I started out the morning baking an apple crisp for breakfast. I know its a dessert. But you only live once and heck we are living on food storage so we have earned dessert for breakfast! Plus apple crisp had a cup of oatmeal in it, and that is a breakfast cereal. Mr. Incredible and I were going out on a date and Grandma was coming over to hang with the kiddos while we were gone. I took a photo and then put the crisp in the oven.

When we got home about 4 hours later there was only some crisp around the edges left. I should’ve taked a photo but I was hungry and instead just scraped what was left onto a plate and stuck it in the microwave. Here is what was left.

It was really sweet. The recipe I adapted it from called for fresh apples and I used dehydrated apple slices. The recipe called for 2 cups of sugar! I cut that back a little bit. By 1/4 cup but really could have just added 1 cup of sugar and would have been plenty sweet. I didn’t use any butter in the crisp topping, I substituted in corn oil.

Grandma brought with her some fresh strawberries and bananas and some grade B maple syrup to dip the sliced bananas and strawberries  She knows how to get into her grandchildren’s hearts. Especially when they have been eating freeze dried produce for the last 14 days. When we came home from our date, Pagey told me she likes to dip mini carrots into maple syrup too.

Today was a random day for cooking. My meals were all over the place and whenever. I pressure canned black beans the way my cousin Jill taught me. So easy, so good.

We ate left over soup and bread from yesterday.  I made bagels! Yes chewy plain bagels. I have a brick of cream cheese in my fridge. I have been saving for cream cheese frosting for my cinnamon rolls. But I decided to make bagels too. I still haven’t made cinnamon rolls with yeast during this challenge. The bagels we relatively easy and fun to make. Check out the recipe here. And some photos so you can see parts of the process.

This was really easy. After letting the dough rest for 15 minutes I cut the circle of dough into 8 pieces like cutting a pie. Took a wedge of dough and rolled it into a ball. Stuck my finger through the center and made a ring out of each piece of dough.

While the bagel rings were rising I boiled 16 cups of water with 1 tablespoon of sugar. Then I placed 4 bagels in the boiling water. I flipped them over after 3 1/2 minutes so each side was boiled. They bagels rise more in the water. I crowded these bagels a bit. Next time I will use a larger pot.

I removed the boiled bagels with a slotted spoon and let them drain for a second before placing them on a ceramic baking sheet sprinkled with cornmeal. I baked them for 30 minutes.

They aren’t the pretties bagels. But they sure tasted good and the texture was wonderful. We used less then half our brick of cream cheese. I can still make frosting!

Fastfood when living on food storage is ready to cook entrees. I have in my food storage some Thrive Express. These are so so so easy. Boil water, dump in the contents of the pouch, stir and cook for the allotted time. We made three Thrive Express meals tonight:

The rice dishes went over the best with the kiddos. The chili was too tomatoey. I added some of my freshly pressure canned black beans to the chili to bulk it up a bit. Its quite meaty, but I wanted more beans in it. I have left over chili for tomorrow.

Here is a photo of my beans just out of the pressure canner. I use my used lids when I pressure can beans that I don’t intend to store on the shelf. I just need a lid to keep the product in the can. I plan to use the last 3 quarts of beans this week in meals. Its so convenient having the beans already cooked and ready to go, no hassel with soaking and draining and rinsing. I can customize the amount of salt I add to the dry beans in a jar. And it is much less expensive than canned beans.  The beans are still boiling that is why there are all those bubbles on top.