FLAG is an acronym for Fights Like A Girl. She is my wife and she is a fighter!
She's the "smart" behind our preparedness program.
"When I was first told about food storage and what should be stored, I thought how boring. People told me wheat or other grains, powdered milk, legumes, honey or sugar, salt, fats and garden seeds. I tried the powdered milk years ago, I could honestly say, it tasted awful. Since then the process has improved and I do use powered milk to rotate what I store in our food program.
I thought “Garden seed!” I have never grown a garden in my life but I understand the importance of getting vitamins and minerals into the diet. Plus a garden could help extend the stored basic food items in your food storage program. Give it some variety. So I realized that besides learning how to cook with the foods recommended in a year supply, I would have to learn about soil, how to plant and grow a successful garden.
My first grains in my program consisted of wheat, white rice, popcorn, corn, cream of wheat and oats. Simple and some variety. My challenge with these few grains was working with wheat, which all they had when I started was red wheat and corn. Some years later, white wheat came onto the market and that added a whole new world.
I continued to attend classes on wheat. I worked on making bread. Experimented with gluten to extend meat or use as meat in a recipe. I have had some success with using gluten. My family likes gluten fried steaks but I don’t make it often. It is a lot of work.
I also learned about sprouting the wheat and the vitamins and minerals that you can receive from the grain. This thrilled me because if we had to live off of what we stored and I hadn’t got down the skill of gardening, we could still get fresh vitamins and minerals.
My beans selection when I started to store beans were pinto and white beans. Those are the beans my Dad exposed me to and the only ones I knew how to cook. Since those early days, I have discovered many types of beans and have included them into our food program. They also can add a variety of flavors.
I would continue to read books or magazines. There was no internet when I first started out on this journey. My resources were attending classes, going to the library, word of mouth and shows on television from time to time.
One of my concerns was getting proper protein in a food storage program. I grew up not with the food pyramid. Most of our dinners where based around meat with grains and vegetables as a side dish. I knew protein came from legumes, some grains had some, and milk had a little. I was told growing up that you get protein from eggs and meat. When I first started my food program
I thought, “How am I going to get eggs? What about meat?”
We now have chickens, that free range and have plenty of eggs and I have learned to can meat which I have done as part of our year supply. But meat is not our main staple in our diet now. It was when I was first married and did not have a knowledge of the wonderful world of grains and beans.
What really helped me was when I attended a class about protein and our food storage. I learned so much from her class. To this day I have the chart she handed out. I refer to it from time to time to check the strength of a protein with the combinations of foods in a meal. I gained a stronger testimony of the inspired program and how it truly can meet our nutritional needs.
She got her information from “Diet for a Small Plant.” She shared a lot of information from that book. Here is the chart she made to give us a summary of complementary proteins.
So now when I cook a bean dish, I would add some wheat helping the dish to make a strong complementary relationship. If making chili beans, I would make corn bread. My children having oatmeal or cream of wheat for breakfast with milk made a strong complimentary protein. Whole wheat pancakes and milk. The list goes on and on. I was excited.
As years moved on and I discovery many more grains and beans available, my boring food storage program became a feast in my eyes. That’s because of all the possibilities and variety of meals at my disposal. I use items from our food storage daily. It is our diet. Because of this I do a bulk order yearly and use the LDS cannery to purchase grains in bulk.
Almost all of the foods we eat, I make from scratch. Cold cereal, crackers, pitas, breads, bagels, English muffins, all types of muffins, cookies, pilafs, refried beans, soups etc. It sounds like it would take so much time but once you get the skills down, it is really fast and easy. Remember I didn’t do this over night. But if I can help others to skip over some of the mistakes I have made or get some excited about using their food storage program, I am happy.
I was talking to a friend the other day about something I was making out of my food storage. She said, this is your hobby beside quilting, gardening and sewing. After we hung up the phone, I pondered that for a few moments and realized she was right. I don’t like spending a lot of money at the store when I can make it at home. It might take me a while to figure out how to make the product but eventually I do. For example, my husband loves corn nuts. It took me a while to figure out how to make them. But once I learned how to soften corn to make Masa, I knew what to do to get his corn nuts.
This same friend that I was talking to on the phone, is the lady who taught the class on complementary proteins. Over the years I have thanked her for taking the time to share the information with us. Because of her class, it opened the door to this food storage journey.
Start your journey today!"
FLAG
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