Food Storage Made of the Meals YOUR Family Loves

Hello and thank you for purchasing food storage made from the meals your

your family loves. When I came across this ebook by Leanne and Donahue, I

really loved the concept. I went all the way through it. I thought it was fantastic

And so I reached out to Leanne and I thought this is something that would be perfect

for the Pandit Preparedness audience, but I wanted to take it a step further and

create a really helpful tool because this methodology does require a fair bit of math. In

In fact, any sort of custom food storage plan is going to require you to do a lot of planning

and a lot of math. And I haven't found an approach that I like better than this one, but I wanted to save

you a little bit of trouble of the math. I'm a math guy. I like math and even I don't want to spend hours writing out equations by hand, totaling

things up, getting out a calculator. That's kind of fun sometimes, but I'm more of a spreadsheets kind of math guy, so I decided

to make you a pretty cool tool. what we're going to do is we're going to walk through how to use this tool. Now if you

haven't read through the ebook yet, I encourage you to read through that first. It's

going to walk you through the process of how to do it on paper, but it's also going to

walk you through a lot of the principles behind this methodology of food storage. I

find it to be a really useful method because first of all, we're only going to be storing the foods that our family actually eats. And what that means is it's really

easy to rotate through these ingredients and keep an active food storage

which saves you loads of money. Why is that? Because we don't have to buy a whole bunch of food

storage that's meant to be able to last for 20 years when it's the kinds of foods that we're

just going to rotate through. All we have to do is plan ahead enough to know how much to have on

a hand. So, we use the oldest stuff first and when we use it, we replace it when we go to the

grocery store just like normal. The other thing that we're going to do in this video is throughout

I'm going to share some important principles of food storage as they apply to this tool

that I think are going to really help you be as successful as possible as you plan for your family's food storage needs

The first step you're actually going to need to take to be able to use this calculator is to create your own copy of it

That's because we're all using the same file. So when you open the file, if I left it available for you to go ahead and just edit here

then next time somebody comes here to check this out for the first time, it will have all of your information in it

So what you do is you go to file and you click make a copy

In doing that, it's going to create a copy of this on your own Google Drive

If you don't have Google Drive, another option you can do is you can download this

and you can download it as an Excel spreadsheet. And that'll also work just fine as long as you have a program that can read and edit Excel spreadsheets

So once you've made your copy, then go ahead and open up that version of it and I'll show you

how to use the rest of it. We need to pick out recipes. These should be recipes for foods that our family either already eats or that we can start

incorporating into our regular eating. That way, if the time comes that we need to start using

this food storage for an emergency purpose, we are eating foods that our family enjoys and

we're not kind of stuck just eating the same food every single day. Now, we've simplified our food

storage plan over what we eat in the day to day by planning for specifically seven individual

meals so that we only have to repeat the foods we eat about once a week. I find that to be really

practical. It doesn't make sense to store ingredients to be able to make literally anything. So we need

to kind of whittle down the meals that we like to eat and kind of narrow them down to the

specific ones we want to include for our food storage plan. One thing I want you to keep in mind

is think about the kinds of ingredients that are easiest for you to store in your specific

I have three full-size freezers in my garage, so I can store a fair amount of things like meat

I can store frozen vegetables, but we have to consider the possibility what happens if we lose power for a long-term situation

Another thing I want you to keep in mind is the kinds of emergencies where you're most likely to need your food storage

While it is possible that we have a calamity that knocks out power for months on end, that's not the most likely scenario

The longest that I've been without power in our modern society in a pretty rural town was only about 14 days

And that actually wasn't me, that was friends of ours who lived down the road. We managed to get it back in about a day and a half after a major storm

For most of us, we're not going to be out of power for a super long period of time

That said, if you lose power for 14 days, the food in your freezer might not be good anymore at that point

So, relying on a whole bunch of frozen food is maybe not a great idea. So I'm not going to plan a lot of foods that are going to require me to have a lot of frozen ingredients

So let's go ahead and pick out a couple of recipes. Now, I'm fortunate in this case that I happen to have my family cookbook with literally over a thousand recipes in it

These are the recipes we use every day and I have it in a digital format

So it makes it a little easier for me to kind of copy and paste. One of the meals are I would say this is probably going to fit under either a snack or maybe a dessert

I'm going to put it under snack. This is one that I can easily provide for on a regular basis, and it's a zucchini bread

Let's take a quick look at these ingredients and see how these stack up. We're going to need flour, easy dry ingredient, something we can easily store for pretty long term

Salt, basically doesn't go bad. Baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon. I'm going to skip eggs

We'll come back to that in a second. Vegetable oil, I can store a lot of vanilla. I have a lot of white sugar

And then grated zucchini. Now, zucchini right now I store in my freezer

But what I could do is I could dry it out and I could store it in mylar bags with an oxygen absorber or I could take it a step further and I could freeze dry it For that I would need a freeze dryer which I don currently have But you can often use somebody else freeze dryer if they have one and just rent the time on it

It makes it a really good opportunity for them to earn back a little bit of the cost of their freeze dryer

and it saves you the cost of needing to go buy one for yourself. The other one I have here, I mentioned eggs

Now, I do have quite a few eggs stored, but not enough to last, like

for a whole year of use. However, I have chickens. And because I have chickens, I have a regular

supply of eggs. I get two to three a day just from three chickens. And that's kind of the year

round average. So that includes even the molting season. Also, when we aren't using that many

eggs, I'm regularly waterglassing them. And when we water glass, they can last easily up to a

year. So I have some stored and others that I'll be able to get kind of on a recurring basis. Also, I

have room in my chicken coop that I could easily add probably three more chickens if I really

needed to. And I have access to a lot of chickens. If I needed more, I have a family member who

literally raises chickens. She doesn't even know how many she has at this current point because

there's new ones hatching on a fairly regular basis. So for me, access to eggs is not that big of

a problem. However, there are a lot of alternatives. There are freeze dried, you know, powdered egg

substitutes that will work in a lot of different recipes. Just make sure, though, that if you're

going to have a year supply of powdered eggs, that that's something that you can stomach going through

on a regular basis. Otherwise, it's just going to sit in your food storage and go bad. There's a

couple more tips for you. We haven't even gotten to putting one of these into the calculator

so let's go ahead and do that now. I'm actually going to go ahead and grab these instructions

I know these instructions, and they're really good. So I don't feel the need to change them

I'm going to copy those and I'm going to go here into this calculator and I'm going to choose

a tab at the bottom. Notice that there are tabs for each of the breakfasts for seven, then

there's seven lunch tabs, then there's a bread tab, and then there's seven for snacks and seven

for desserts. I'm going to pick one of the snack ones, the first one, and I'm going to replace

what's written there with this. Now I have my instructions. The cool thing about this is

that once I've put the recipe in here, I can actually print out each of these worksheets

and put them into my binder. So I can have the same exact binder, the same workbook

that Leanne talks about in her e-book. I can just create it digitally, which makes a few things

a little bit easier. So let's go back here to that snack. Okay, now what I need to do is I need

to put in a quantity and an ingredient and then what the quantity represents. Let me show you

what I mean. So I need three cups of flour and I also need to keep in mind how much this is going to

make. This is going to make two loaves in eight by four inch bread pans. That's going to be enough

for my family of seven if this is like a one day kind of our snack. Actually one loaf might

even be enough but I think we'll go ahead and go for two just in case. All right. So I've got

three cups of flowers, my first ingredient. So I want three cups

of flour. So here it's a drop-down. You need to select one of these items

If you come across, by the way, either measurements that are not included here

that you'd like to see included or changes or updates you'd like me to make to the tool

please go ahead and let me know in an email to info at pantry preparedness.com

because I'm going to be able to go ahead and update this tool and then you can re-download it

and have all of the latest features, which is going to be pretty cool. So three cups of flour

Next, I need a teaspoon of salt. So teaspoon is T-SP. Tabloom is a capital T with a B-SP

T-B-S-P. A teaspoon of salt, baking powder and baking soda. So for these, I can literally copy and paste

because it's the same measurement. Baking powder. Baking soda. Three teaspoons of ground cinnamon

I'm just going to put cinnamon. I'm most likely going to be using ground cinnamon in most, if not all of my recipes, at least for food storage

So I'm just going to write it a cinnamon. You can do it however you like. What we do want to do, though, is be consistent

So if I write flour here, I should recognize that that's my regular all-purpose flour

If I wanted to, I could write out all-purpose flour. If I, for a specific recipe, need bread flour, I need to make that different

But if sometimes I write flour and sometimes I write all-purpose flour and those, you know, and I change it up a lot, it is going to kind of mess up the calculator functions in the end

So just try to be consistent. I need three eggs. In this case, because there's no measurement, I need three individual eggs

I leave the measurement blank. We'll just fill in the rest here

Okay, now I have this recipe entered. Now I do have a lot of extra lines that are now unnecessary

That's okay. If I want to delete them, I can. I can just highlight the entire rows

So starting at the number, I can highlight all of those rows if I want to

And I could right click on them and delete them. However, what that's going to do is it is going to create an error on another page, which

you can also remove. Or you can just leave it like this if you don't mind that there's some extra space in here

One more tip with this recipe in particular I need two cups of grated zucchini and I gonna do this what once a week Well for a good quarter of the year I am going to have zucchini in my garden

It's just that's just a fact of life. I'm gonna have fresh zucchini. So I don't necessarily need to store up quite as much zucchini as this plan is gonna tell me

because growing zucchini for me is not hard. The same will be true for a few other things that

that I grow regularly in my own garden. You could argue that yes, but to be prepared

you should prepare for every possible scenario. And while that may be nice

it's just not that feasible for all of us. And so if there is something that you do

and that you anticipate in most emergencies, you would continue to have access to as kind of a recurring thing

then you probably don't need to worry about having as much of that in your food storage as the plan says. So

Now I've entered this one. I also previously entered in one of my breakfasts here

This is a recipe for German pancakes, which is one that we love to do with our kids

Now what we want to do is actually fill in all of the different recipes

Pick out the recipes you want from your cookbook. I'll probably, for one of my dinners, do a spaghetti recipe

Pasta is really easy to store. Ideally, I'd have a little bit of vegetable oil and salt for when I cook the pasta

And then we make a homemade spaghetti sauce that just uses regular tomato sauce that I could

literally can myself out of my garden, as well as just a few spices. That one does have ground

beef. Now, ground beef could be a problem because what if, again, I lose power for long enough

that all the meat in my freezer goes bad. But we have options. We can buy freeze dried ground

beef. And that might be one of those things that I do make sure I keep some of that on hand

Maybe not as much as this tool will tell me to because I'll also have some fresh ground beef

in the freezer. It just kind of depends a little bit on your risk tolerance. Do you want to have

everything or do you want to just accept that you're going to take a little bit of a risk for the

sake of practicality? And that's totally your choice. Now I want to show you what the tool does and this is

where it gets really cool. If I go all the way over here to the right, each one of those recipes has

its own little tab here at the bottom. Then I'm going to go to the recipe multiplier. And here I need to

tell the tool how long I'm expecting my food storage to last. Is it a year supply, a six month

supply, a three months supply? And those are the options built in here. If you want more options

again, let me know, I can build them into the tool, easy enough. And what that's going to do

is it's going to set a multiplier number. You don't need to worry about what these numbers are

For example, the bread recipe, we're going to make bread every single day. And so I've assumed

that you follow the baseline plan from the book, which states that you

you're going to make a loaf of bread every single day. And if that's the case, I need 365 times what the recipe calls for

That said, for all of the other recipes that I'm only going to have once a week, I need 52 times those

But if what you're looking for is about a six-month supply, then it's going to cut those numbers in half

Then what that does is it gives me this all ingredients and quantities sheet

This is the one that I mentioned where if I delete a bunch of rows, it's going to give me an error

because if I had deleted all of those rows from that snack right here from the zucchini bread

then all of these rows would give me an error. All I have to do is delete those two and the error goes away

The downside of that is it's then harder. You lose the formulas and stuff

So if you try to go back and recreate that or change what recipes there that has more ingredients

then now you either have to know how to do that in a spreadsheet or you have to just grab the template

again, the link is going to continue to stay live. So that's always an option as well

Then what this is going to do is it's going to take all of those measurements and it's

going to upscale them. So you're going to be getting everything in cups or in kind of a

just a larger quantity. So it's a little bit easier for you to calculate when you go to

the store. Now we know we don't buy flour and sugar in cups and so what you can

then do is you can use the converter that Leanne has in the book. And in that

with that converter you can just do some basic math. to find out if I needed 400 cups of sugar, well, what's 400 cups of sugar in pounds

According to the equivalence sheet in the e-book, two cups of sugar weighs approximately one

pound, which means if I need 400 cups of sugar, I could divide that by two. I need 200 pounds

of sugar. That's quite a bit. And so that just again comes back to what's written in the

e-book that most people underestimate how much they and their family is going to need for an actual

your supply of food. And next you may notice out to the side, this will generally be hidden

but there is this called recipes and ingredients. This is just a sheet that's being used

in the actual calculation for the master list of ingredients. This though, the master list of

ingredients, this is the kind of the pinnacle of kind of where this lands. And so here's what it

does, basically. It's going to take all of the ingredients from all of your recipes

And because it's doing that, this is where it's important that you actually use the same sort of naming convention

You'll be able to tell when you look at here if you see, you know, I had vanilla in a different recipe

And then you may have caught that earlier in this video, I wrote vanilla extract

So this actually showed up as two different lines. I went ahead and I changed that other recipe

So now they both say vanilla. And now I can see how much vanilla I need for a year for those two recipes

And I can see which two recipes it's in. That's what's super cool here

So it going to list out all the ingredients It going to list them in alphabetical order exactly like we taught in the e It going to list exactly which of the meals by number 1 through 29

Which of the meals use this ingredient, which is going to be really helpful if we ever need to do this

And then I have three columns. I have the need column. Here's how much is needed total

It just totals it up. And then I could say here, well, vanilla, how much do I have

Well, I actually have eight cups. So I need to buy negative 5.8 cups

And I'll probably update that formula. So if it's below zero, it just zeroes it out. But, or I could just leave it like this

You can see, well, I actually have extra of this. I don't need to buy any for a little while

And that's just a really nice way to be able to keep track of kind of the grocery shopping you need to do

That leads me to another tip for food storage. Now, ideally, we would be prepared for whatever happens and we'd be prepared right now

But that's, once again, not necessarily going to be feasible for all of us

And so if what you want to do is make sure that you have enough food for a year, you might start with the three month

Go to the recipe multiplier, change this to three months. And let's just fill in everything that you need until your buy list is zero

And then let's just keep that going. And then maybe we level it up and we say, okay, let's work on getting up to a sixth month food supply

And then the way that we go about doing this is just every time we go to the grocery store

we take a little bit of what we need from our buy list and we just make sure that we

pick up a little bit more of that so we tack on a little bit more to our normal

grocery budget what that's going to do is in times of surplus in times where we

have enough food we have the resources that we need we have the money to buy those

resources and maybe we have a little bit extra we take that opportunity to buy

just a little bit more and what that's going to do is it's going to prepare us for

that time when maybe we'll never need it but it'll be there just in case. It'll prepare us for that time when an emergency

requires us to be able to dip in to this food storage. Hopefully you won't need it

for a whole year. But there are plenty of scenarios where that could possibly happen

What I found to be the most likely scenario where you need to use your food

storage isn't usually a calamity. It's not a natural disaster. If we need to evacuate

you're probably not going to be able to take your year supply of food with you. So far we haven't had a collapse of society yet. That could happen. But if it did, then

our year supply we would definitely want to hang on to and use to help us

during that time period to be able to create some sort of sustainable future going forward because in that scenario it's we're probably gonna need more than

just a year supply of food to continue to thrive. No, the most common scenario I

found where people need to dip into their food storage is actually something

like the loss of a job or just economic tumult. Things happen in our lives

that make it so that we can no longer generate the income that we've been living on

and as a result we need to be able to live off of food that we've stored up in the past

I personally in my life have had times where having that food storage that was already prepared

for me ahead of time has been a huge blessing to be able to have that food even if there wasn't

enough money to go buy more food today. And as a result of that, I am a strong proponent of having food storage, even if it's just

couple weeks worth of food, three months worth of food, six months, or ideally a year or more

All right, there's one more feature of this tool that I want to show you real quick before we wrap up

And that is this here. This is not necessarily. This isn't from the e-book

This is something that I built in on the recommendation. Actually, of a family member of the person who wrote the e-book

And my recommendation is this. To include a little bit of buffer

This is for that scenario where, I don't know, maybe somebody drops an egg

It's a scenario where you need just a little bit extra or maybe there was a can of flour

that wasn't totally sealed and now it's growing weevils and you're not super comfortable with that

Having just a little bit of buffer is going to help ensure that even if things happen that we

can't control or that we didn't foresee, we're still going to have enough food

So I let you choose the buffer amount. By default, I'm going to leave it here at 5%

But you could change it. Just change it to 10 right there. Now it's 10%

And what that's going to do is it's going to update this column here of how much you actually need for your food storage to give you 10% more

Or in the case of my default, just 5% more. Then I encourage you once that's all done to take this sheet right here, however many rows it ends up filling into after you actually fill out all 29 of your recipes

And I encourage you to print this sheet. You just click print here at the top. and then I could do it landscape wide just like this or I could just do it portrait and

then I can fit to width or I can do custom if I do it this way then I could do

about 90% and that's going to give me all of these columns and then what I'll do is I

just won't print the pages that have these extra columns off to the side you don't really

need to see the buffer amount. The reason I'm wanting to print off these pages right

here is to be able to have them in my workbook in my binder. With this list in my

binder I can work off of it exactly the way that is taught in the e-book but now

our calculations have been done for us automatically which is super awesome. And that

my friends is how the tool works and I hope that the additional advice and tips

that I've given you will be helpful as you start working on preparing your food

storage and coming up with your custom plan filled with foods that you're family loves and will actually eat. Thanks again for joining me and I hope to see you again soon