Tuesday, August 10, 2010

An End To A Challenge

Well, we are ready to wrap up this challenge. We are not quite past the 4 week mark, but we've had a couple of cheat days (lunch with grandma and dinner out after Dave's wedding) so now it's hard to keep the momentum going. I think we have done awesome! There hasn't been any complaining and we've figured a few things out:
1. Powdered eggs are very necessary.
2. Cheese is a pain, learn to live without or do cheese sauce. A #10 can is pretty inexpensive but I always wonder what to do with it all once it's open. Ragu does make a small jar- I'm just a cheap skate. I hate to pay a $1 a jar. None of this solves my problem for pizza though. I guess I'll keep experimenting or we'll learn to do without mozzarella.
3. 1 mylar bag of hard red wheat from the cannery makes 10 loaves of bread using my favorite recipe. I'm lazy so I usually just buy my wheat flour already ground and keep my wheat in storage. Yeah, not going to do that anymore. We ran out a few days ago and so we had to grind. We don't have an electric grinder so we got out the manual one. The kids had a blast taking turns and Steve helped a lot too. The bread tasted so much better than usual and I'm sure had more nutrients than the processed flour. Anyway, it was nice to have a gauge on how much we could make with 1 bag. It gave me an idea of how much wheat we really need for what we make.
4. We need lots more powdered milk. I was surprised that we are going through about a can if not more a week. I only had a couple of months worth on the shelf so I will definitely be stalking up. It's pretty cheap at the cannery right now ($7 something a can) so it's a good investment and has a long shelf life.
5. Every food storage needs Cap'n Crunch and Cool Ranch Doritos. I always thought these were just luxury items, but when you have a crisis or a big change it's nice to have something familiar and something you enjoy, especially for your kids who may not understand what's going on.
6. A garden is a life saver. I don't know what we would have done without fresh veggies. I just wish we would have kept lettuce growing in pots in the shade. We really missed our daily green salad with dinner.
7. Eating from your food storage is a lot of work. We loved trying new recipes but it took so much time to prepare everything. It took me all day to make 10 loaves of bread! I am so grateful for my modern appliances. Even though it took all day to make bread, I used my Kitchenaid, nice bread pans, and oven. I can't even imagine all that kneading!

Anyway, I could probably go on and on all day with what we've learned. Most importantly we learned that we can do it and that we can do it cheerfully. Now I'm off to the store to buy some lettuce for the BIGGEST salad ever!

1 comment:

Diana said...

Congratulations! I am impressed you finished your challenge. I even talked about you to my co-workers. :)

How about I just learn from your lessons though? I believe I don't possibly have enough time to learn every lesson in life first hand. ;)