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.