Snow Day

It's a snow day here at our place. We got about 2 1/2 feet yesterday and my car has become buried. That's ok though, because I don't trust it in the snow anyway.

So I decided to go through our food. I pulled out every unopened item from the storage room and the pantry and went through it all.

I really thought we had a lot more than this, but that's everything folks! and after writing EVERYTHING down, I decided we probably have at least a three months supply of food that we could live off of. Which is reassuring to me.

As I've mentioned before, I'm LDS. My church leaders council us to have a years supply of food storage. at minimum, a three-month supply I believe. I understand for some people a years supply just isn't possible. It's really not possible for us either, as we live in a basement apartment, and don't have much storage space. But it's important for our family to follow the council of our leaders and obey.

So I wanted to know where we stood, since it's a new year, and I have resolutions for our family to have a food supply that we can live off of. I don't have a food storage of items our family won't eat, because it won't do us any good. For example: we don't eat hardly ANY beans, lentils are as close as we get, and sometimes refried beans. But pasta. . .wow, we eat that all the time! so have about 40-50 lbs of pasta right now. I don't know how long that will last us, but I think it'll take us at least 3 months to finish it off, if we ate it every day.

and now that I've written everything down, I know exactly what we have, and I can plan meals from our pantry. That will help cut down our food budget, and I can put the money somewhere else it's needed.

Happy snow day everyone! :)

creating my space

I realized I'm already getting ahead of myself. I need to create a space for my food storage, which is difficult because we're living in my in-laws basement! so we have to be creative. there is a storage room in the basement, but it needs some serious cleaning out first.

This is our storage room:

Those top two shelves are ours. Not too much space eh?
The bottom shelves are my in-laws. As you can see, they've got a rotating system going on with their cans right there. they take the front can, and every time they buy a new one, it goes in the back. A whole lot cheaper than a cansolidator! (although I still want one, and some day will have a HUGE one)
this is the hallway back to the other storage room. Those shelves we just looked at? They're on the left side of the photo. Imagine the shelf space that could be created if all that stuff was moved, or at least cleaned up!
This is the back storage room. Pretty much it's full of random stuff. A lot of canning jars, from back when my mother-in-law would can stuff. There's actually still a lot of jam she had canned. Good thing that stuff can last forever!

They also have a little bit of their own food storage. Those big number 10 cans have a bunch of stuff in them.

anyway, my goal for tomorrow, while Captain Jax is off of work, is to get this room a little more picked up!! if we consolidate everything into it's own place, I can get some space in there. And I can use the empty canning jars to can some fresh fruit this summer. Yum!