this wasn't in the plan |but life is still pretty good

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we were challenged to live off the food we currently had for one week. We did it. I did cheat (sort of) and went to the grocery store on Friday to buy dish soap and dishwasher detergent. Since this was a learning experience more than anything, I learned that it's no fun to completely run out of such things and bought two with the intention that I will always try and have a back up around. This is not the first time I've had to make a trip just for one of those things, but hopefully it will be the last.

I've been thinking a lot this week about food storage and decided that probably the two main reasons we'd need to live off what we had on hand would be financial reasons or some sort of emergency that caused a wide-spread power outage.

In the event of a power outage, it would be very important to have lots of non-perishable food on hand. We currently have quite a bit (our pantry isn't really what needs restocking at this point), but that's totally a fluke. We normally really don't have much. I want to keep my supply up and add a few more things to it, like tuna fish and canned chicken maybe. Recently someone suggested to me that it's good to have minute rice on hand (I normally don't buy it because it's more expensive) because if electricity is the problem, you'll need to cook with propane, or another alternative fuel, and it would take much propane to boil rice for 20 minutes.

If finances became suddenly very tight, the grocery store would obviously still be there and be accessible, but we'd want to stretch what we had, so that grocery spending would be as minimal as possible. I certainly did some stretching this week. I would have never imagined a gallon of milk could last 10 days in this house.

Another thing I learned this week is that Bug doesn't drink nearly enough water. In an effort to make the milk last as long as possible (and the juice too), I tried to get him to drink water and unless it was bedtime he wouldn't have it.

So, if one week ago all the grocery stores in the city I live in closed their doors, we'd have survived. We would've had dirty dishes, but we would have been nourished.