A month of food storage

Ah, February.  I am so glad that you are over.  I think I have cried more this month than in any other month of my life.  But I digress . . . one of the things that we accomplished this month was living completely on food storage.  It was a success!  Here are some things that we learned:

• We had WAY more food than we thought we needed.  I guess that is better than having less!  But we definitely made it through the month without starving.  :)
• We like having meals in the freezer to just warm up and serve.  Pizzas are a BAD idea for a freezer meal.  Don't do it!  But we are having chicken enchiladas from the freezer tonight, which is great, because Chris just made twice what we wanted and we froze half of them.
• I think the only thing that we really ran out of was ketchup.  I found this recipe on how to make ketchup.  Chris liked the homemade ketchup.  I didn't.
• We didn't buy enough ice cream before we started.  We are excited to have ice cream again.
• We are excited to have ice cream and fresh produce again!  I seriously cannot wait!
• Something I learned about myself: I have never been a huge fan of vegetables.  Ask my family.  But I am much more likely to eat FRESH vegetables than frozen vegetables.  Chris ate the frozen ones, basically every day, and was fine.  But I am not that good at having frozen ones, unless I make myself do it!
• Leftovers are our friends!  Seriously, we rarely had sandwiches for lunch because we had so many leftovers.

Food Storage!

So, as I said in the last post, we got our shelves in our food storage room put up.  This was very exciting for us, because we got to actually look at what we have as far as food storage.  So, we assessed what we had, and what we needed, and went to the cannery to get some more stuff.  Holy smokes!  It is so fun to go to a cannery!  We bought a lot of stuff that we didn't even know that we needed!  We also rented a canner, and canned our own rice and flour today.  So now we are set!
Chris looked at the food and said that we should make it our personal challenge to not buy any food in February. We are making it our personal goal to not go to the store for anything besides milk or eggs during the entire month of February.  This is going to be a test of our food storage, and of our freezer meal making skills. (I have never tried it before.  Wish me luck!)  So here we go for an adventure!  Here is our menu, very subject to change:
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February Menu

1.     Pepperoni pizza

2.     Penne pasta skillet x2

3.     Grilled chicken and veggies

4.     Potato bar

5.     Breakfast

6.     Italian chicken and potatoes in the crockpot

7.     BBQ chicken pizza*

8.     Curry chicken and rice

9.     Spaghetti and meatballs

10. Tacos

11. Enchiladas*

12. Freezer lasagna*

13. Beef fajitas

14. Chili

15. Pepperoni pizza

16. Grilled chicken and veggies

17. Homemade bread

18. Leftover penne pasta skillet

19. Tater tot casserole*

20. Curry chicken and rice

21. Breakfast

22. BBQ Chicken pizza*

23. Freezer lasagna*

24. Spaghetti

25. Leftovers or breakfast

26. Italian chicken and potatoes in the crockpot

27. Enchiladas*

28. Breakfast

If you want to know more about our church's views about food storage, click here!  Wish us luck!