Category Archives: food storage

Pantry Dinner #3

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For my third Pantry Dinner I decided to make pancakes. I know, I know, that is a breakfast! Hey I am an equal opportunity food consumer. If pancakes want to be dinner who am I to stop that!

Really thought, I seriously couldn’t think of anything else. I didn’t plan far enough ahead to really cook anything. I have found out that I need to freeze some cheese and keep some canned tomato products on hand. I will write that one down for the next grocery trip! Dadzoo thinks we are in trouble if I am resorting to pancakes on day 3, I have some magic up my sleeve, I think he will be pleasantly surprised.

When I first started to seriously store food I looked into storing pancake mix. Storing enough cereal for 7 people is just too expensive. I found that pancake mixes only last a few months, not so good for storing long term. So I started to experiment with made from scratch pancakes and this is what I came up with!

All these items can come out of long term storage, even the eggs, you can freeze eggs! To freeze an egg you just crack it in a bowl, lightly scramble it and freeze it in a ziplock. Easy! However, I have made this recipe without eggs and while it isn’t as good it is still yummy. I have also used water instead of milk, and it works well too.

Here goes, our cast of characters:

3 cups milk

2 eggs

1/4 cup sugar

1 tsp salt

3 tsp Baking Powder

3 cups flour

2 Tbsp oil

For this batch I used 2 cups of whole wheat flour and one cup white.

I have gone all whole wheat, they are good, but not as fluffy,

I have used all white flour and those, while not as nutritious, are to die for!

Add all the dry ingredients and stir a little.
If you are a really gourmet cook, sifting the ingredients would probably be the best.
Since I am no gourmet and I typically I am making this in the morning while I am still half asleep, I just stir it a little with my spoon.

Then in goes the milk.

See these little gems?
They are eggs from my own little chickens.

I am getting about two eggs a day now from the two smallest chickens

that is why they are so small.

I am going to use 5 eggs because they are small, if you are using medium or large eggs, stick to two.

Aren’t they so tiny and cute.

Add the oil and stir it all together.
Usually I have to add more milk or water to make the batter thinner.

Pour about 1/3 cup on the griddle and fry away.
When they get little bubbles all over, they are ready to turn.



There you have it, hot pancakes with warm maple syrup for dinner, sounds yummy doesn’t it!

And if you are 4 you get to have some Apple Jelly on top of your pancakes too!

Pantry Dinner Day 2

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As I mention in a previous post we are eating completely out of the pantry for the next little while. I am kind of enjoying the challenge. I don’t want to give the impression that we are starving and I am making dinners from flour and rice, however this is very diffrent from what I usually do in regards to our eating.

Typically the day Dadzoo gets paid I will make a two week menu with Breakfast, Dinner and Snack, I will then make my grocery list off that, adding some items to build up our years supply of food. Since I didn’t do that for this pay period I am going off of what is left in our pantry. Items that I have purchased in bulk on sale, or purchased to build up our food supply.

Yeasterday I baked a chicken. I have never baked a chicken before. I have baked parts of chicken, drumsticks or breasts, but never a whole chicken. I always buy several fryers at the grocery store when they go on sale, which is pretty often. I keep them in the frezer and I usually use them for chicken noodle soup. So when I was wanderng my food storage area and I came upon those chickens I decided that I was going to bake one for dinner.

The only problem I had with baking a chicken is the heat factor. It is a stinking 100 degrees outside and my kitchen/living area is located on the south west corner of the house. I tends to get really hot in there, even with the air conditioner running. I figured I could use the crock pot and it wouldn’t get as hot, but even the crock pot can warm things up in that room. So, I used a tip I had seen on another blog. I put the crock pot on my back proch. Yummy chicken, no heat!

All I did to the chicken was sprinkle a good amount of lemon pepper all over it. I happen to like lemon pepper, you could use anything that strikes your fancy. I am out of onions, otherwise I would have put a diced onion in with it too.

This is how it looked 6 hours later. When I brought the crock pot in, the house smelled wonderful, you would have thought I would have had it cooking all day in the kitchen.

I cut it up and served it with peas (from the freezer, not the garden) and some home made Rice-a-roni. (very yummy and cheap)

The chicken was really moist and delicious. Dadzoo and the punks loved it, this will definatly become a staple at our house.

Biscuits

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This recipe is so good! All the ingredients can come off your pantry shelf which makes for a perfect food storage recipe. With a total time of 30 minutes from start to finish it makes for a quick side bread to any meal. Best of all it is yummy, flakey, buttery, biscuity goodness!

Here is our cast of characters:
4 cups flour
2 Tablespoons Baking Powder
2 teaspoons salt
2/3 cup shortening
1 1/3 cup milk, or buttermilk or yogurt
(simple huh!)

To the flour you add all your dry ingredients. You can also use wheat flour if you want to, but I think the white makes a lighter biscuit, and anyway, this isn’t a healthy, fat free type of item, why mess with that and use whole wheat?

Stir the dry ingredients together with a fork

Then add the shortening.

Cut in the shortening with a pastry blender. If you don’t have one (I don’t, I really, really, want one, but I can’t find on anywhere. If any of you happen to see one, pick it up fo me, I will pay you back) Or if you don’t have one (me, me) use two butter knives.


You want the shortening to blend in, but do not mix it in well, I need to be in little clumps. That is what makes it flakey.

Add your milk, (powder milk if you are using food storage) or buttermilk, or yogurt. If you don’t have buttermilk on hand and would like the flavor of a “buttermilk buscuit” Add 1 Tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice to the milk before you add it.

Stir it all up with a fork and dump it out onto a lightly floured work surface.

Taking care not to mix in the shortening too much; with your hands moosh (is that a word? moosh) it into a ball

Roll it out until you get it to your desired thickness. I like it to be about 2 inches thick, the thicker the dough, the thicker your biscuit

Now cut out your buscuit. If you would like to be a fun mom/wife/girlfriend/person, use fun cookie cutters.

If you don’t care and just want to get the job done, use a cup, like Punk #1 is doing.

Stick them all on a cookie sheet that has been lightly sprayed with cooking spray, or greased with shortening. You can put the biscuits really close together, they won’t spread out, they will raise up.

Bake at 425 degrees for 10 t0 15 minutes, until golden brown.

Now doesn’t that look yummy. Wonderful, flakey, down-home goodness.

Drizzel with honey, jam, apple butter……..and sink your teeth into warm biscuit heaven.

If I am doing this recipe for breakfast (it is yummy with eggs and sausage and if I really want to throw caution to the wind, I will even make gravy, but only sometimes, well, I think I have only done that once…) I will mix everything but the milk the night before and stick it in the fridge.

In a couple of days I will post the recipe for homemake pancakes, they are as quick and easy as buying a mix and much better for you!

Adventures into Apple Butter

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My adventure into apple butter didn’t start out as I had planned. In fact I never planned on making apple butter at all. I wanted to make apple sauce and apple jelly. One winter when I was little we had a whole bunch of what my mom called “apple sauce” really it was more like apple pie preserves. It was quart jars of apples pealed and sliced with syrup of sugar and cinnamon. I remember really liking them, and the last few years I was toying with the idea of making some in the fall when you could buy apples on the side of the road. Then my in-laws made a whole big batch of apple jelly. I had never heard of, or tasted apple jelly. I was really good and a really pretty soft pink color. So I determined that this year I was going to make my apple preserves and apple jelly.
I went and bought two boxes of apples; I looked on the internet and found a recipe for apple preserves that looked easy enough. I spent all of one morning peeling and slicing my apples, carefully saving the peels and cores for the jelly. I added cups and cups of sugar and cinnamon and lemon juice, stirred it all up in the biggest bowls I had and packed them into quart jars, 24 of them to be exact, and processed them for the amount of time the recipe called for. I was on a roll! While doing that I boiled my apple peels and cores, strained them and added sugar and pectin and bottled those too. My kitchen was a mess. Sticky sugary counters and floors, a sink piled high with dishes, it was hot with all the canning and boiling water. I was tired, but satisfied, look at all the food I was preserving and packing away for my family…what a great mom I was!

Then everything crumbled. None of my jars of apples sealed, none, not a single gal-durn blasted jar! (Do you like my pioneer swear words? Ha!) So here I am in my steamy sticky mess with 24 quart of apples not sealed! (I think this is where I burst into tears and drank a whole two litter of diet coke and ate all the chocolate I could find) Then to top things off my jelly didn’t, well, jell! So now I have 24 quarts of unsealed apples and 24 pints of un-jelled apple jelly! (This is where I call Mike, in tears, pulling my hair out, wishing I were a drinking woman, and tell him he better bring home dinner or I just might need to be committed that very night)

 

I cried over the computer to my friend Katie and she calmly sympathizes with me and says “why don’t you make apple butter?” Apple butter? Hmmmm…..”How do I do that” I ask. She tells me to dump all my jars of apples in a crock pot and let it cook for about 12 hours, until it cooks down and thickens up. Then put them in pint jars and process them like I would jam. So that is what I did. I let it cook over night, and the house smelled wonderful that next morning! We had warm apple butter on pancakes and I was sold! I did another batch that day and ended up with about 24 pints (we are already half way through it.) I will defiantly be doing apple butter again. As for the apple jelly? Well, I have 24 pints of apple syrup in my basement (I know there is a way to re-process the whole batch and add more pectin and such, but I just didn’t have it in me, maybe another day) if you would like to try some, let me know, I will let you have a jar, or two, or three…. So there you have it, my adventures in Apple Butter.So here is the recipe, as best as I can remember it, the thing about apple butter is that it isn’t an exact thing, you can adjust to your preference.

Big box of apples, pealed, cored and sliced (you can save the cores and peels to make apple juice or apple jelly, however you ladies are on your own with that!)
Lots of sugar (4 to 5 cups)
½ cup lemon juice
Cinnamon to taste
Nutmeg to taste.

Mix it all up, taste it, adjust it to your liking. Throw it all into a crock pot (I wouldn’t prepare more apples that your crock pot can handle, just do it one batch at a time) or you can throw it into a big pot on the stove, just be careful it doesn’t get too hot. Cook it on low for about twelve hours until it thickens to your preference. Spoon it into pint jars and process (I used the cold pack method) 30 minutes. I would think that you could freeze it too, if you didn’t want to go to the trouble of processing it. Or you can make small batches and just keep it in the fridge. This is a very forgiving recipe!

Apple butter is good on, pancakes, scones, biscuits, French toast, peanut butter sandwiches, toast or rolls. It is good mixed with yogurt, Cottage cheese or granola. I like it warmed up on scones and pancakes.

I hope you all like it!

Old English Scones

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I always thought that scones were a type of deep fried bread. Around here that is what people typically think of when someone says “scones”. Actually scones are a type of flakey baked bread, a lot like a big biscuit. English scones are served mostly with tea or coffee, and since I usually don’t partake of coffee or tea we eat it with milk for breakfast. This is a great food storage recipe. Your kidlets and husband will like it, it is easy to modify to suit the taste of your family, and it can be used for dinner, snacks or breakfast. So here goes!


Here are our ingredients:
2 cups flour (white or wheat)
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp Baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup shortening
1 egg
1/2 cup milk

The only thing that can’t come out of your food storage is the egg, unless of course keeping chickens in your backyard is part of your plan. If you don’t have an egg, just use a little more milk. You can also use buttermilk or yogurt in place of the milk.

First you mix all the dry ingredients


Then add shortening

Then you “cut” the shortening in, using a pastry cutter, or two butter knives or a fork. You don’t want the shortening to mix into the dry ingredients, it needs to look like a bunch of flour and pea sized clumps of shortening.

If I am making this for breakfast I will mix everything up to this point the night before then cover it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. You don’t have to do this step and it will still be yummy!

Here we are the next morning just coming out of the fridge. (Yawn)

(I forgot to add the cinnamon the night before, I like to add cinnamon, I think I am discovering that cinnamon is my favorite spice)

add your egg

and milk, or buttermilk, or yogurt…..

Mix it all up until it is a crumbly mess. Don’t mix it up until it is all combined well, that is what makes it flakey and crispy

With your hands moosh it into a ball

Put it on your pan (or stone, I like useing a baking stone for this) and with your fingers spread it out to about a inch thick, using a pizza cutter make 8 wedges.

sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, or sugar, or chocolate chips, or colored sprinkles….whatever

Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes until it is golden crispy

I serve it with apple butter (this stuff is to die for! Thanks Katie for talking me through making my apple butter)

Yummy, yummy, yummy!!!!

This recipee is really easy to modify! If you want to use it for dinner don’t put any sugar in it and it is like a biscuit. Or (one of my favorite ways) you can add fruit. I like blueberries. When you add fruit double the sugar, and add frozen or fresh fruit when you add the wet ingredients. I like it with cinnamon and chopped apples. You could add chocolate chips or nuts too. Serve it with jam, apple sauce, cold milk, hot chocolate, diet coke, tea or coffee ( if that is what moves you).

(if I am serving this as breakfast I am learning that I need to double the recipe for my family of 7, or serve something with it, fresh fruit, scrambled eggs or sausage)