15:13 – We just spent several hours getting steel shelving set up in my office and moving/organizing/inventorying stuff onto those shelves. Having enough food to feed Barbara, Colin, and me for a year or more gives me a sense of security. Having still more in the form of bulk staples that can be stretched with the soups, sauces, spices, meats, and other stuff we have on the shelves also puts us in a position to help family, friends, and neighbors if it ever comes to that. Speaking of which, the chicken tetrazzini turned out very well. It made enough to feed 4 to 6 people, and everything in it was shelf-stable.
We filled seven 2-liter Coke bottles with bread flour yesterday. That turned out to be such a PITA that we transferred the remaining 25 or 30 pounds from the 50-pound bag into heavy freezer Ziplock bags, which isn’t really long-term storage, but we use enough flour that it’ll be fine in the Ziplocks. The 2-liter bottles work pretty well for sugar, rice, oats, and similar bulk foods, even cornmeal, but it’s a real struggle to get them filled with fluffy stuff like white flour. So we still have a sealed 50-pound bag of white flour sitting waiting to be repackaged.
For that, I plan to use one-gallon foil-laminate Mylar bags from the LDS store. To keep down the dust, we’ll probably fill Ziplock bags first, and then seal the filled Ziplock bags in the foil/Mylar pouches. Until yesterday, I would just have sealed the foil/Mylar pouches with a clothes iron set on high, but I read something yesterday about the LDS church recommending that their pouches be sealed only with one of the impulse sealers they sell, or the equivalent. Apparently, a clothes iron doesn’t get hot enough to do the job reliably. The impulse sealer the LDS church sells costs $410, but I understand that many LDS wards and branches have impulse sealers available to borrow or rent, so I’ll probably check with our local LDS church the next time we’re ready to repackage bulk staples.