Food storage Pizza!

Food Storage: Pizza

If you ask most kids the most universally liked food may very well be pizza. When you are thinking about living life without electricity, why would you want to stress your kids out feeding them only porridge, soups and beans? Yes traditional wisdom says these are easy to store foods and easy to make post electricity but why not make sure you have some comfort foods along as well. Pizza can and should be a food storage meal.

When I think of fast and easy, bread dough does not come to mind. In fact I do not even store wheat berries right now. I figure it is pointless until I own a wheat grinder. So we are stocked up on the easier to cook and start of multi ethnic cuisines rice. In order to store pizza you need some sort of dough, but I say skip all the work and store Boboli. What is this? Well it is a premade Pizza crust that is vacuumed packed and stored on the shelf of your grocery store. Usually hanging next to the pepperoni that is also shelf stable. I will agree that these options are a little pricey, but still much cheaper than a trip to Pizza Hut. They are good for approximately six months after purchase. Which for me is a little light on the food storage storability.  However we eat pizza every week so rotating this should be quite a bit easier than porridge, soups and beans anyway.

Once you have the dough figured out then the sauce and topping are pretty easy, until you get to cheese. Right now there are three options for cheese. Good: make your own from canned milk Better: Freeze mozzarella and make sure your freezer works after an EMP Best: Buy some freeze dried cheese. Thrive is supposed to be a good brand. http://www.thrivelife.com/shredded-mozzarella-cheese-freeze-dried.html

So there you have it Pizza as a food storage food and after looking at the Boboli calorie count and how light and flexible the product is I am seeing it as a great contender for my bug out bags. I bet my kids would eat it plain.

Water: Plan A, plan B plan C

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Here in Oklahoma we are having epic flooding. We have been blessed to not be personally impacted by this deluge, however it does make you wonder about all that undrinkable water. If let us say my well was underwater then it would be contaminated with all the other stuff in that water like stuff seeping from the water treatment plants, whatever in in the engines of the cars floating down stream and dare I say even perhaps a body or two human or otherwise. Water could become a serious issue. Even in “One Second After” they had a show down over the water in the reservoir. So in light of these unusually Oklahoman events of epic flood I am going over my water plan A plan B and Plan C.

Plan A: we live rurally and have two wells. The currently operating well has an electric submersion pump in it which provide ample daily water supply.

Plan B: There is no water coming out of the pipes! We have approximately 80 gallons of water bottles stacked here and there about the house. Most are 4 gallons from Sam’s club.

Plan C: The electricity is out, the pipes froze or a well piece is not functioning, we have a secondary well actually located in our well house that has a homemade, husband designed hand pump made from items that are available from hardware stores.

Plan D: There is no water coming out of the hand pumped well. We have two very brown ponds on our property, plus another across the street and a running stream about ½ a mile down the road. Down the hill and back up again. This a horrible option as we only have a water bottle type filter and that just isn’t going to cut it in a real live emergency.We would have to come up with a make shift sand filer and then boil the water.