October

Using and Rotating Food Storage Build a Three Month Food Supply Gradually Build a small supply of food that is part of your normal, daily diet. One way to do this is to purchase a few extra items each week to build a one-week supply of food. Then you can gradually increase your supply until it is sufficient for three months. These items should be rotated regularly to avoid spoilage. The Provident Living website suggests the following steps: 1. Decide how much to spend on your food supply each week.
2. Date the food to be shelved when you get home AND update your inventory list so you know what you have and need as you go. 3. Use one or several food rotation methods you like. 4. Make meals several times a week using food from your pantry. Follow these steps as part of a regular routine of planning, grocery shopping, and stocking up on food storage.Why do this? For peace of mind, to save money, and for convenience–you never run out of food in your house because your pantry is well stocked. Think how much better you will feel knowing that if you experienced economic hardship, had to “shelter in place”*, or were caught in a natural disaster situation, your family would have what is needed to survive. Build-up your supply gradually. *Sheltering in place during a pandemic flu means to stay indoors and practice social distancing to avoid infection. 9 Food Rotation and Labeling Ideas Weekly container method This method works well if you organize your food storage with weekly menus. Create as many seven-day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) menu plans of your family’s favorite meals (personally I would use this method only for the dinner meals) as fits your families eating preferences (a minimum of two different menu plans is recommended). Label each different seven-day menu plan with a different letter (A, B, C, etc.). Place all the non-perishable ingredients needed for each one-week menu in a separate container (plastic or cardboard box). Label each container according to the meal it contains (A, B . . .). For a three-month supply, you will need twelve containers – 6 each for each of two different menus (A and B) or four containers each of three different menus (A, B and C). At the beginning of the week, empty the next container in your rotation and place all the food in the pantry closest to your kitchen so you can use it during the week. To rotate your storage, refill that container with the same foods you took out. Don’t forget to date the foods or the container so you know in which order to use each one-week box of food products. Do not include in these containers food items that last a long time after they are opened such as oils, condiments, spices etc. Two Columns Method The idea is to arrange the items to be stored in two columns. Every time you need to remove a product from the shelf, take it from the right (these should be the ones that need to be used first). When the right column is empty, you slide the whole left column to the right, and re-stock on the left. This method is more practical to use when you just have about 20 or less of a certain item(s) you normally store in your pantry. Color sticker method Select colored stickers to represent year or half-year expiration periods (the frequency depends somewhat on the foods you are labeling). Place a sticker on all or some items in your food storage to correspond roughly with when the food items expire or should be used. This provides a quick visual key to how frequently or when foods should be rotated. Personally, I think placing stickers on every single can or box would require purchasing too many stickers to regularly use this method on all the products I store. This method works well for items stored in different areas of the house (under beds, tables etc.) where the expiration date is not easily visible. Place the stickers on an area of the products that can be easily seen. 3×5 Card Method 1. List each item in your food storage on a 3”x5” index card. 2. Place all of the cards alphabetically in an envelope or recipe/index box. 3. Place the envelope or box in your food storage area. 4. Place another envelope or recipe/index box (empty at this point) in your kitchen. 5. Each time you take an item out of your storage area, take its 3”x5” index card from the envelope or box in the food storage area and put it in the envelope or box in your kitchen. 6. When you go to the grocery store take the 3”x5” cards from the box in the kitchen with you (instant shopping list). 7. After you have purchased the items from the 3”x5” cards place the cards back in the envelope or box in your food storage area. Variations ** If you frequent several grocery stores color code your index cards by store. For example, put all items that you purchase at Fred Myer on pink cards,   put all items you purchase at WinCo on green cards, etc. Then when it’s time to go shopping you just need to take the cards that coordinate with the store you are going to. ** If you only shop at one grocery store consider color coding your index cards by department. For example, put soups/canned goods on green cards and put baking foods on pink cards, etc. Then when you are shopping you can find all of the items in each department before moving on to the next department. Sticky Notepad Method This is simple, practical and easy. Place a sticky notepad on the cupboard door, or near the storage shelf where your food storage is kept. Every time you remove an item, write what it is on the notepad. When it is time to prepare the weekly grocery list, tear off the sheet from the pad and stick it on your grocery list or write the item’s name directly on it. Update and Inventory food storage method Be sure to have a place near your pantry, in the kitchen or where it is most convenient for family members to write the items taken out of storage so they can be added to the weekly shopping list. I use a blackboard on the kitchen door. A clipboard with a shopping list can be placed in the kitchen, or stuck on the fridge. Make sure all your family members understand what you want them to do. It is easy to forget to write down the food storage used throughout the week, especially if there are younger children or busy teenagers in the house. You should inventory your three months food supply regularly. “Opened on” method Products that take a longer time to consume should be dated the day they are opened, so you know how long it takes to use them, and how much you need  to purchase for your family for 3+ months. Rubber-band method One practical and easy method I personally like is the rubber-band method. I find this method to work well with items that take longer to use after they are opened such as boxes of  bouillon cubes, vanilla flavoring etc. Your food items should be organized in a row and an rubber-band should be wrapped around the second-to-the-last container in the row. As you use your supply you’ll eventually come to the container with the rubber-band around it then you know its time to buy more. Auto Rotating Shelves Method This method is well known and liked. No detailed explanation is necessary for this method – the new cans go in the back, and the can you need to use is taken out in the front, and the next can will roll down. The shelves are quite costly store bought. A pattern with photos will be available on the blog soon! You need to find the method(s) that work best for you and your family. These ideas have been around for a long time. I have tried most of them and I know others who use them. Do you have a method you like that was not listed in this article?  Leave us a comment to let us know what rotation method you use. Brigitte S. Photos by Brigitte S. Shopping Tip By Brigitte S. Use Seasonal Sales to Save Money and Stock Up on Food Supplies and Other Necessities Seasonal sales are great opportunities for the wise shopper. When you know what sales will occur month by month, you can plan ahead of time what to buy, and how much of your food budget to spend. Use your coupons during these sales to increase your savings. What’s for sale in October? Grocery Sales: Apples, fresh pumpkins, grapes, oranges, sweet potatoes, cranberries, yams. Baking Season begins (stock up on holiday food) Oil (vegetable and others), canned pumpkins, instant mashed potatoes, broth, pudding, stuffing, canned cranberries, marshmallows, ice cream, pie shells, whipped cream, crackers, candy making supplies, nuts, baking chocolate chips, vanilla, sprinkles, fruit cake, candied fruit, frozen pizza, corn syrup, soup mixes, Stove Top, look for great Kraft deals, pet products. Fire Prevention Month: Fire escape ladders, glow sticks, smoke alarms, fire extinguishers… Halloween promotions & fall and winter clothing (winter coats, hosiery…). Closeouts on school supplies and clothes. Daylight Savings time end promotions Alarm clocks, batteries Others Fishing supplies, car care products, crystals, Silver, glassware, new cars, houses, appliances, shoulder season travel bargains.
A Very Inspiring Story Family Life By Laraine T., POE Stake Young Women President In a Woman’s Day, October 2009 article, entitled “Kids, I Shrunk the Honey” Paula Spencer details the consequences of paring our family budgets, from eliminating fast food, designer clothing, cell phone access, cable television, to unnecessary extra-curricular activities. Certainly there is guilt associated with a parent’s desires to cut back. We may be duped into feeling that we are somehow inadequate, that we just don’t love our children enough, that we are not nurturing enough, that we are unwilling to supply them with important “needs”. On the contrary, our children may learn some critical truths in our actions to cut back in our expenses: Maybe, just maybe, they will take better care of their “stuff”. Unfed, the bottomless hunger for immediate gratification might go away. Although reading food labels is healthy, paying attention to other labels is not. Their old “stuff” may get new life or take on new importance. They may finally grasp basic economics: Money grows neither on trees nor in the ATM. They will still get into college—scholarship, employment, savings. Deprivation may ignite that invaluable motivating force called desire/ambition. And perhaps, the most important, but unstated truth that our children will learn is that they are eventually and ultimately responsible for their own care and keeping, that they alone are responsible for the choices made in their lives, from making money for desired privileges/things, to making money for their own college education. Now, there’s a novel, radical idea!
Rotating and Using Your Long-Term Food Storage By Donna W. Sister Julie Beck, the General Relief Society President, asked several bishops what skills the sisters in their wards needed most to be self-reliant. Their answer: living within a budget and cooking. Rotating and using your food storage can help you to be more self-reliant. Why is it important to rotate your food storage? Prevents throwing away unused, expired food, which saves you money. Allows you and your family to get accustomed to eating stored food, essential in effectively dealing with emergency situation. Eating your long-term storage is healthy. Most food storage items are lower in fat and higher in nutrients than most convenience foods. Because these high-fiber food will be upsetting to the digestive system if you suddenly begin to eat them, it is important to start incorporating them into your diet now. By already knowing how to use your food storage, it will help to relieve a lot of stress in times of emergency. If you will eat food storage meals two days out of the week you can have a whole year’s supply rotated in just three and a half years. How can you remember to use your food storage? Keep a permanent marker in the same place where you store your food and then every time you bring home a new package or can of food, just date it. If the item has an expiration date already on it, you might want to circle it. I have also written the date on the item at the time of purchase. Keep small amounts of your food storage in the kitchen. The more you see these items the more often you will use them. Find recipes that sound interesting using food storage items. The Internet is a great resource. Many of the cooking websites allow you to enter either the recipe you are looking for and/or the ingredient(s) you have on hand. I like the websites where users rate the recipe and give comments. My favorite site is allrecipes.com. Also, BYU TV and byubroadcasting.org have a wonderful program called Living Essentials that has many segments on preparedness. Three of them are on rotating and using your long-term storage. You can also print the transcripts. Incorporate food storage items into your favorite recipes. Out of desperation years ago, when all of our children were living at home, and before the popularity of freezer meals, I did something that saved lots of time, money, frustration, and cleanup. With money tight, very few prepared food were purchased. In my planning notebook I made a list of 15 food items to have on hand, all cooked up, refrigerated or frozen, ready to go. Almost all used items from our long-term storage. They are: Boston brown bread Quick bread Whole wheat bread Potatoes – brown and sweet Granola Rice Vanilla pudding Soup Yogurt Sprouts Dry beans, soaked and cooked Salad dressing Powdered milk – chilled Pancake and waffle mix Ground meat gravel (mixed with TVP) As you set up a rotation system, storing and using your food will become second nature to you. You can save money on the things that you purchase because you purchase them on sale. You will also have peace of mind because you will know that you have the supplies that your family needs. And . . . you know how to use them and are using them on a daily basis. Here are two of my favorite recipes using food storage items: 8 Minute Lentil Oat Waffles 2 ¼ cups water 1 cup soaked lentils (can use any legume) 1 ½ cups rolled oats (equals ½ cup dry) 1 Tbsp. oil ½ tsp. salt 1 Tbsp. honey Soak beans as directed, drain, and combine all ingredients in blender. Blend one minute or until light and foamy. Let stand while waffle iron heats up. Batter will thicken slightly. Blend briefly again and bake for 8 minutes. DO NOT OPEN BEFORE TIME IS UP. One 9” serving contains comparable high protein and amino acids as a 3 oz steak. 911 Emergency Dinner - very easy and fast to put together 2 ¼ cups rice 15 oz can of black beans, drained (or equivalent of cooked dry beans) ¼ cup low fat shredded cheddar cheese Salsa Low fat sour cream Cook rice according to directions. On each plate layer rice, black beans, salsa, sour cream and cheese. Microwave. Note: This is especially quick if the beans are precooked and frozen in 1 cup packages, ready for use.
Family Home Evening Idea “Family Home Evening Helps: Scripture Study with Children” by Meredith R. Jack, Ensign, Jan. 2004, pg 69: A few years ago we became concerned that our Primary-age children were not familiar with some of the scripture stories. To help them learn more, our family began to read aloud and discuss stories from Old Testament Stories each Monday night. We also invited family members to illustrate an event from one of the stories. After completing our pictures, we hung them on a wall in our family room to form a general time line. During subsequent family home evenings we played question-and-answer games related to the stories in our pictorial time line. Available online at lds.org, at Church distribution centers, or as selections printed in the Friend magazine, the scripture readers illustrate most of the standard works, making this activity adaptable to your family’s choice of study. Our children have had a stronger foundation for studying and understanding the scriptures as they grow older, after learning the fundamental stories in their youth.

9 Food Rotation and Labeling Ideas

Weekly container method

This method works well if you organize your food storage with weekly menus. Create as many seven-day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) menu plans of your family’s favorite meals (personally I would use this method only for the dinner meals) as fits your families eating preferences (a minimum of two different menu plans is recommended). Label each different seven-day menu plan with a different letter (A, B, C, etc.). Place all the non-perishable ingredients needed for each one-week menu in a separate container (plastic or cardboard box). Label each container according to the meal it contains (A, B . . .). For a three-month supply, you will need six containers each of two different menus (A and B) or four containers each of three different menus (A, B and C). At the beginning of the week, empty the next container in your rotation and place all the food in the pantry closest to your kitchen so you can use it during the week. To rotate your storage, refill that container with the same foods you took out. Don’t forget to date the foods or the container so you know in which order to use each one-week box of food products. Do not include in these containers food items that last a long time after they are opened such as oils, condiments, spices etc.

Two Columns Method

The idea is to arrange the items to be stored in two columns. Every time you need to remove a product from the shelf, take it from the right (these should be the ones that need to be used first). When the right column is empty, you slide the whole left column to the left. This method is more practical to use when you just have about 20 or less of a certain item(s) you normally store in your pantry.

Color sticker method

Select colored stickers to represent year or half-year expiration periods (the frequency depends somewhat on the foods you are labeling). Place a sticker on all or some items in your food storage to correspond roughly with when the food items expire or should be used. This provides a quick visual key to how frequently or when foods should be rotated. Personally, I think placing stickers on every single can or box would require purchasing too many stickers to regularly use this method on all the products I store. This method works well for items stored in different areas of the house (under beds, tables etc.) where the expiration date is not easily visible. Place the stickers on an area of the products that can be easily seen.

3×5 Card Method

1. List each item in your food storage on a 3”x5” index card.
2. Place all of the cards alphabetically in an envelope or recipe/index box.
3. Place the envelope or box in your food storage area.
4. Place another envelope or recipe/index box (empty at this point) in your kitchen.
5. Each time you take an item out of your storage area, take its 3”x5” index card from the envelope or box in the food storage area and put it in the envelope or box in your kitchen.
6. When you go to the grocery store take the 3”x5” cards from the box in the kitchen with you (instant shopping list).
7. After you have purchased the items from the 3”x5” cards place the cards back in the envelope or box in your food storage area.

Variations

** If you frequent several grocery stores color code your index cards by store. For example, put all items that you purchase at Fred Myer on pink cards,   put all items you purchase at WinCo on green cards, etc. Then when it’s time to go shopping you just need to take the cards that coordinate with the store you are going to.
** If you only shop at one grocery store consider color coding your index cards by department. For example, put soups/canned goods on green cards and put baking foods on pink cards, etc. Then when you are shopping you can find all of the items in each department before moving on to the next department.

Sticky Notepad Method

This is simple, practical and easy. Place a sticky notepad on the cupboard door, or near the storage shelf where your food storage is kept. Every time you remove an item, write what it is on the notepad. When it is time to prepare the weekly grocery list, tear off the sheet from the pad and stick it on your grocery list or write the item’s name directly on it.

Update and Inventory food storage method

Be sure to have a place near your pantry, in the kitchen or where it is most convenient for family members to write the items taken out of storage so they can be added to the weekly shopping list. I use a blackboard on the kitchen door. A clipboard with a shopping list can be placed in the kitchen, or stuck on the fridge. Make sure all your family members understand what you want them to do. It is easy to forget to write down the food storage used throughout the week, especially if there are younger children or busy teenagers in the house. You should inventory your three months food supply regularly.

“Opened on” method

Products that take a longer time to consume should be dated the day they are opened, so you know how long it takes to use them, and how much you need  to purchase for your family for 3+ months.

Rubber-band method

One practical and easy method I personally like is the rubber-band method. I find this method to work well with items that take longer to use after they are opened such as boxes of  bouillon cubes, vanilla flavoring etc. Your food items should be organized in a row and an rubber-band should be wrapped around the second-to-the-last container in the row. As you use your supply you’ll eventually come to the container with the rubber-band around it then you know its time to buy more.

Auto Rotating Shelves Method

This method is well known and liked. No detailed explanation is necessary for this method – the new cans go in the back, and the can you need to use is taken out in the front, and the next can will roll down. The shelves are quite costly store bought.

A pattern with photos will be available on the blog soon!

You need to find the method(s) that work best for you and your family. These ideas have been around for a long time. I have tried most of them and I know others who use them. Do you have a method you like that was not listed in this article?  Leave us a comment to let us know what rotation method you use.

Brigitte S.

Photos by Brigitte S.