So you've started stockpiling food - grains, beans, water, salt and
other items. But have you planned meals? It doesn't do much good to
simply store foods when you don't have a plan for cooking and eating.
What if I store lots of flour but then realized that I haven't thought
much about what to do with that flour. I've got beans but nothing to put
with them. Or I've got a food item that I could cook with electricity
but it never occurred to me to figure out how or if I could cook it
during a crisis when power may be out. What if I want to make tortillas
and suddenly realize I haven't got an ingredient I need.
That's why we have a meal plan. My wife has planned meals for every day
of the aftermath of any catastrophic incident (flood, earthquake, viral
outbreak, EMP, tornado, ice storms, economic collapse, etc)
Planning what we will eat every day for breakfast, lunch, supper and
snacks allows us to buy exactly what we need to prepare those meals.
Here is my wife's plan, but the quantities will vary depending how many
of our community make it to our agreed-on safety place, and how much
food we have managed to store there ahead of time.
The list below has quantities for one adult assuming we are rationing
food, and that most of our canned goods are gone. It is our basic meal
plan which we hope to supplement either with larger quantities or other
nutritious foods:
Our Basic Weekly Meals
 |
| Basic Food Needs |
Breakfast: 1 c. oatmeal, 1/2 tsp. honey, 1 slice irish soda bread, 1 cup of tea or coffee
Snack: 1 c. corn mush, 1/2 tsp. honey
Lunch: 1 cup soup broth with pasta and some dehydrated vegetables or fresh vegetables if available, 1 cornmeal dumpling
Snack: 1 c. corn mush, 1/2 tsp honey, 1 cup pine needle tea
Supper: 1 c. beans, 1 c. rice, 3 tortillas
This provides approximately 2300 calories per person per day. My wife is
in charge of making sure we all purchase enough of each ingredient to
make these foods.
Pine Needle tea will be available throughout each day in unlimited
quantities as it prevents scurvy and is an excellent source of Vitamin
C.
We also have planned special meals and treats. This will provide some
variety in tastes and also be a small morale booster. It is important to
plan and store such food items.
 |
| Basic with Kraft Dinner added |
 |
| Lots of extras added here! Canned peaches, carrots, and more |
Our Special Meals:
1 night each week will be Kraft Dinner. We buy it on sale when it's 33cents per box.
1 night each month will be tuna with pasta for a tuna casserole (while our cans of tuna last)
1 night each month will be rice cooked in broth (a flavoured bouillon
cube) with some of the dried vegetables my wife has been making with her
dehydrator
1 night each week there will be a dessert of some kind
Friday night special: this will be a shot of liquor for each adult and chocolate milk for the children (using powdered milk)
Sunday afternoon will incorporate a short break time with one candy per person and some games or reading time.
Depending on the time of year we hope to be able to add apples from
trees, rhubarb, fruit from wild bushes and vegetables from the gardens
to supplement our diet.
We will also add foods found in the wild and any animals we can hunt or
fish we can catch. And of course we have to have a method of cooking
these foods for a large group. I'll talk more about that in another blog
post.
WHO (World Health Organization) tell it like it is 
