09:38 – As she was making a skillet dinner last night, Barbara commented that everything she was using was from long-term storage. A can of Costco chicken, a pound of Barilla rigatoni, a pint of Bertolli Alfredo sauce, and a cup of chicken bouillon makes a tasty meal sufficient to feed four at about 600 calories each. For dessert we had fresh peaches, although we could have had canned peaches instead.
I’m trying to get us to the point where we’re eating at least one or two dinners a week entirely from LTS. What we’re finding is that we don’t give up much, if anything, in terms of taste by using LTS food exclusively. We still eat a lot of fresh and frozen foods, but if necessary we could easily make the shift to using only LTS foods. There’s no need for hideously expensive freeze-dried foods, either. Canned and dehydrated foods are a completely acceptable and much cheaper alternative. We have zero freeze-dried foods in our pantry, and I have no intention of changing that.
My next food storage goals are to build up our stocks of bulk staples, add more canned meats, add more supplemental stuff from Augason Farms (cheese, butter, and egg powder, TVP bouillon, and so on), and replace a lot of stuff like spaghetti sauce and applesauce that we’ve been using for the past year without replacing. Although I wouldn’t say that Barbara is 100% on-board with my food goals, I think she’s coming around to my point of view. She’s as aware of the news as anyone else, and understands that things could get very bad very quickly. And, of course, the stuff we’re buying is stuff we’d eventually use anyway. By stocking up now, we’re just buying what we’d buy anyway but at a lower price.
So on our next Costco trip, I intend to buy a lot of bulk staples like sugar, flour, oatmeal, and rice, in addition to restocking our canned goods and replenishing our supply of toilet paper and other non-food consumables. I’ll order what I can from Costco and Walmart on-line. It costs no more to do it that way, and we don’t have to haul it back home.
Work continues on building science kits and subassemblies. We now have over 100 finished kits of all types in stock, but this is the time of year when they start disappearing like dreams.
We’re starting to run out of good stuff to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming. I suggested the other day that we start re-watching Heartland. I was kind of surprised that Barbara didn’t object. It used to be that she wouldn’t re-watch anything, even if it had been 30 years since we’d seen it. My argument has always been that I’d rather re-watch something that was really good instead of watching something new just because it was new. And anyway we don’t remember much about stuff we watched even five or ten years ago, so in effect it’s new to us.