This is not the first time food storage has saved dinner. Just the most recent time. It was Sunday (you know, when I avoid shopping and all the stores around here are closed anyway). We had been visiting friends and I needed a quick dinner, so I went to the food storage room and pulled out three cans of clam chowder. The kind you just heat and eat. Heat up some clam chowder and serve with some bread–quick and easy. Unfortunately, two of the cans of soup had been in sweet husband’s work truck kit for some time before making it to the food room, and apparently they don’t react well to being frozen and heated and frozen and heated in the back of a pickup very well because when I opened the can I could tell something wasn’t right with them.
They were all grainy and not smooth and creamy like their counterpart who had lived its whole life on a shelf in a temperature controlled environment. They didn’t smooth out when I poured them out and mixed them. A little iffy, so I opted not to eat them. The dog liked them just fine.
Now I’m totally bummed because I’m hungry and I really wanted clam chowder and I don’t have any potatoes for making my own. Then I thought, wait a minute. I have canned clams and dehydrated potatoes (I ended up using some dehydrated sliced potatoes from a package of hamburger helper I had in storage instead of digging out and opening a bucket of dehydrated potato dices). And I have dehydrated carrots and dehydrated celery. And I have milk (I didn’t have to use powdered milk, although I could have).
So I got the dehydrated goods cooking in some water, added milk and butter/flour to thicken it, a can of clams, some seasonings, and then added the one good can of soup at the end to make the pot more full.
Voila! Food storage sames dinner. And it was pretty doggone tasty. Now, I could have just decided to make something else, but I already had the good can of soup open and I really wanted some clam chowder at that point. It took about 20 minutes longer than just opening a can, so not too bad on time either. Has your food storage ever saved you?
Keep preparing! Angela
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Yes, yes, a thousand times “yes.” Actually, not that many. However, it is so nice and handy to know that whatever I do not have at my fingertips is somewhere in the house, stored for just such a moment. I do not have the religious imperative to store food, nor do I have the inclination or energy to do much more than I do right now. At this moment, I am loading my excalibur. There is bell pepper, and I will put garlic in shortly. I don’t want to run it so near empty, so I am trying to figure out what else to put in there. Potatoes and Romaine are all I see…lol. There are some things I hate running out of–Miracle Whip, butter,tp name two, so having a stash saves my sanity, time, and gas some days.