel-cut oats with chopped strawberries
        Meaty chili with corn, beef, green peppers (frosen from our garden last year), and beans; cornbread
        (I made a triple batch of cornbread this morning so I could freeze half of it, and I also froze enough chili for another meal. There's a freezer dinner for later in the month when my school tests begin to overwelm me)

One thing I've noticed is this: we have plenty of whole grains on hand, but not much white flour. I don't store much white flour since it's not as nutritious as other grains. HOWEVER, most breads call for some white flour. Whole wheat bread is pretty heavy, so we usually make it half wheat, quarter white flour, quarter oats. Bread is our main staple, so we'll need to stretch our white flour this month and add more of the wheat flour to the regular bread recipe. Also, cornbread calls for half white flour, half cornmeal. We'll need to watch this item as the month goes by.

I also happened to run out of brown sugar the first day. It was one of the bulk items we were getting low on and hadn't restocked yet. Luckily we have some dark corn syrup I can mix with white sugar if we really need to the brown sugar.

We had a very lucky stroke of luck this week: our young pullets started laying eggs! We'll have a steady supply of eggs now. It's funny to me that the timing worked out so perfectly. One of the reasons we raise chickens is so we could have eggs in an emergency (but mostly it was to boycott commercial egg-production and animal cruelty). Eggs would have been the hardest thing to cook without, so I'm very thankful they started laying.

Dry milk is not anyone's favorite, but I've found that adding a drop of vanilla helps the flavor a lot. It also really helps if I make the milk the night before we plan to use it, that way the flavor can mellow out in the fridge.

So far, so good. I'm not expecting it to get tricky for at least another week or two. The end of the  month will be the most adventurous, I'm sure.