I made an egg scramble this morning. I had 4 potatoes left and shredded two of them for breakfast. I mixed up the equivalent of 5 eggs using the scrambled egg mix. I chose to add mixed bell peppers. I have fallen in love again with Thrive’s mixed bell peppers. They are so good. And a #10 can lasts forever! I also added freeze dried onions, and freeze dried sausage and some freeze dried green chilis. All Thrive of course.

I walked away from the hash browns to help Julz order some photos for a school project. The potatoes burned pretty bad in the center. I cut out the burnt part and the rest was okay. I have no resources to waste. I added the scrambled egg mix and the veggies and the rehydrated and drained meat. I used the left over liquid to deglaze the pan and then dumped in the eggs and veggies. The skillet was excellent. I am slacking on my picture taking. It looked similar to the skillet I cooked last week. This one was not as greasy.

For lunch I made chicken soft tacos with our left over chicken and tortillas from our enchiladas last night. After school Reese had a friend over. Reese’s friend wanted waffles. I swear waffles are our go-to food. We snacked on freeze dried pineapple, and freeze dried fuji apples. Oh we opened a can of freeze dried ice cream sandwiches. Reese really loves them. I really love Thrive freeze dried double chocolate ice cream bars.

Last week I invited my friend Rachel and her family over for dinner for tonight. She has four children and her husband and my husband are in a similar line of work. Rachel brought a yummy guacamole dip, fresh bell peppers and celery sticks. Loved it!

I made spaghetti, a dinner staple. We eat spaghetti all the time. I was amazed when I realized its been 12 days and we have not had spaghetti for dinner yet. Tonight was the night.

We used all Thrive vegetables. This is a recipe Mr. Incredible found in the summer and made a batch using fresh vegetables. Mr. Incredible does not normally cook up recipes in the kitchen. I was thrilled with how well it turned out when he made it this summer. Tonight I asked him to dig out the recipe again so we could make it for our pasta. This time it was even better because the prep time was cut in half since we used all Thrive veggies. Mr. Incredible said, “I like cooking with Thrive.” Marvelous I tell you! I have canned crushed tomatos and tomato sauce  in my food storage. I also used and love the versatility of the Thrive tomato powder. I make it into tomato paste all the time.

I am storing many pounds of Italian organic whole wheat pasta. The sauce  was served on fettucini tonight.

After school today I made the kiddos a tortilla with cheese. They also ate Thrive mangos, and a smoothie. I keep kefir grains and make the kefir into a smooth when its ready. I save the powder from the bottoms of my fruit cans to mix into the smoothies. The freeze drying process removes 98 % of the water from the food. Some of the fruits have turned into powder at the end of the can from jostling around during shipping.

Today we added strawberry powder and peach powder to our smoothie. Gigi helped me make it.  I have some mango powder and more strawberry powder to add to the next smoothie. Normally I add frozen berries and other frozen fruit to thicken it. With the food storage exercise going on, I am adding ice instead. I add a quarter cup of Thrive fruit drink and a cup of water and ice, ice baby. I like my smoothies cold and thick.

This is not cheating. On Tuesday I invited my brother’s family over to dinner for tonight. My gracious sister-in-law offered to bring something to the dinner. She is such a doll. I asked her how she felt about bringing a green salad.  She did and it was fabulous because she is fabulous herself. We got to eat fresh green salad tonight. And my brother’s family got to eat yummy chicken enchiladas from our food storage. Even Stevens.

Enchiladas start with tortillas. At 2:30 this afternoon I started dinner.  It needed to be ready by 6:oo pm. Don’t you just love slaving away in the kitchen?  I am totally kidding! The more familiar I am getting in cooking with my food storage the easier, yummier and quicker it becomes. Its like my creative mind starts working and I have ideas about making this or that with what I have on hand. It is amazing!

While the dough rests I make the filling. Its a cinch because is all shelf stable. I use cream of chicken soup. I know some of you are rolling your eyes at cream of chicken soup. Its not the healthiest choice but it is shelf stable and its for company. And it is for company. Honestly this is how I make my creamy chicken enchiladas, with cream of chicken soup. Sorta lame-O but totally yum-O. I add some spices and green chilis. I added two pints of my canned chicken. My cousin in Arizona taught me how to pressure can chicken. It is wonderful! And so easy. Promise. As long as you have a pressure canner. When I find chicken for a song I load up and pressure can several pints. Normally a pint is plenty for a dinner for my family.

At 4:45 I do need to start the tortillas which I whip up in 5 minutes. The dough I mean. Then I enlist Julz to help me roll or cook the tortillas. I have learned it is best to give my kiddos choices, they love to choose the task they do. And honestly I appreciate the help so which ever she wanted to do would be marvelous. She chose rolling the tortillas. She doesn’t like working next to the hot stove. She is rolling the dough and I am baking the tortillas.  I tell her we need to have the enchiladas wrapped up in the oven by 5:30, we have 20 minutes to get them done. Ready, set,  go. Its like Cupcake Wars and Julz loves that show.

With the enchiladas in the oven, I make refried beans with the rest of my pinto beans. Beans are a residual food in so many ways. The refried beans are okay. I will have to explore other recipes. Cheese we used Thrive Colby cheese tonight. We are a cheesy family.

It was a good day livin’ on our food storage. This is a great exercise for me in all sorts of ways. I am so happy my family rocks and is willing to do it with me! No photos. With company it threw everything off and I forgot to get my camera out when we were eating.

Heather Lorimer is a Platinum Thrive Consultant, a mom of soon-to-be four, and a former home economics teacher. She has a fabulous blog about cooking with her food storage. I have been eyeing the Chicken Mango Stir Fry on her blog for several months now. Tonight I cooked it up with some modifications. Yes I am a modifier.

Rather then telling you the differences between the two recipes. I am simply going to explain what I did for dinner, inspired by Heather.

In the past I have made coconut rice for my family. Both times it was not received well, okay they hated it. Mr. Incredible and I on the other hand love coconut rice. The kiddos prefer just plain rice. Tonight I cooked up the last of the basmati rice I had on hand. I love those long, long grains of basmati rice.

While the rice was steaming. I rehydrated the Thrive Seasoned Chicken in my pyrex 2 cup measuring cup. I filled it with the freeze dried chicken slices then poured boiling hot water to cover the chicken. I covered the  measuring cup  with a plate and let it hang out while I worked on the marinade. Since freeze dried chicken in already cooked it is a bit tricky to marinade. I wanted all the flavor of the marinade so I mixed it up and when the Thrive Seasoned chicken was finished rehydrating in the hot water I let it sit in the marinade for a little while.

I have Nellie and Joe’s key lime juice in my fridge. I have a super Key Lime pie recipe that calls for it. Lime juice is always handy for me. No lime zest though. This is the lime I used in Heather’s marinade.

In a separate dish I put 1 1/2 cups of mangos, the onions and mixed bell peppers. I pour the excess liquid from the chicken on top of the fruit and veggies. Those rehydrated for about five minutes.

In a frying pan I added a bit of olive oil. Poured the chicken and marinade in the pan and stir fried them for a minute or so. Next I added the mangos, peppers and onions. Since I didn’t add the coconut milk to the rice. I added a half a can of full fat coconut milk to the stir fry. I let that simmer for a few minutes. Added some freeze dried cilantro. Done. Served over plain basmati rice. When you eat this dish, food storage is the last thing on your mind. Lucky I store coconut milk in my pantry. Not enough though. Its on the list.

No cheese in this recipe. As I am cooking out of my food storage I realize how much cheese I use in my everyday meals.

This is not what I was thinking when I was searching high and low for a recipe. I did want to have a oat bar that Julz could eat, meaning it had none or very little sugar. I found this recipe at Kath Eats and used it.

Nuts. A half cups of walnuts or almonds. Last Christmas in a white elephant gift I got was a bag full of nuts in their shells. After Christmas Mr. Incredible asked if we should just throw them away since we don’t own a nut cracker. I said no, and threw the bag in my “health food” cupboard. I wonder if I am the only one who had a “health food” cupboard. I was raised in Seattle Washington by a hippy granola mom. She is amazing. She cooked from scratch when I was young. No sugar was in our house growing up. She made yogurt, bread and sprouted all sorts of seeds to eat. She birthed her babies at home using certified nurse midwives. And even gave homeschooling a shot. My mom ate to live, she didn’t live to eat. As a child I didn’t eat to live, I lived to eat. If something looked, smelled, or had a weird texture I wasn’t touching it. I can relate to my Reese completely. And I let him live to eat too. The food in my “health food cupboard is stuff like, millet from Eden foods, kombu and wakame (sea vegetables), dry chick peas, raw sunflower seeds, chia seeds, agave nectar, brown rice syrup, raw almond butter, polenta, dates, raisins, and nuts in their shells. I have another cupboard for vitamins and supplements, herb teas, essential oils, conventional and homeopathic medicines.

Aaah, my tangents are so tangenty.

I used raisins, sunflower seeds, and sesame seeds. The nuts I used were almonds, walnuts and hazelnuts. Kath’s recipe includes no sugar. Thats a good thing. Except I could not wrap my head around oats in a recipe with zero sugar. I did sneak 3 tablespoons of brown sugar into this recipe. It still qualified as Julz compliant.

This is the mixture poured into a parchment paper lined pan.

Julz and I both thought these would be better with apricots instead of raisins. I am also thinking freeze dried mangos.  Mr. Incredible is snacking on them and likes them the best out of the fam.

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”.