It has been in my plans to make a quiche for breakfast (I know its not a breakfast food necessarily) while I am living on my food storage. I had two Marie Calendar pie crusts in my freezer. I could also make a pie crust with flour, oil and water, but frozen are easier. Since I have them, I might as well use them.  Every time I’d think about baking up the quiche I couldn’t decide what ingredients to put in it. Finally this morning after my run I decided. Yay! The quiche would have, spinach, mushrooms, onions, sausage, and cheese of course. We love Thrive freeze dried sausage.

The pie crusts are a bit freezer burned. They’ve been in the freezer since November.

I reconstituted my freeze dried cheese. It so easy. Here is a video to show you how.

I modified heavily a fresh ingredient quiche recipe to come up with a shelf stable quiche recipe.

Here are the mushrooms, spinach, onions, and sausage. They were all freeze dried. I rehydrated them in 1 cup of hot water for 5 minutes. No chopping or slicing, just measure and pour into hot water and wait for a few minutes. Easy. Love it. The nice thing about freeze dried food is it takes nearly no time or water to rehydrate. Also very little energy compared to the energy it takes to rehydrate, dehydrated food.

Scrambled egg mix is incredible. If someone didn’t say, you wouldn’t even know the scrambled egg mix is not fresh eggs! Honest. The scrambled egg mix is that good.

Add some of scrambled egg mix from Thrive, to your home store. I figure 6 cans is a year supply for my family, two adults and four children. We also have whole egg powder for baking.

Do you have these lovelies on your pantry shelf? My favorite is the shelf stable whipping cream from Trader Joe’s. The shelf life is less than a year but I have heard, from a creamery in Logan, Gossners, the cream is good long after the best-by date. If you are in Cache Valley you can get this shelf stable cream at Gossners. Otherwise get it at your Trader Joe’s.  Canned milk is cool. I have a few cans on my shelf . I prefer my instant Thrive milk for most things. It tastes like 2% or whole milk but its skim.

This is the scrambled egg mix, water, cream and canned milk. Along with the salt, pepper and pinch of nutmeg. All whisked together.

Pour half the cream egg mixture in to each pie crust and bake.

These quiches are so delicious. Other ingredients to add: broccoli, peppers, tomato dices, and green chilis. You can get them all freeze dried from Thrive. Yum!

I am a salad girl. I love a big green salad with all sorts of fresh vegetables, nuts, seeds, fruit, a little blue or feta cheese. A light homemade vinaigrette. Unfortunately storing lettuce is difficult if not impossible to do. I was cleaning out my plastic food container drawer when I found a green wire mesh lid for a wide mouth canning jar. This triggered a memory of when I bought a small packet of salad sprout seeds. I had never done anything more with those seeds. Now that I am doing my food storage challenge I dug out the packet of seeds and watched a youtube video on how to sprout seeds.

The above pouch of seeds is exactly what I had purchased several months ago.

This is so totally easy. I measured out 4 tablespoons of seeds. Rinsed and drained them. Then covered the seeds with 2 cups of water. Let them sit over night. The next morning I drained the seeds and rinsed them again. I  shook the jar to spread the seeds around a bit. Let them sit on my counter near my kitchen window and sink. I rinsed the seeds again about dinner time.

This is after  about 36 hours

This is what the seeds look like after 48 hours. I am rinsing and draining the seeds two times a day.

This is 72 hours later. Yummy salad sprouts. I just eat them straight from the jar. I love them on turkey sandwiches and on my salads. As you look over our meals we are eating during this challenge its lacking in fresh green vegetables. In the summer it will be much easier to eat out of my food storage because we will have a thriving garden to accompany the beans and breads. In February when there is 2 feet of snow on the ground its nice to be able to sprout seeds. I am definitely going to be storing more seeds to sprout in my food storage. My next batch I am going to sprout only 3 tablespoons instead of 4 and see the results. I have my sprouts stored in my refrigerator with a regular canning lid on the jar.

I am so glad I had those seeds in my “health food cupboard”.

This morning I woke up and made biscuits. I found a recipe last night that looked simple enough. I had four pounds of butter in my freezer plus part of a pound in my fridge.  I am rationing the butter.  I used a 1/3 cup for the biscuits. Generally through this challenge I am saving the butter for spreading on top of toast or bread and vegetables. I would rather use oil when I am baking.  I used a packet of gravy mix and some freeze dried sausage. It mixed up fast. The best by date was in August of 2009! I had that packet in my cupboard for quite some time, over three and a half years! Another reason to use your food storage.

I have no idea why its called California Casserole. This is a stand by recipe from Mr. Incredible’s family. Every time I make it all my kids love it. It was the perfect lunch for a Sunday afternoon. I store olives in my food storage. We always serve California Casserole with a bowl of black olives on the side. It’s really a version of chili macaroni. The California Casserole has ground beef. I used Thrive freeze dried ground beef.

For dinner I made tortillas. I am opening cans of meat.  I live in Utah where I canned the beef at the local wet pack cannery the LDS church owns for their welfare program. I occasionally volunteered there. When you work as a volunteer you have the option to purchase a few cases of the product you help can, in my case chicken chunks. A volunteer can also purchase what is available, which happened to be beef chunks when I volunteered. I have a few cases of each in my food storage. On the tortilla I put sweet beef and cheese. It was a hit. No one even thought “food storage” dinner. But it all was. I shredded the beef, added a half of cup of medium salsa and a quarter cup of brown suger. Its like the sweet pork I make. Its easy and yummy.

Sundays are good days for treats. We are a popcorn family, I have a 50 pound bag of popcorn I bought at Sam’s club. It takes us a few years to work through 50 pounds of popcorn but its a good grain to store. I also grind the kernels into cornmeal.  I made popcorn balls. A Paula Dean recipe. It was sweet and snacky, just what we were looking for. And food storage compliant.

For breakfast this morning I made waffles, an easy no fail meal. Sticky sweet syrup and peanut butter. Its a stick-to-your ribs breakfast. Everyone mostly likes waffles in our family except the oldest, but she ate them too.

Earlier in January I bought a box of oranges, 38 pounds of oranges! The kids and Mr. Incredible love oranges. I don’t care for them myself. It was a fantastic deal, $.38 per pound. We finished the oranges up today. Aaah fresh fruit, we will be seriously craving it I’m sure come March.

Lunch was late. I made minestrone soup from our home store. I am sticking to vegetarian meals this week to see how well they are received. My Reese took one look at the soup, saw zucchini and said, “I am not hungry”. My Julz enjoyed it and my little girls each had a bowl. This recipe makes a huge batch, so I have leftovers for tomorrow.

The french bread is a hit. I am starting to incorporate whole grain flour into the recipe. Tonight I added one cup of whole grain flour and four cups of white (organic) flour.

I turned half the dough into a pizza and half of the dough into a loaf of french bread. It turned out wonderful. I love having freeze dried cheese in my home store. The minestrone soup was best with some cheese sprinkled on top and some fresh ground pepper. I make my pizza sauce with just a regular jar of spaghetti sauce. I thicken the sauce with tomato powder, which is wonderful stuff and lasts forever. I love the versatility of the tomato powder from shelf reliance.

Growing up, breakfast was my least favorite meal of the day. As I am  getting older I appreciate breakfast foods more. This morning I whipped up an egg scramble. I have a few fresh potatoes in my pantry. I grated 3 or 4 for hash browns. I always use hash browns as my base for a breakfast skillet. The rest of the scramble came from my food storage. Sausage crumbles, onions, and scrambled egg mix. I rehydrated the sausage and onions and added those once the potatoes were crispy. Then added water to a half of cup of the egg mix. This is a high calorie breakfast especially since I use a fourth of a cup of oil to fry the potatoes in. I served this scramble with some salsa in the fridge. Mr. Incredible couldn’t tell the eggs weren’t fresh eggs.

For lunch we had bean and cheese burritos. Its a great stand by and one of Audrey’s favorite foods. She ate one on the way to afternoon kindergarten.  Paige and I each had a burrito too while we studied letters and the sounds they make. I had a pack of whole wheat tortillas in the fridge from ages ago. But they had neever been opened and were still good. I used the rest of the can of refried beans from Wednesday and some of the fresh cheese block. I have about four ounces left of fresh cheddar cheese.

I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon baking. Tonight we had a dinner party to attend. I told the host I would bring french bread. It turned out quite well and was so easy. I am being modest. My Julz said it was the best bread she’s ever eaten. I think this food storage thing is helping. We all ate a loaf after the kids came home from school and I brought the second loaf with us to our dinner party.

I had 3 bananas that desperately needed to be made into banana something. I decided on banana bread. I used some yogurt (which made me think about learning how to make yogurt from this greek plain yogurt so we can have it throughout our challenge) and powder egg whites instead of fresh eggs. I cut back the sugar and ground a mix of whole grains: spelt, hard white wheat and hard red wheat. This is a good time to explain that I have organic unbleached white flour, in a 50 lb bag. Not all of the bag would fit into the 6 gallon bucket I have for it. So I have been working out of the bag to get rid of the left over. Lately Reese has been chanting “the whiter the bread the sooner you’re dead!”. I know whole grains are a better option but I had my reasons of using lots of white flour in my recent recipes. Now the bag is empty and all my remaining organic white flour in tucked away snug in a bucket with a gamma lid. Not too far away.

My fear of cooking and cleaning and cooking and cleaning is coming true. I have been cooking in and cleaning my kitchen all day! I told Mr. Incredible I may not be leaving my kitchen for a month! The sad part is the kitchen is the only room left to clean as I type this post.

Dinner. We went to the dinner party tonight. Amy made a beautiful spinach salad and lasagna. Julz and I were in salad heaven. Spinach and strawberries and blueberries with chevre and candie walnuts. Delish! I am hoping more friends invite us over for dinner. She even sent us home with some left over lasagna. Amy is such a dear.

Food Storage Used Today:

• Freeze dried sausage crumbles
• Freeze dried onions
• Scrambled egg mix
• Egg white powder