Is Life Possible Without a Weekly Grocery Run?: Food Storage to Flour Tortillas

Actually, it’s possible. For those of you new to the concept of storing food, from extra canned goods to long-term storage, the thought of this might seem as impossible as flying yourself to the moon. The premise to having food stored is simple: being able to be self-reliant, a.k.a. depending on no one thing (grocery stores, restaurants) except yourself in order to feed your family in case you don’t have access to food and water; in short, survive.

In the wake of event such as hurricane Katrina and others, many people in the US were in just this type of situation, namely, not having ACCESS to food, water, and other necessities. (This could turn into an emergency preparedness conversation real quick, so I am just sticking to food.) Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Those people had their homes blown away; even if they did have food stored, they couldn’t have eaten it or transported it.” The answer still applies. The hurricane evacuees were bussed everywhere from cities up north, all the way to Texas and beyond. Many of the cities that they were moved to had a shortage of food because of the influx of evacuees. This now became an issue for not just the evacuees, but the regular residents, and food couldn’t get there fast enough to meet the demand. There are many amazing stories, but a message common in them is this: those who had prepared and set aside extra food faired better and even helped their neighbors and evacuates weather the hardship.

I have prescribed to the notion of storing extra food, off and on, for several years. During good personal economic times, I was better at it; it’s always easier to buy more when you have more money lying around. Now a days, everyone is hanging onto their pennies. As the price of food continues to rise little bit by little bit, I find my finances even more important to me than they have in the past. This week, I put myself to a challenge. Namely, could I survive this week (mentally and physically) without going to the grocery store or eating out, living on the food that I had stored. The answer is yes! It was hard for me to avoid the store though—for me, there is something reassuring about going to store each week or every other week (when I plan ahead for meals). I like going and buying milk, or veggies, or just going and buying something I can eat later in the week.
Here is my report on how I stretched the food I had, and how I used the stored foods to make items from scratch that normally I would have just gone and bought.

The first to go was the milk. As I got half-way through a gallon of whole milk (my family drinks it like crazy), I started diluting it for my toddler. After all, I pay the same price at the grocery store for one gallon of whole milk as I do for one gallon of 1 or 2%. I figured that having a glass of ½ whole milk and ½ water would equate to either 1 or 2% milk. Suddenly, my milk consumption slowed dramatically. Next to go was the bread. So, using only 6 ingredients, one of them being water, I made homemade bread from a recipe that start to finish is only 1 hour, and I have put this recipe to the test in the past. My family, who are all homemade bread purists (meaning they prefer the it-takes-all-day-to-make/rise-3-times bread) all couldn’t tell the difference between this recipe. Now, I got this recipe from www.pantrysecrets.net, so unfortunately I can’t post it on here. But with this recipe, I was able to make 2 loaves of bread for 25 cents each. That sure beats buying bread for $3-$5 dollars.

Lastly, for the sake of keeping this blog not too long, was tortillas. We like tortillas at my house, and this week we ran out. Usually, I would just go pay the $3 bucks and go on with life. But, this time I gave it a shot at home. I used the recipe below to make homemade flour tortillas for the first time. They were amazing! And, believe it or not, I was able to make 15 tortillas (the smaller variety) with only 2 cups of flour that I had sitting in my cupboard.

If you only count the milk, the bread, and the tortillas (there were more things, but for now I’ll just stick with this) I saved $15 dollars:
2 gallons of milk: $4 ($2 each)
2 loaves of bread: $8 ($3 and some change each)
1 bag of tortillas: $3

That said, there are so many more things that could be used to same money, from storing dried beans, flour and other staples, to just having an extra pound of ground beef in your freezer for when you might need it. Hopefully this inspires you to store a little extra of something you regularly eat, or perhaps just start making some things from scratch to save yourself a few bucks. These days, every dollar counts!

Flour Tortillas
(source:Food Storage Kit Recipes, Mesa Home Storage Center, Mesa, AZ)

2 cups all purpose flour (I used bread flour and it worked fine)
½ tsp. salt
¼ c. oil (I substituted liquid lecithin since I had that in my pantry)
2/3 c. warm water
Additional flour to roll out, or you can use spray oil and eliminate rolling out in flour.

Directions:
1. Combine first 2 ingredients either with your hands or in a food processor until mixture resembles fine crumbs.
2. Pour water into dry ingredients and fork it together; if you are using a processor, combine until a ball forms.
3. Pour dough onto a floured surface and knead until smooth.
4. Let dough rest for 30 minutes in a bowl covered with plastic wrap.
5. Remove from bowl; divide dough into 12-15 portions and roll into balls.
6. Roll out balls to paper thin; this is easiest between two pieces of plastic wrap. (For this and for kneading, I substituted spray oil for the flour, and in this step sprayed the oil on the dough and rolling pin and it worked great.)
7. Bake on a VERY HOT, UNGREASED griddle until freckled, about 20 sec. on each side.