Category: cheap preps

08:48 – I got email yesterday from another woman who wants to remain anonymous. I’ll call her Jen II, so that I can just use the Jen category. Besides which, she reminds me a lot of original Jen. They’re both determined and decisive.

Jen II isn’t LDS, but she’s prepping for her family of five and has jumped into the Mormon “Big Four” long-term food storage with both feet: 1,500 pounds of flour, oats, pasta, instant potatoes, and rice; 300 pounds of beans; 300 pounds of sugar/honey; 72 pounds of milk powder; 50 liters of vegetable oil; 50 pounds of salt; and various other dry staples. They bought most of that in a couple of runs to their nearest LDS Home Storage Center in #10 cans and foil-laminate bags, hauled it home in their pickup, and stacked it in the basement.

She’s now set for a year of feeding five people on iron rations, and could probably stretch that to 18 months with other regular foods she has stocked. Their basement is now stacked with cases of #10 cans, but she knows this is just the basic staples. She needs to (a) add lots of supplemental dried and canned foods–meats, fruits, vegetables, powdered eggs and cheese, sauces, spices, and so on, (b) get it all organized, and (c) figure out exactly what to do with it if/when worse comes to horrible. Her goal is to have what she needs to feed her own immediate family plus some other family and friends for a year or more. Fortunately, her husband is fully on board with all of this, and is happy to leave the decisions to her. Money isn’t much of issue, nor is storage space.

She and her husband are both retired professionals. They live in a small town that sounds ideal. The rest of her family consists of their adult daughter, their son-in-law, and their early-teens grandson.

My first suggestion to her was to pick up a good cookbook oriented toward cooking from long-term storage, such as MD Creekmore’s , and the freely-downloadable Shelf Storage Recipes, both of which are collections of recipes contributed by people who routinely cook from long-term storage. Then to go through those, pick out some recipes to try and figure out which ones she likes, and order whatever supplemental foods are needed from Augason Farms via Walmart on-line.

My time this week was occupied almost exclusively on science kits, but I did spend some time in the evenings doing prepping research.

• I spent a lot of time researching relocation issues. We’re still looking at homes, and have decided to look at some that are farther out into the county. One or two of them are located not far from the oddly-named hamlet of Meat Camp, NC.

• I read a couple of post-apocalyptic novels, including the first in Angery American’s Home series, . This one apparently had an editor. There are some misspellings, typos, and other mistakes, but it’s generally readable. Two annoying things it has in common with other PA novels are that the protagonist ends up stuck hundreds of miles from home and has to get there on foot and that the text is often a thinly-disguised shopping list, with specific makes and models of gear. Also, the protagonist is a regular 30-something guy–6 feet tall, 260 pounds, and not in particularly good shape–who walks 250 miles home carrying a 60-pound (!) backpack that contains at least two of everything he could possibly need, including almost literally the kitchen sink. Now, I used to backpack when I was in my early- and mid-20’s and in good shape and I was bigger and stronger than that guy, and there’s simply no way I could have carried a 60-pound backpack for 250 miles. I’ve known SEALs, Green Berets, and USMC Recon guys who would tell you the same thing. I would imagine that any ex-military who read this probably giggle uncontrollably at the ridiculousness of it all. Still, this book stands out among recent PA novels as pretty well written.

• I ordered one or two minor long-term food storage items, including a quart bottle of .

So, what precisely did you do to prep this week? Tell me about it in the comments.