Progress on one year of meals for 12 people...*

“Meals for 12 in a Box” Storage
This is a slow process, because it is a daunting task. Wow! But, I am taking it one meal at a time. Here goes... 

I tend to store things separately so I will have some flexibility when it comes to making meals later down the road. I don't want to be “boxed in”. 
But, when it is a meal I know we like I “box it in”. I will then store it “12 meals at a time”. After I hit the goal of one years food supplies stored for DH and me; this year I am now working on storing meals for 12 people for one year. That's 4464 meals just for dinner. (13,392 for three meals a day)

Basically when you have a specific meal you like, work towards buying enough for 12 meals (one meal, once a month for 12 months). Do that 30 times & you have one year of stored food. Simple, huh? 

I have been really working hard toward this lofty goal. With some adaptions, I have started a list on a calendar page, as I figure out what I already have on hand and what I need to add to bump up the # of meals, then I add it to the calendar. This taking me awhile, particularly since I have started packing things away for when we move. I certainly have more food stored, I just haven't converted it to my calendar yet.

BREAKFAST: I started with breakfast. Since I already had plenty of bulk items that I would need stored.

For example we have 24 ½ gallon jars of cold cereal. Being generous, I estimated that would be about “8 breakfasts x 12” for the year.

Plus, I have TONS of oatmeal stored. Enough for to round off the remaining breakfasts; to include dehydrated fruits, canned fruit and powdered milk.

DESSERTS:

With that ton of oats I have enough oats left to add at least six cookie “days x 12” for my calendar, to include: sugar, butter, p.b. and cocoa, for our favorite no bake cookies.

I have 52 cake mixes (yes, I am working on having on hand the stuff stored to make cakes from scratch), which added about 4 “days x 12” to my list.

Here is one new example for dinner that I finally completed:

STRONGANOFF:
So, if this is one meal, I need to have 24 pints of beef (the other half will be meatless made with mushrooms), 48 pints of pressure canned milk & 48 packs of the packaged mix, plus noodles.= one meal for 12 people, 12 times in a year. To expand that: This is what it looks like on paper:12 (people preparing for) x 12 (once a month for 12 months) x 31 (one month) x 3 (meals a day) = one year of storage.

I was sort of beating myself up for not being any further along on my goal, but that meal alone is 144 meal portions. NOT beating myself up anymore.

Edited: Dehydrating milk, canning milk and canning butter are popular posts. The "how to" links are embedded within those words (above). I need to transfer the butter from Facebook to the blog. I tend to respond a lot faster to comments left on the facebook page, with THIS post if you have questions or comments.

Note: Currently of the 12 people I am preparing for, 6 are children. When I am storing for the children, I am storing an adult portion for them. While they are young now, if something happens say in five years, they will be teenagers. I want to insure that I have enough to feed them at what ever age.

I often store these meals in these banana boxes, good movable size for this gramma. I label and date the boxes. I also add the amounts needed of other items on the box itself.

You may modify it, based on your goals. For example, when I got started I modified it to “6 meals” so I could attain my first goal of 6 months storage goal. Don't forget to add water to your storage as needed.
I will be slowly working on these boxes and will share more as I go along. 

What I do here is simply share our preparedness journey. If you liked this post we would love it if you joined our Perky Prepping Gramma community on Facebook, comment or share. Plus it would just make my day. (1597)

Things I have used or read this week:

    

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