Here are some things that I have been thinking about as I have been posting about pantry meals.
--Every time I get recipes from someone else, they may look great, but just aren't what my family is used to eating. I make menu plans based on someone else's likes and my family ends up not eating anything. So when I got serious about putting these pantry meals together, I went first to the meals that my family eats on a regular basis. I was quickly able to go down my list of things that we eat and choose the meals that lent themselves the best to being converted into a pantry meal. So while MY family likes what are in boxes at MY house, yours may not like these things. Fit your meals to what YOUR family likes and will eat. This is why the PMS group (hee hee...I laugh every time I say that!) was so great. I could get one of a new recipe to try. If we liked it, we added it to our list; if we didn't...no loss. And we tried the new meals over several weeks. I didn't try to feed my family all of the new meals all in a row.
--At our house, we don't often eat "out of a can". I did have to do converting of my recipes to make them shelf stable. I usually don't buy canned beans. It is easier and cheaper to buy and cook dried beans. Or bottle them myself. But for my boxes right now, I found sales and bought canned beans because I didn't have any bottled ones on hand. I also cook beans and freeze them to have on hand. I don't often think ahead far enough to be able to soak and cook beans. So I soak and cook them when I can and then have them frozen when I need them. And our pantry meals are only a small percentage of the meals that we eat. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't eat these meals all in a row and "eat out of a can" for 90 days straight. We store pantry meals for use in extreme circumstances.
--We mostly eat fresh or frozen veggies because the sodium is so high in the canned veggies. But fresh and frozen veggies aren't shelf stable. We do what we can in our pantry meals...
--I don't just put my pantry meals together and them hide them under the bed and forget they are there. If I have a super busy day and don't plan ahead (that happens more than I would like to admit!) I grab a pantry meal to get dinner on the table quick. But I don't necessarily use every can out of the box. If I grab Taco Soup in the box I would use frozen corn and beans and leave the bean and corn cans in the box and be that much ahead when I refill the box. If I pull the box of stroganoff, I would use sour cream out of my fridge and not use my sour cream powder. If I pulled the box of Shepard's pie, I would make mashed potatoes from the potatoes in my house and not use the potato pearls. You get the picture. I save the longer term storage items for the emergency use of the meals.
--One of my favorite stories to share about my pantry meals is from our vacation to AZ last year. We went to Phoenix for a week to visit family and we stayed in a condo. We knew that we would have a full kitchen in the condo to cook in and we did NOT want to have to eat fast food the whole time. I grabbed enough of my boxed pantry meals to last the week and packed them in the car. (The boxes fit great and traveled really well!) When we got there, I just stacked up the boxes on the counter and cooked out of the boxes. I knew that I had everything that I needed for the full meal in the box. We added salad or a fresh fruit on the side and had great meals! It saved us SO MUCH money on food! There were also several days that we were over at my Grandma's house and didn't want her to have to feed our big family, so I would just grab a box and take it with us to her house and cook her dinner!
No comments:
Post a Comment