Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise
44 minutes ago
Monday, December 3, 2018
Replacing Preps
The best way to keep your food storage fresh is eat from it on a regular basis. That's a good plan for a couple of reasons. Your stock gets rotated over time as you always draw from the older stuff before it expires. Another often overlooked reason is that you actually practice cooking and eating from stored food. There are people who are heavily stocked up with beans and rice, but never eat them in their day to day life. During a disaster you don't want to learn new cooking skills and get used to different foods. You also don't want to discover you've undstocked something critical like hot sauce.
With that in mind I've replaced all the dehydrated foods I field tested during the winter. One addition is instant Mountain House breakfast foods. Those aren't great, but they are edible, quick and have the calories you need. After trying those out, I'm happy there's so much oatmeal in storage as it's a tastier breakfast. Still, nobody wants to eat the same thing all the time.
The problem with eating from your stored food is that you have to remember to restock. At one time I'd thought I'd bought way too much rice. Imagine my surprise the other day when I found myself scraping the bottom of the barrel to find enough rice for dinner. It didn't take me very long after that to buy more. All my beans would be very lonely without any rice.
One of the huge holes in my preps turned out to be medical supplies. My recent problem with leg infections really brought that home. I've had to go to the store to buy bandages a number of times. While I had more than enough for immediate medical needs, supplies for long term care was lacking.
The thing about preps is that you can't stock them up and forget about them. Supplies have to be managed.
-Sixbears
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It also gives you the opportunity to evaluate what preps you have stocked. Food items especially. If you haven't touched them in 6 months or a year (except for seasonal stuff like for the holidays) then it's time to clear them out and stock stuff you do use.
ReplyDeleteI try to rotate my stock, and work hard at making sure old moves to the front, new goes to back. Have even gone so far as to date-mark with magic marker.
Just because I'm mostly broke doesn't mean I have to be stupid about it.
Now, to get some of those mac-and-cheese with the cheese packets rather than dried cheese. Since dried cheese needs butter or other fat source and milk to really make them taste good.
And, yeah, medical supplies. Got a great deal on Band-Aids or so I thought. They were the plastic-y ones that don't hold worth a darned. Have gone back to the 'cloth' band-aids because they actually work.
And I have to have a large stash of other types of bandages due to wife's issues. Heck, after her last operation-induced infection, I have enough gauze and other stuff to last years.
I'm slowly building up my medical stocks again. Even my niece, who lives with us, finally got a decent first aid kit for her car. Of course, I've medical bills to pay down before I can stock up too much.
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