The document provides tips for planning meals using food storage items, organizing food storage, and rotating items to maintain freshness. Key points include: - Make a menu and calendar for meals using favorite recipes and food storage items. Organize recipes and store ingredients together. - Properly storing, rotating, and incorporating food storage items into regular meals helps ensure freshness and prevents waste. - Various methods are described for organizing and tracking food storage items to know what needs to be replaced and easily find ingredients for recipes.

1. Recipe Planning & Using Your Food Storage

6. Food & Water Storage Pyramid

7. Add canned, dehydrated, freeze dried, sprouting, gardening How do I add fresh vegetables and fruit to my Food Storage plan?

8. Home Storage Salad Bar?

12. When planning your food storage Menu you need to be creative and think out of the box.

13. Menus at a Glance List your menu plan and in (11) put how many times you will have that meal. This will serve as your master list.

19. Organizing Ideas Organize your Kitchen shelves by Recipe Store all ingredients for each individual Recipe together on the kitchen shelf. Better Homes and Garden published And article April of 2008 on “ Getting Organized” The put-together pantry: make meal prep a breeze” depicts wire bins neatly labeled with the main dish names and filled with the canned ingredients for each recipe.

22. Why Rotate my Food Storage? 1. To provide the most nutrition and taste for your family. 2. It prevents throwing away unused, expired goods, which saves $$. 3. It allows you and your family to get accustomed to eating stored and dehydrated foods. 4. Eating your long term storage is healthy. Most food storage items are lower in fat and higher in nutrients.

23. Ways to do Rotation

24. Use rotation racks or rolling shelves

26. Use a rotation sheet

27. Rubber band method - The basic idea is that you have a certain number of the same items. As you use them, you will eventually come across the last one which is the rubber-banded. This means “hey, go to the store I’m out of raisins!” or whatever it is.

28. • The 2 column method – Great for food that you keep 6-10 boxes at a time. Put them in 2 columns right next to each other with the earliest expiration date in the right hand column. When you need one box, take it form the right hand column, first box first. When the right hand column is empty, move the lefthand column into the right hand column and restock into the lefthand column.

29. • The Sticker Method- Buy colored circle stickers. Assign a color to each year or each 6 months period. Label your food according to it’s expiration date.

31. 1. On a poster board, tape or glue pockets made of index cards cut in half, one for each kind of food in your basic year’s supply. Each pocket is labeled by the type of food, number of packages or units, amount in each package, and the total amount needed for a year’s supply of that item. For example, one pocket might be labeled “spaghetti—48 boxes x 2 lbs. = 96 lbs.” 2. We make an inventory card for each package or unit. Spaghetti, for example, would need forty-eight cards, each with “spaghetti—2 lbs.” written on it. Those forty-eight cards are placed in the labeled pocket. Do the same with each food item. 3. Whenever someone takes an item from storage, that person also pulls a card from the pocket and brings both items to the kitchen. We place the card in an envelope taped behind a cupboard door in the kitchen. We color-coded the cards to represent the source for obtaining each food item. Foods obtained from the cannery are kept on red cards, grocery store items on green ones, warehouse items on blue, and home-canned items are on pink cards. It’s a simple matter before shopping to pull all the green cards from the envelope when planning a trip to the store, or all the red cards when I plan for a trip to the cannery. I know exactly what needs to be replaced. As items are restocked, I replace the cards in the poster board pockets. We hang our poster board in our storage area. Now we are able to keep our year’s supply of food fully stocked.—Leslie O. Andersen, Kansas City, Missouri"

32. Under the bed: Put plywood on the floor under your bed with wood dividers nailed onto it. This will allow you to put cans in on one side of the bed and take them out from the other side of the bed. Don’t forget the plywood, the cans are difficult to push to the front if they are on carpet.

33. Rotating Shelves: Pre-fabricated shelves can be bought with pre-drilled holes so you can adjust the height of the shelves. If you put one end of the shelf one hole lower than the other side your cans will roll.

34. Store items that you use frequently in 5 gallon buckets. Keep one of the buckets in your pantry with “ Gamma Seal” lid on it. They are easy to get in and out of and when it is empty, you can just open another bucket, dump it into the bucket with the gamma seal lid and refill the empty bucket. This is easy to do on your own time with no special equipment. (Put items in them that you use frequently so you can rotate through them—for example, flour, sugar, powdered milk, etc…) *Don’t forget to put oxy packs in the buckets that you seal. If they are full, you will need about 4 oxy packs per bucket. They do not need to be in the buckets with the gamma seal lids. You should be in and out of those frequently. You can purchase oxy packs at the cannery for $.07 each.

35. As we anticipate the Savior’s return to reign on the earth, we must prepare ourselves individually, as families, and as a people. … I would live as if it were to be tomorrow—but I am still planting cherry trees! Wilford Woodruff “ I know of no other way to prepare for these times of adjustment than to be certain that during times of employment, preparations are made for less prosperous times, should they occur. Start now to create a plan if you don’t already have one, or update your present plan. Watch for best buys that will fit into your year’s supply. We are not in a situation that requires panic buying, but we do need to be careful in purchasing and rotating the storage that we’re putting away. The instability in the world today makes it imperative that we take heed of the counsel and prepare for the future” L. Tom Perry “ The best place to have some food set aside is within our homes. . . . ‘We can begin ever so modestly. We can begin with a one week’s food supply and gradually build it to a month, and then to three months. . . . I fear that so many feel that a long-term food supply is so far beyond their reach that they make no effort at all. “Begin in a small way, . . . and gradually build toward a reasonable objective.” President Gordon B. Hinkley, ‘To Men of the Priesthood,’ Ensign, Nov 200?