Food Storage

Okay, I have an idea. Instead of focusing my efforts on eating more grains and legumes and fruits and vegetables and calling it "healthy eating," I'm going to focus my efforts on eating more grains and legumes and fruits and vegetables and call it "using our food storage." That shopping list that I posted from "The Mormon Diet" book looked, as Josie said, like a food storage list. Since we have wheat and oatmeal and rice, and beans and barley and powdered milk, how about if I just use those? After all, according to a booklet that we found among our stuff from the Utah State Extension Service, the Golden Rule of Food Storage is to STORE WHAT YOU EAT AND EAT WHAT YOU STORE, or, in other words, ROTATION.

This booklet gives some recipes for using food storage, which, surprise, surprise, seem to be very similar to recipes for healthy eating. Things like making your own cream soup, making yogurt and buttermilk and sweetened condensed milk, wheat berry pudding, barley pilaf, and golden harvest muffins. So I'm going to post one of those recipes on here, with the commitment to try it this week, and give a report on how we like it. Actually, I'm going to go with two recipes. The first is for buttermilk (because I have some buttermilk in the fridge that needs to be used), and the second is for cream soup (because I want to try making my own cream-of-something soup base).

Buttermilk
1/2 cup buttermilk
3 cups warm water
1 cup nonfat dry milk OR 1 1/2 cups instant nonfat dry milk
Put buttermilk, water and dry milk in a large clean jar and stir or shake until powder is dissolved. Cover the jar with a lid or clean cloth. Let stand at warm room temperature until it clabbers, about 10 hours in the winter or 5 hours in the summer. After it clabbers, store in the refrigerator. Save 1/2 cup to mix buttermilk next time. Buy commercial buttermilk occasionally for a fresh "start."

Homemade "Cream" Soup Mix
2 cups powdered nonfat milk
3/4 cup cornstarch
1/4 cup instant chicken bouillon
2 tablespoons dried onion flakes
1 teaspoon basil leaves
1 teaspoon thyme leaves
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 cup instant rice
Combine all ingredients, mixing well. Store in air-tight container until ready to use. Equivalent of 9 cans of soup.
TO SUBSTITUTE FOR 1 CAN OF CONDENSED SOUP: Combine 1/3 cup of dry mix with 1 1/4 cups of cold water in saucepan. Cook and stir until thickened. Add to casserole as you would the canned product.
Variation: Add a 4 ox. can of mushrooms, undrained, as part of liquid for cream of mushroom (10% fat)