StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - Save Money, Eat Better, Help The Environment. Kitchen Storage Solutions: Pantry Storage Tips & Cabinet Organization Tips - Article. Racks for canned goods 1 of 1 Use wire closet racks in kitchen cabinets Use closet racks as cabinet organizers.
Trim the racks to length with a hacksaw and then mount screws to the back side of the face frame to hold the racks in place. The back side of the rack simply rests against the back of the cabinet. Now you can easily find your soup and check the rest of your inventory at a glance Video: How to Organize Your Pantry Elisa Bernick, an editor at The Family Handyman, will show you a quick and easy way to organize your canned goods in your kitchen pantry. Wine glass molding 1 of 2 Use T-molding to hold stemware 2 of 2 Cut T-molding to length and screw in place T-molding designed for wood floor transitions makes a perfect rack for stemware. Video: How to Store Wine Glasses Kitchen storage is always valuable real estate.
Stop drawers from falling out Homemade drawer stop Drawer stop keeps drawers in place Plastic bag holder Tissue box keeps plastic bags organized Thyme saver Spice storage Back to Top. Simple Food Storage Meals for Tight Times: Stock up on three months worth, fast! When a summertime monsoon storm is on the way, I quickly track down my kids, bring them indoors, and prepare to hunker down. It’s a mom-instinct. We unplug the computers, make sure all the windows are securely closed and locked, and if my husband isn’t home, I call to make sure he’s okay. A storm of a different kind is on its way to America and has already been wreaking havoc with family incomes and our sense of security. No one knows what the extent of the damage will ultimately be, but moms everywhere are responding to their maternal instinct to gather everyone together. Image by mullica Having enough groceries on hand for a period of three months is a good first goal, but if buying enough for three months is too daunting and not in the budget, start with buying enough to have a pantry fully stocked for one month.
If you’ve been losing sleep over the state of our economy or your own personal finances, there’s no time to waste. 1. 1-2 #10 dehydrated potato dices. Image by crd! 2. 3. 4. Long-Term Food Storage. 12 Fruits and Vegetables That Last for Months. Do you routinely throw $5 bills away just for kicks? Probably not. And very few of us light candles with dollar bills, no matter how much we may have loved Scrooge McDuck. But that’s basically what you’re doing whenever you go grocery shopping. According to a recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, 40 percent of the food that’s grown and sold in the United States is wasted—if we cut food waste by just a third, we could feed every hungry person in the country. That waste comes to the staggering cost of $2,275 per year, for a family of four. Another report from the United Nations pointed the finger, in developed countries at least, squarely at grocery stores and consumers, in part because the former pushes “great bargains” that encourage the latter to buy more than they need.
The solution, though, isn’t cutting back on your fresh produce purchases. Apples Apples need an optimal temperature of 30°F to 32°F—just 10 degrees warmer, and they’ll ripen twice as fast. Beets Garlic. How to Store Vegetables & Fruit Without Plastic. Food Storage Basics: Step 1 – Water.
What does water have to do with food storage? Well, you can have all the food in the world but if you don’t have water you won’t be living long enough to enjoy that food. In most cases, you’ll be around for only three days. One easy way to remember this is with the 3-3-3 rule. Generally speaking you cannot live longer than 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food. In an ideal world, we would all have a years supply of water stored away. However for most people, storing a years supply of water is not practical and in many cases not necessary (I’ll be covering water filtration methods later). Here’s some helpful pointers:You should have at least one gallon per person, per day, for 14 days: 14 days acts as a buffer zone that gives you time until the infrastructure problem is fixed or at least until you can figure out other water-procurement methods.
Storing water is an easy step. Here are the links to all the articles in this series: Enjoy Fresh, Local Food All Year. This guide to fresh, local food and seasonal storage will provide all you need to know about preserving, canning, freezing, dehydrating and more. Enjoy Fresh Local Food: Seasonal Storage Can you name three crops that will keep easily for months in a cool closet? (Try winter squash, sweet potatoes and garlic.) Or how about vegetables that stay fresh until well after Christmas when stashed in the refrigerator, or even just a cooler in your unheated garage? (We recommend carrots, beets and potatoes.) Buying local produce and “putting it by” (or “putting it up,” depending on your region) is a great way to support local farmers and give your family fresher, better-tasting organic food.
Every bite you take — today or months from now — helps strengthen your local economy, supports more sustainable food production and brings you a step closer to a more self-sufficient life. Plus, buying local food in bulk often can save you money on grocery bills. Cool Storage Superstars Underground Sleepers. The Produce Worker's Guide to Storing 25 Common Fruits and Veggies. Popular in Food & Drink Unless you belong to a CSA or grow your own garden, produce can take up a huge chunk of your grocery budget, and throwing away food can also feel like throwing away money. As a former professional cook and produce worker, however, I know that getting the most out of your produce can be tricky if you don't know the best way to store or prep it. (See also: Waste Not, Want Not: Stop Throwing Away Your Food!) A note about freezing in general — there's less chance of freezer burn when you use a sealable freezer-weight bag; you can also suck out the air with a drinking straw to ensure that there's no air in the bag before you close it.
Whatever your preferred method may be, I've rounded up all 25 items from the previous produce worker's guide to picking produce and laid out some basic prepping and storage tips to help you get the most out of your favorite fruits and vegetables. Avocados Bananas Basil Beets Berries Broccoli Carrots Citrus Corn Cucumbers Eggplant Figs Green Beans Kale. Chill food without electricity with the flowerpot fridge. Here is a video version of how to make the world's cheapest and easiest refrigerator from two terracotta pots. It uses minimal resources and runs completely without electricity. It's called a zeer pot, or the pot-in-pot and was rebirthed by Mohammed Bah Abba, who put the laws of thermodynamics to work for mankind.
Patrick Whitefield previously posted a solution here on permaculture.co.uk describing how to make this simple device but here is a visiual/auditory how to with the added advantage of some temperature testing on a hot day in the USA at the end. You'll be suitably impressed at how cold this design gets. Wonderful!
How To Prepare Survival Food;The Survival Bible. Where’s the Meat? « The Lazy Homesteader. Since my post last week when we unplugged the fridge I’ve gotten a lot of questions (mainly on my facebook page) about meat. Are we vegetarian? Are we switching to raw foods? How do we plan to keep meat from going bad? What about lunch meat? Well, it’s pretty simple. When meat is on our menu, roughly three days a week in the summer time, I go out to the chest freezer in the garage, retrieve the prescribed package of protein and let it defrost on a plate on the counter, just in time to get cooked up for dinner.
We generally don’t buy much in the way of meat from the grocery store. When I announced this project, my mom, who really does think I’ve lost it completely, asked about the Thanksgiving turkey. The other question a few people asked me (people who admitted they hadn’t been following along from the beginning) was where would we get the ice, since the fridge was unplugged and we were using the freezer compartment as a cooler? So far, the switch hasn’t actually been too drastic. Practical Ways to Store Food without a Fridge « The Lazy Homesteader. Over the last couple of weeks there has been an article from treehugger.com floating around Facebook, Reddit, and Pinterest highlighting Korean designer, Jihyun Ryou’s five creative ways to store food without a fridge.
The designer’s goal was “re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food, which is closer to nature,” by using objects to make this knowledge visible. The designs are super modern looking with clean lines and things like sand and water mounted to your wall. And, I have to admit, they do look cool, despite being kind of impractical. In light of their impracticality, and because we’ve lived without a fridge for the last 9 months, I’m offering up some practical answers to Ryou’s modern artworks; while less artistic, everyday homesteaders can apply them to their own kitchens.
Symbiosis of apple and potato: Most fruits don’t need to be stored in the refrigerator. My mom had one of these hanging produce baskets. Verticality of Root Vegetables: Like this: How To Dehydrate Food: Basic Tips Of Drying Fruits and Vegetables. How to dehydrate food is an important skill for emergency preparedness. You can stock your emergency food storage as you prepare your daily meals. Dehydrating Food Saves Everything: Money: produce is free from your survival garden, buy seasonal produce in bulk, no refrigeration is required, produces an extra-long shelf life.Space: takes up A LOT less storage space then cans or bottlesYour Health: Dried foods are safe… drying prevents bacteria and mold growth.
Dehydrating removes the water from the food, but leaves the vitamins and minerals. Your Time: just slice, prep, dry, pack and storeYour Taste Buds: dried foods have amazing intense flavor and do not melt into a sticky mess Whether you want to preserve fruits and vegetables from your garden or the produce from your local farmers market... dehydrating food is the right method for you! Want to Know About How To Dehydrate Food? How Does Dehydrating Preserve Food? Warm temperatures cause the moisture to evaporate. How do I Get My Food Dried? How to Preserve Food by Robert Wayne Atkins. How to Preserve Food for Future Consumption Using Three Simple Old Fashioned Methods Copyright © May 7, 2010 by Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.
All Rights Reserved. Click Here for a Microsoft WORD printer friendly copy of this article. Basic Food Safety Precautions Wash your hands thoroughly before handling any type of food. The Three Traditional Food Preservation Methods There are three simple ways to preserve food using traditional old fashioned procedures that do not require any special chemicals, or salt, or equipment: In the ground. In the Ground (Appropriate for Carrots and Radishes in the Fall) Leave the vegetables in the original ground where they grew during the summer. This technique works well with carrots and radishes. Mulch the ground above the vegetables with a thick layer of straw. However, if the weather has not yet turned cold and you leave radishes in the ground then they will go to seed. In a Root Cellar (Appropriate for Some Vegetables and Some Fruits) Carrots: Cut off the crown. 40 Preserving Links: Beginner tips, pro tricks and canning with honey.