How To Create a Menu For Emergency Food Storage

So you have a bunch of food storage and water…now what? Do you know exactly what you’re going to make with all that food?

Hope you’ve stocked more than just beans and rice, so you have a good variety of food that you can make some tasty meals with.

If you’ve just stocked piled freeze dried food or you’ve made your own dehydrated meals…well then this post may not be for you.

But if you’ve stored a lot of canned foods, rice, beans, pasta, pancake mixes, staples (flour, sugar, etc); then what are you going to actually make with all that food and when do you plan to eat it?

Creating a menu plan will help you understand your food storage a lot better. You’ll be able to clearly see what food is being utilized on what days, how much food you’re going to need and what to actually make from your food storage.

1. Regardless of how much food you have stored at this point in time, you can create a food storage plan for an entire month. It doesn’t matter if you have the food yet or not; get out a white board, piece of paper or word document and start writing down meal ideas for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Make sure to include any water needs as well. For instance, if breakfast will consist of pancakes or oatmeal, those both require a certain amount of water. Include the amount of water needed.
2. Repeat meals as needed. Remember, this is an emergency or disaster, not everyday life. So you will probably be eating the same meals more than once in a week. For instance, for breakfast, I might put down that we’re going to have oatmeal 3 times a week and pancakes the rest of the 4 days. But I will stagger it every other day so that it doesn’t get too boring.
3. Get creative. If you have a can of tuna, rice and some canned vegetables, you can have a pretty stellar meal right there by just combining all those ingredients! Yum! You will have to get creative with some of your meals, but that’s why we’re making a menu right now so that we’re not coming up with stuff on the fly; as well as making sure we have enough food and water.
4. Make sure to include spices, snacks and drinks. Don’t forget to include any needed spices for any particular meals, any snacks and any drink mixes. If you’re going to want to keep your coffee or tea around, make sure to include that in the menu plan, along with the necessary water needed. If you have kids, snacks will definitely be good to have around. There are plenty of nonperishable snacks, especially for kids.
5. If you do have freeze dried or dehydrated meals, mix it in with your canned stuff. One week we might have 5 days worth of canned meals while the other two days are freeze dried or dehydrated meals. Mix it up!

It’s okay to include any necessary dietary needs; this is YOUR food storage! Make it however YOU see fit, not what the internet tells you you need to store and make.

I also have this great eBook that offers some great food storage recipes. It’s written by a friend and I love it. I’ve made some great meals from it from my everyday food storage!

I have a video below that talks about all of this in greater detail.

Get creative with your food storage and menu plan so that you know exactly what and how much food and water to store for the whole family.

Conquer tomorrow, by preparing today!