Category Archives: Food for Storage

Happy Customers, Prepared for Life

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It’s always exciting to receive customer feedback, especially when it’s customer feedback that confirms everything we’ve been saying about PrepareWise’s superiority to other emergency food for so long. Admittedly, we are a little biased. But you, as people simply trying to find the best quality and value in emergency food, are pretty fair-minded. So when you tell us our product is good, it has to be true.

Here is some feedback we received recently from Mark, an experienced prepper and happy buyer of PrepareWise emergency foods:

 

We received our PrepareWise food order on Monday morning. The shipping was free and the delivery time faster than several other vendors we have used in the past. We decided to try it right away for lunch because our morning was full of work.

As we began to prepare lunch, we looked at the buckets and realized several very innovative features: the bucket tops are designed to mate with the bottom of other buckets, creating a more stable stack, and the lids do not come off all the way, creating a better seal and no chance for damaging or misplacing the lid. All the foods are immaculately packaged in thick mylar, contain oxygen absorbers, and are vacuum-sealed.

The ingredients are clearly listed on each package, and to our amazement we can pronounce the names of all the ingredients. We have yet to find a label with an artificial or unhealthy ingredient.

Preparation was easy: Bring water to a boil, pour in food, and cook for 15-18 minutes, stirring occasionally.

We tried the fettuccini alfredo. I can tell you that I have had several other competing brands’ fettuccini alfredo and was sorely disappointed. Frankly, yours was delicious. We are now trying to unload some of the other companies’ food so we can buy more PrepareWise. My children, mother-in-law, and wife all commented on the deep flavor and great seasoning. We tried it plain without the addition of any seasoning or meat and it was great. My eight-year-old son suggested that we add chicken so we opened a can of white chicken meat, and it was filling and delicious. It was one of the quietest lunches we have ever had. The kids were too busy eating to talk. We liked it so much we had dinner last night and breakfast this morning from our PrepareWise foods inventory. We want to eat the food now so when we have no choice later it is familiar and expected.

Thanks for developing a relationship with Legacy Foods. We have already told several friends about the food and will be purchasing more next month. Not only is the food delicious, but PrepareWise is the best value for the dollar I have found the past five years of prepping.

Thanks,

Mark and the LoneStar Posse

Thank you, Mark, for the thumbs-up. We work hard to offer the highest quality ingredients and create the best-tasting emergency food available. We also think it’s vital that food storage be easy to prepare and convenient to store. It validates everything we do here when we hear from customers that we are fulfilling our mission and helping you in your efforts to provide well for your family.

We can talk forever about PrepareWise food storage and tout its superiority, but it’s never going to mean the same thing to you as when you hear it from a fellow customer.  Trust Mark—Once you try it, you’re going to have a hard time saving it for later.

Harvest Season-Stewed Tomatoes as a Base for Many Recipes

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Canning stewed tomatoes is a simple procedure. The recipe involves very few ingredients and once you have canned a few batches, it is a quick and easy canning process. These tomatoes are a great item to have in your long term food storage. They can be used during the year for a large variety of recipes and replenished during the next tomato harvest.

When I moved out on my own for the first time my mother helped to stock my kitchen, as many parents do when their kids “leave the nest.” She filled an entire shelf with stewed tomatoes. Not planning on cooking large meals or cooking often while in college, I admit I rolled my eyes at the huge quantity of red tomatoes taking up so much room in my little pantry. But, they really came in handy during the year. When my roommates ate cold cereal for dinner, I ate pastas with marinara or spaghetti meat sauce made with my stewed tomatoes.

I still love using the stewed tomatoes in many of my recipes. While I do make the occasional simple marinara using the tomatoes, I now often use them for a greater variety of recipes. In the summer, I make a relish with the tomatoes and grilled peppers and onions to spoon on top of grilled sausages. I also use them for a base for a spicy gazpacho. In the cooler months, there is nothing quite like chili made with a base garden fresh stewed tomatoes. The tomatoes bring a sweet and delicious flavor that you just can’t get out of store-bought canned chili.

Stewed tomatoes are one of the more versatile items to have in your long term food storage. There are just so many recipes that call for tomatoes. Once you have used canned stewed tomatoes and tasted the difference between store-bought varieties, it is hard to go back. This is why I have to buy bushels of tomatoes from the farmers market in the late summer to be sure that I have enough cans to cook with and still have some left in my food storage before the next harvest. What are your favorite recipes to use stewed tomatoes in?

Canning for Your Long Term Food Storage

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Canning is the process of sealing food in glass jars using heat and pressure by boiling in water or using a pressure canner. Canned foods are great products to add to your long term food storage because they can last up to five years on the shelf if properly processed and stored. It is also an inexpensive way to increase your food supply.

Vegetables that work well for canning include green beans, squash, corn, and carrots. Some good fruits to can would be apples, pears, peaches, tomatoes and even watermelon rinds. Tuna, salmon, beef, chicken and game animals are popular meats to preserve. Canning bad food will not make it good. Use fresh, organic produce and meat. You can store the food in its pure state, or you can make juices, sauces, filling, spiced and pickled items. Search for recipes that sound good to you, and don’t be afraid to experiment with flavors.

Starting to can and preserve your own food can seem daunting, but if you are able to follow a recipe, you can can! The advantage of doing it yourself is that you know what is in it and you know it tastes the way you like it. And with the harvest season upon us, now is the perfect time to get started. Produce is available in abundance and is at the peak of ripeness.

Contact your local agricultural university’s extension service to find classes on canning near you. There is usually a nominal fee of fewer than twenty dollars plus supplies for the class and you will walk away with some canned items in hand. The class will teach you the latest proven techniques for canning properly and introduce you to good resources for recipes. There are also many books written on the subject of canning, for instance, “So Easy to Preserve” produced by the University of Georgia. This book is well received in the canning community and considered a reliable source of reference.

A popular saying among food preservers says “Cooking is an art, canning is a science.” Following the recipe is crucial to your safety. Times and temperatures are very important. Make sure that the recipes you use have been tested and are USDA approved for canning. The jars should be completely sealed and airtight to prevent harmful bacteria from growing. Follow the precautions and you will have quality, delicious food to add to your long term food storage.

-Gary Jenkins-

Gary Jenkins is a father and husband living in Oregon who is a wildlife rehabilitation and outdoor adventure enthusiast.

Prepping Your Garden for Next Spring with Compost

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Gardening can help to build food storage. Canning and dehydrating your own garden items will help you to expand your food storage items with home grown items. The health of your garden will greatly affect the amount and the quality of your garden harvest.

Without the proper preparation in the fall your garden may suffer the following growing season. After you have harvested your garden it is crucial to begin to create a proper soil environment for the next year. Manure and composting are very important for creating a nutrient rich soil that will help your garden to thrive.

If you have a large garden area you may want to begin by tilling and feeding the soil in areas as the harvest allows. If your garden is the smaller variety, it may be easier to do this all at once. But, keep in mind that various types of manure and compost will work better for different types of crops and vegetables or fruits.

Manure is very efficient fertilizer and can help create a healthy soil. Cow manure is one of the most popular manures to use because it can be purchased in bags at most garden and hardware stores. Horse manure is a close second that can purchased from local ranches. Unless you are more advanced in your soil and fertilizer knowledge, abstain from using foul fertilizer that must be aged for quite some time before it is useful. Keep in mind that wet fertilizer will have a pungent odor, but is much easier to work with.

A green crop can be created by reworking items that have not had time to seed back into the soil. This can be done easily and will help to improve soil quality where it is lacking. It will help to break up solid or clay ridden soil, add nitrogen back into the soil and keep the soil moist. If this is done before the weather is overly chilly, the process will work throughout the soil in the winter, exposing a revitalized soil next spring.  You can also use manure in this process to allow for a warmer compost. Other garden foods that have become overripe before you were able to use them for food storage can be added to the mixture as well.

If you have issues with a particular crop it is always helpful to speak with a local green house. They can offer support and knowledge of the local soil. Also, they may be able to tell you if you need something special in your area for a particular crop. For instance, in the western U.S. it is difficult to get blueberries to grow in our soil. It is simply not acidic enough. A seasoned green house owner helped me to create a blueberry-friendly soil environment in a porch pot that works well. Your specific type of soil and soil needs will vary on the crops that you grow and the region that you live in. This may effect how you prepare your soil for the spring.

Food Storage Cookbook Review

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As a mother of seven, Peggy Layton seems to know a thing or two about getting creative in the kitchen by taking a hands on approach when it comes to cooking. She’s also come to figure out that there are a lot of ways people can use their food storage to make delicious, everyday meals that the entire family will love to eat. With nine mouths in the house to feed, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Since she is a resourceful mother of so many kids it is assumed in her book Cookin’ With Food Storage that the reader is already a decent cook, and that’s an important thing to keep in mind while considering the purchase of this book. Peggy Layton assumes you’ve got a little talent in the kitchen—and if you don’t, this book might not be the best choice for an amateur cook.

With that said, what you will find inside are creative recipes for everything from Chicken and Dumplings to Snickerdoodle cookies, and this recipe book explores a realistic approach to utilizing both fresh and freeze dried food long term food storage ingredients. If you have storage buckets of whole wheat and cans of powdered eggs then this is a great guide for learning how to use them.

There’s also a section that covers supposed recipes passed down from Pioneers who made the trek to Utah over a century ago, as well as some suggestions on preparing and consuming things you’d never consider eating unless you were in serious trouble. You know, things like squirrels and rabbits. Fairly entertaining to say the least.

The Bad:

It’s pretty remarkable that a book can be so well received and have so many editorial mistakes. In fact, there’s a chance this book wasn’t really edited at all. Grammatical errors, misspelled words and random astrices and other characters abound.

The Bottom Line:

Despite its typographical errors, it is manageable to work around the poorly edited text if you’re a decent cook capable of reading between the [missing] lines. There are really a lot of great ideas in this book that make it a good addition to any cookbook library, especially for the long term food storage proponent.

–Jared Matkin–

Jared Matkin is a Salt Lake City based freelance writer and outdoor enthusiast who is continually on the lookout for innovative and usable products designed to help improve the way we live.

A Misconception About Dry Dog and Cat Food Storage

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We often tend to leave out an important member of the family when we talk about emergency planning and storing freeze dried food for our families. Sorry furry friends, we don’t mean to exclude you, there’s just so much to do to prepare ourselves.

Of course not everyone out there has the tendency to forget about food storage supplies and emergency preparedness kits for our pets. In fact, if you’ve been wondering what you might feed your dog or cat in the event of an emergency then you might be surprised to learn that you can actually buy freeze dried food products for your animal, and there are a lot of sites out there that offer up pet food storage foods and brand reviews.

But if buying freeze dried food for your animal isn’t quite what you have in mind then there are other short term solutions that can be adopted. Of course canned pet food is an easy way to maintain some food storage if you’re careful to watch expiration dates and use the same rules of FIFO that apply to our own food. But storing dry pet food can be a little tricky. Again, it’s important to pay attention to manufacturer suggestions and expiration dates, but in addition, dry dog and cat food is vulnerable to the same deterioration that any food is, and air and water are both contributing factors in spoiling our animal’s food.

So here’s your pet friendly food storage tip. Contrary to popular belief, it is actually better to keep dried food inside the bag rather than dump the contents into a plastic bin. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Remember the scare with BPA in consumer plastic a few years ago? Well remember that when you’re shopping for a container to store your pet’s food in, and good luck finding one that’s BPA free. Chemicals from a plastic bin can seep out of the container and contaminate your animal’s food. Despite its popularity, this is not a good practice for pet food storage.

2. As fats and oils are released naturally from dried food the residue has a tendency to stick to the bottom and sides of a plastic bin, leaving a greasy film that becomes rancid over time. This can increase the potential for bacteria and mold growth, thereby leading to a variety of health risks for your animal. In the end, we’re trying to protect them, not create a whole new emergency.

But don’t throw that container out just yet. Airtight containers are still a good option for helping keep dry food fresh—just put the entire bag into the container rather than dump the kibbles into the bin. Then after every use, try and force as much air out of the bag as possible, use a clip to seal the bag, and then lock down the air tight lid to help keep the food extra fresh.

Food storage for our pets involves a little bit more effort than just having an extra bag of dried food laying around the house. Always be aware of expiration dates and keep wet food in cans as part of your backup plan using the same food storage practices you would use for yourself. Tails everywhere are wagging in approval.

–Jared Matkin–

Jared Matkin is a Salt Lake City based freelance writer and outdoor enthusiast who is continually on the lookout for innovative and usable products designed to help improve the way we live.

Long Term Food Storage Series: Dehydrated (Cherry) Tomatoes

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If you have ever had a “good” cherry tomato season, you have probably been in the same boat that I was in last summer. I had so many cherry tomatoes that I did not know what to do with them. I love, love, love garden fresh tomatoes, but there is only so much bruschetta, tomato sauce and tomato salads that can be eaten in a month. Towards the end of the season I had more than enough canned tomatoes from my large tomato plants for my family and for holiday gifts and still buckets of sweet cherry tomatoes left over.

In the fall it is not uncommon for me to use my dehydrator often to dehydrate apple chips, pear chips and delicious beef or incredibly delicious deer jerky (depending on who in the family was lucky enough to “get a deer” during hunting season). Well, my dehydrator was already out and my buckets of tomatoes were begging to be used. I knew that I could use these in my food storage and when I looked for instructions on how to dehydrate these babies I also found a ton of recipes to use these dehydrated cherry tomatoes in.

Here is how I dehydrated my tomatoes and a simple and yummy tomato paste recipe that you can make with your dehydrated tomatoes.

Dehydrating Cherry Tomatoes

Cut tomatoes in half and place cut side up in dehydrator.

Use a small amount of olive or canola oil drizzle on the tomatoes.

You can use a bit of salt or Italian seasonings if you would like.
Dry the tomatoes until they become leather like, but not hard and brittle.

Store in an airtight container with the rest of your food storage.

Dehydrated Tomatoes for Paste

Simply grind a handful of tomatoes for paste, dilute with warm water. Mix well.

The amount of powder and water will depend on how thick you would like the paste.

This is actually quite advantageous for various recipes because tomato paste bought from the store is just one very thick consistency. If you are adding to a stew you may want the paste to be thinner than if you are adding to a chili. This recipe allows you to do that.

Food Storage Preservation Series: Jams, Jellies and other Fruit Spreads

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I think this post comes at an opportune time for many of you that are planning on creating jams and jellies with ripe fruit. Just this weekend I picked apricots from a local family member’s orchard that were in abundance and starting to fall to the ground. Just one fruit tree often will bare more fruit than can be eaten by one family. In addition to sharing with extended family and neighbors, fruit made into spread is a great addition to long term food storage.

Soft spreads can be summed up into a variety of conserves, preserves, jam, jelly and marmalade. While all of these will be a welcome item to your food storage, there are two that I prefer to always have as part of my long term food storage. I like to always have a jar or two of conserves, usually made with raisins and nuts as well as marmalade, usually made with large fruit chunks. I prefer these because they seem a bit heartier than the average jam or jelly.

Making a fruit spread can be a complicated process for a newbie. If you are a beginner you will need to make sure that you have all of the equipment and ingredients on hand that you will need, as well as easy to follow instructions. The ingredients necessary for these spreads include fruit (of course), acid (such as lemon juice), pectin, sugar and any additional spices a particular recipe calls for. For utensils you will need a food scale, candy thermometer, jelly bag, spice bag, large slotted spoon and a very large saucepan. I would also recommend a detailed instruction manual such as the Ball Blue Book. Ball also has some recipes and canning instructions on their website.

I don’t like to get married to one fruit spread recipe and I love to try new ones every year. It is common for families to have traditional recipes for canning fruit that have been passed down for generations. My all time favorite is my great grandmother’s apple and mint jelly recipe, perfect for summer time snacks on the patio. What is your favorite fruit spread recipe and what do you plan on making this year that will supplement your food storage?