Overlapping ingredients

One of the best things I learned regarding preparing is to store what you eat and eat what you store. It’s a very simple concept, but extremely powerful in focusing our food storage planning. If you eat what you store and store what you eat, you know you will always have something you like on hand.

Keeping a food journal is an easy way to get an understanding of what you are eating on a regular basis. If you keep it accurate, you can also get a feel for your burn rate and how much stock to keep on hand. To be honest, keeping a journal in general is a good way to keep up with a prepared household.

I want to suggest something else that may give you a quick leg up and continue to be an arrow in your preparedness quiver. It will not replace a food journal, and it will still take some time, but it can bring focus and give you quick win.

Go through your recipes and look for those that have similar ingredients. As an example, look at my go-to chili recipe. It was the first post on this site for a reason. Most of the ingredients in it can be used in several different dishes.

The beans and corn alone can be put together into a quick side salad in about 5 minutes:

Just crack a can of each (chickpeas, black beans and corn) drain, rinse and dump in a bowl. Dress that with some red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, salt (not too much since the beans tend to be salty) and pepper, maybe some onion and garlic powder (if you don’t have fresh) and some basil. You can also add some feta crumbles if you have any on hand. Or shredded mozzarella for a home made pizza recipe. This makes a great side or small salad for lunch.

When I started to get serious about stocking up on food, I looked at the recipes my wife and I make and bought extra of those ingredients. There was so much overlap between my chili and her spaghetti sauce it was easy. In a very short amount of time, we had a good stock of ingredients for at least 2 meals that I knew we would eat.

You don’t need to do this all at once. Once you know what you need for ingredients, hopefully for a couple different recipes, pick up extra on your next trip. If you make 2 recipes a week, using a can of diced tomatoes per meal, grab 4 cans. Congratulations, you just added one week to your supply.

This is copy canning. And it works. By taking copy canning and really focusing on those recipes you make every week, you can resist that urge to buy things just because “they” say you should. If you aren’t a rice and beans family, don’t buy rice and beans! And if you are keeping track of those ingredients that you know can be used in 3 different dishes, when a deal shows up you can pounce on it, buy big and know it isn’t a waste of money. That food won’t sit on your shelf and collect dust.

Do this with a couple recipes until you have 2 weeks worth of back stock. Now pick 2 more recipes with overlapping ingredients and do the same. Once you have two weeks of those recipes, start on 2 new recipes. In about a month, you will should find yourself with 2 weeks of supplies for 6 different meals. If one of those creates leftovers, you now have 2 weeks worth of meals secured. I would bet that if you look across all of the ingredients you have, you will find at least one additional meal you could make, too. If you can double up on ingredients for all recipes each week, you can probably cut that time down.

OK, so if you’ve made it this far, let me give you some very discrete action items:

1. Pick two recipes that have overlapping ingredients that you make regularly.
2. Figure out how much of each ingredient you need to keep on hand to make both recipes in a week.
3. When shopping, replace the items used in the prior week’s meals plus enough to make the ingredients for the following week (2 weeks if you can swing it).
4. Pick two new overlapping recipes and do steps 2 & 3.
5. Pick two additional recipes and again follow steps 2& 3.
6. Repeat the process until you have 4 weeks of all ingredients for 6 meals on hand. Chances are you will have this done in under a month.

The goal is to shop and stock with focus on what you know you will use. It is something I wish I had done earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time and money As you grow, you will expand on this, both with new recipes, and new foods. Until then, this process may help you get started and quickly put up a stock of food you know you will use.