YWtGS: Quarantine Week 1 Menu and Food Storage Recipe

A Year Without the Grocery Store has a post up about their first week of quarantine and how to plan meals from storage food – Quarantine Week 1 Menu & Food Storage Recipe . Also check out Rural Revolution’s recipe for Beef and Mushroom Pie, resulting from a cleaning out the fridge moment.

So many of our lives have been turned upside down. Whether you are now homeschooling your kids – since many schools have been closed. Are you eating at home on a regular basis now when normally you would have gone out to eat one or two times during the week? Are you used to precooked or prepackaged meals? Each of these things can be so hard to navigate in their own, so what is one thing that we can do to make one of these things easier? Make a Menu!

So it’s hard to think about what to feed families during a crisis. And even for those of us who have a food storage menu set up, some of those meals might not sound appetizing at the moment. How do you go about making up a menu for while you’re in quarantine?

Principles for Making a Quarantine Menu

1) Start with what you already have

Are you like me? Do you buy food for a specific meal and at least once a week you don’t eat it? More than that, oftentimes, you don’t reschedule those meals for the next week? Yeah, me too! So when looking through my freezer, I found a lot of food that is easily incorporated into this week’s menu.

I have a fairly deep pantry that I’ve been developing over the course of several years. I built it using a food storage menu. When I started making this week’s menu though, I didn’t major on my food storage menu. I started with what I already have in my freezer.

(2) Eat “normal” foods as much as possible.

This is a really scary time for us as adults. California has already been given a “shelter in place” order. It’s been rumored that Illinois will be under the same order starting tomorrow. This can raise our anxiety level – and we’re adults! Imagine what it is like for your kids!

If you feed your kids normal foods, this will actually help them emotionally deal with this situation. The greater a level of “normal” you can give to your children, the better off they will be during this crisis.

Don’t think that introducing crazy, strange foods at a time like this will do anything good for their (or your) digestive system. Don’t think that your kids will all of a sudden eat canned asparagus if you never fed it to them before. The same goes for

(3) If you’re struggling, make a schedule.

I’m not talking about a menu. I’m talking about a dinner schedule from which to make your menu. A schedule might look like this.

Monday – Mexican Dish

Tuesday – Italian meal

Wednesday – Oriental Dish

Thursday – American/Casserole

Friday – Soup

Saturday – Pizza (either frozen or homemade)

Sunday – Left Overs

OR maybe you’re “schedule” will look like this

Monday – Beef

Tuesday – Chicken

Wednesday – Pork

Thursday – Vegetarian

Friday – Beef

Saturday – Chicken

Sunday – Pork

Then when you go to make a menu, you don’t have to stress too much because the hardest part is already set up for you!

My breakfast and lunch meals are almost always identical from week to week. This is how our breakfasts and lunches go in general. I plan on keeping it the same as MUCH as possible even in quarantine. I do know how to make bread, bagels, granola, biscuits, pizza, and cinnamon rolls, so I can keep that up even if I have to make it from scratch.

Monday Breakfast – Oatmeal / Lunch – Grilled cheese

Tuesday Breakfast – Bagels / Lunch – Beefaroni or soup

Wednesday Breakfast – Homemade granola / Lunch – Sandwiches

Thursday Breakfast – Eggs and bacon / Lunch – Mac and Cheese

Friday Breakfast – Homemade Granola / Lunch – Pizza

Saturday Breakfast – Biscuits and Gravy / Lunch – Get Your Own

Sunday Breakfast – Cinnamon Rolls / Lunch – Meatballs

4.) Don’t hesitate to learn new things!

Making bread really isn’t hard!

And if you can make bread, you can make cinnamon rolls, pizza crust, and bagels. Making noodles is actually really easy too. These things are just time-consuming, but when you’re forced to be at home, it’s a great way to spend your time.

Making homemade granola is even easier to make, and then you have several days worth of breakfasts ready at once. One batch of our granola lasts us 2 weeks eating it twice each week.

My Menu for Quarantine Week 1

So here is an actual picture of my menu for this next week. It goes on my fridge today and will stay up. One of the reasons why I post it is so that I don’t get “What’s for breakfast, Mom?” ALL-THE-STINKING-TIME! I have one child who will finish dinner and go, “Hey, Mom! What’s for breakfast?”

The second reason that I post a menu is that my oldest daughter is responsible for breakfast every day. My middle daughter is responsible for lunches every day, and I’m responsible for dinner every day. This way, they don’t have to ask me what they should be making. They know because it’s listed.

So here’s my menu. Some of this will be from scratch. This week, I’ll make the cinnamon rolls from scratch, but we still have “canned” biscuits” to make things easier on my daughter. We still also have frozen pizzas, so we’ll do those instead of making those from scratch. In future weeks, these will eventually be made from scratch.

Food Storage Recipe – Homemade Granola

We double this recipe and it makes at least 4 breakfasts for a family of 7.

Ingredients

6 C Oats

1 C Nuts (we prefer pecans)

1 C Chocolate Chips

1 C Coconut (can be omitted)

1/2 C Cocoa powder

1 C Coconut oil

1 C Honey

1 T Vanilla

Directions:

Grease a 9×13 two-inch deep casserole dish. Mix the oats, nuts, chocolate chips, coconut, and cocoa powder together. In a saucepan melt the coconut oil and honey together. Once they are melted together, remove from heat and add vanilla. Pour the mixture over the oat mixture in the 9×13 dish, and stir thoroughly. Bake for 1 hour at 250.

Do you need help setting up a food storage menu? I have written a FREE 7-page Fast and Easy Food Storage Solution Guide to help you through the process.

What About You?

How are you setting up your menu for this time during quarantine? Do you feel like you’ve got a good handle on it? If you’re doing well, do you have any tips and tricks to share with the rest of our readers? I’d love to hear. Leave a comment below in the comments section so that we can all be better prepared.

Together lets Love, Learn, Practice, and Overcome!

There are links in this post. Some of the links may be affiliate links. Some of the links may not be. My promise to you is that I will only recommend the most economical version of the best quality of items to serve you. These are the items that I have bought for my own family. You can feel free to use my affiliate links, of which I will get a small amount in compensation, or you can choose to search out your products on your own.

Please note that any affiliate links above are for A Year Without the Grocery Store and not for the Lower Valley Assembly.

AmPart: A Practical Approach to a Neighborhood Defense Plan

Noell Bishop of Bishop 30 Solutions has written a brief introduction at American Partisan on A Practical Approach to a Neighborhood Defense Plan. If you find that you are interested in more detail on this topic, you can try to get your hands on a copy of A Failure of Civility by Mike Garand and Jack Lawson which goes into detail on organizing neighborhood protection teams. It is hard to find these days, but AMP-3 still had some copies last I checked. (Update 12/2020: Jack Lawson has published a new book set Civil Defense Manual which you can from his site.)

Before we dive into the subject of Neighborhood Defense, I thought I would share with you some of my experiences that lend to my thoughts on the matter. Although I have actually studied the subject I have had some events that have been very beneficial to me on the subject.

In 2005, I was a DEA agent assigned to the Houston Field Division in Houston, Texas. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that year. Myself and two other agents along with members of our air wing based out of Houston responded just after the hurricane had passed. What I saw and what I was told to do was somewhat over whelming to say the least. As a reservist, I had already participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and, to be honest, what I saw in New Orleans was worse because it was in the United States. Growing up, I had always heard it said that “no matter what, we Americans will stick together.” Well, I’m here to tell you that could not be farthest from the truth there in New Orleans. I’m not going to tell a bunch of war stories but let’s just say I used more of my Army Special Forces training than law enforcement training. When developing a Neighborhood Defense plan, I kind of equate it to a guerrilla base when things get really bad out there. So for that, I draw from my days in training at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School attending the Special Forces Officer Qualification Course and the Unconditional Warfare phase, Guerrilla Base Operations, and my time at Robin Sage and other sources.

Let’s start this by identifying what the possible threats are that would lend us to need a Neighborhood Defense plan…

Click here to read the entire article at American Partisan.

In regards to Bishop’s statements above about the conditions in New Orleans post-Katrina, I recently heard another speaker, also former military with several years of duty under fire and also deployed to New Orleans/Katrina, make very similar comments about the horrible conditions there.

Bison Prepper: Four Storage

From Bison Prepper is this article on four storage plans.

I of course KNOW that all you ever hear from me is “buy wheat, and that’s it”. Okay, that’s not entirely true. If you read the entire last ten years of blog posts I’ve covered plenty of other storage foods. It just seems like all I ever discuss is wheat and wheat accessories. I’m SOOO sorry I’ve focused on the most inexpensive food which is also the healthiest for you. But real Christian Militiamen don’t eat wheat. Wheat is for peasants and besides they have their own freeze dried machine ( that never works and must be hacked and requires a direct line to the companies Help Desk which is all anybody could ask from a unit costing four grand ). And do you ever see wheat being advertised on your favorite Yuppie Scum Survival Site? Just saying.

So now, I’m going to discuss the four completely different food storage plans. Not a “wheat only” or a “MRE/Freeze dry only” plan that is supposed to be a One Plan Fits All Scenarios. Four separate storage plans for four phases of our collapse. The first is the Budget Plan, which is just buying whatever you like that goes on sale. This is for drastically reducing your food budget. The next is the Inflation Plan, which is just really an extension of the Budget Plan but different in that you are stocking the complete menu you normally follow. The aim is to have weeks or months worth of a complete diet so you can then relax and keep expanding it cheaper. The Inflation will merge into the Budget while reducing your regular price items. The Bug-In Plan is the foods requiring little to no cooking for the times you are bugging out or bugging in under noise/light and smell discipline ( the aforementioned MRE/Freeze Dried ). Last is the Mostly Just Wheat menu which is the Collapse Plan. None of this is new or unique, the point is to approach food storage as separate needs and focuses.

Click here to continue reading.