I Can’t Believe It’s Food Storage
Do you have a three-month supply of food for your family? Are you building up and using your long-term food storage? In I Can’t Believe It’s Food Storage , author Crystal Godfrey explains how to transition common food-storage items (such as powdered milk, whole wheat, and dried beans) into your own recipes. Godfrey also provides over 100 kitchen-tested recipes for you to try. In addition, you’ll learn how to put together a personalized three-month supply and how to involve your entire family in
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My food storage is no longer just sitting on a shelf,
This is a book geared toward, but not limited to, the Mormon population and it focuses on the products available from their church canneries. If you use it understanding these factors you can get a lot out of it. The recipes are basic family-friendly fare; delicious but not gourmet. I found the book, and Crystal’s website, shortly after buying several food storage items that I planned to store for 20-30 years, and then throw out and replace if I didn’t have to use them. The money was spent just to have a back-up, but now I’m using at least one or two items on a daily basis and I plan to use all of them and replenish as I go along. This is a much better use of my money and storage space.
There are positive and negatives about this book. First, the positive aspects:
You will learn how to actually USE your stored food on a daily basis. This really is the focus of the book and the web-site, not how to survive without power. Not only will you save money by not wasting the food you’re storing, but you’ll save money because food storage is generally cheaper than fresh foods. All the food storage I have uses no preservatives or artificial flavor or color enhancers, so I can use it as a convenience food without the additives found in many convenience foods.
The recipes are organized according to the type of stored food, i.e., powdered milk, powdered eggs, whole wheat, dried beans, dried vegetables and fruits.The layout makes it easy to find ways to use specific types of foods.
One interesting idea is to use dried beans to replace some or all of the fat in baked items (I prefer using half beans and half oil or butter because the flavor and texture are better). Crystal also provides several recipes for using magic mix, a concoction of powdered milk, butter, and flour that is very useful to have on hand.
The negatives include:
The black and white photos are dark and of poor quality. They really add nothing to the book.
There are several editing errors throughout the book. These include several misspellings, a misplaced subheading, and an ingredient mix-up between two recipes. I noticed these mistakes while doing a quick scan of the book. Spell-check should have picked up most of the spelling errors, and a careful proof-reader should have noticed everything else.
I would have preferred more recipes and a lot less of the first three chapters, but that is just a personal preference.
Overall I am satisfied with this book. Its focus is on using your food storage on a daily basis and not just during emergencies; there is no better system for rotating your food storage! It has changed the way I look at food storage and use it and I am saving money on groceries because of this book.
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|Well worth the purchase, but more introductory than comprehensive,
I will concur with all reviewers who have previously noted that this book is clearly written by a person with a particular religious (Mormon/LDS) orientation and outlook.
Since I am a Jew, I hope I won’t be accused of giving this book a good review just for being friends with the author.
Frankly, there is stuff in this book that is very far from my interests, but that doesn’t make the book less useful in its own little way.
Fundamentally, this book is IDEAL as an introduction to how one might use one’s food storage as part of daily cooking. It is actually arranged into chapters based upon adding food storage items into your daily cooking, one at a time. That means there is a chapter on Using Powdered Milk, Using Powdered Eggs, and Using Dried Beans. It also means that the recipes aren’t arranged in the more typical way–based upon types of food like breakfast or dessert. Reading through the bean section then, one skips from recipes for cake to psuedo-sausage to cookies to chili. It can feel a bit odd, but it does make it easy to incorporate only those food storage items one may have opted to start with. Even better, recipes throughout the book consistently give both typical (refrigerator) ingredients and the food-storage equivalent (dried milk, dried eggs, etc.) Using this one small cookbook helps one to internalize this new “system” of cooking. I, for one, feel like I will be able to more readily adapt recipes from traditional cookbooks using what I’ve learned from this one. I love how I can take a recipe anywhere in this book and use those ingredients I have fresh and those ingredients I have from storage with clear instructions as to how I might do so.
I have created a food storage plan as a hedge against inflation and because my husband and I are both a bit on the paranoid end of the spectrum. We have plans in place for flu quarantine, major weather events, etc. Since the LDS church and the hard-core survivalist crowds have done lots of legwork already as far as foods that keep for very long periods of time and how to store them, I am happily piggy-backing on that great knowledge base. Last week, I bought this book, “Cookin’ with Home Storage” by Layton, and “The Essential Food Storage Cookbook” by Girsberger/Peterson. I’ve made something out of at least one book every day this week, and “I Can’t Believe It’s Food Storage” is the clear winner from this trio. I’ve made 6 recipes from it, and only one or two each from the other books. It is easy to use and fairly inspirational (in that go-try-something-new way.)
Today, I made p. 113 “Blender Wheat Waffles”, and my older son walked in and hugged me and said, “Thanks, Mom!” He said they were the best waffles he’d ever had.
We’ve also made and enjoyed:
p. 102 Breakfast Casserole (with adaptations — no pork sausage for us — enjoyed but not adored)
p. 129 Bannock (adapted–I had to add flour until the dough seemed right, but everyone liked it)
p. 130 Cornbread (best I ever made)
p. 163 German Apple Cake (AWESOME — light and delicious using 1/2 whole wheat flour)
p. 163 Reduced Fat Banana Bread (Very yummy, but stale by the next morning so eat ASAP)
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|Excellent Book, with some cautions.,
This is an excellent book and a great resource for those of us who are buying food in bulk, beefing up our food storage and generally learning to cook with food storage ingredients.
Two notes that I didn’t see in other reviews.
1. This is very much an LDS book in the very introduction. There is a whole section in the front of the book about having a Family Home Evening, for example. There is an assumption that you will agree or be saving food storage and learning to use it because you are LDS. This is a small portion of the book but if you are not LDS and are not interested in this, it might help to know about it.
2. This book is heavy on the dried milk, dried eggs, and similar ingredients. It barely, if at all covers things like cornmeal, whole wheat flour, and other ingredients that are a bit more difficult to cook with/grind etc.
Those two items were not an issue for me. However, my friend who is not LDS but has much in the way of survivalism, food storage type items found this book was a little light in some areas. If you already cook with food storage, this is probably a little bit simple for you.
If you are looking for a good all around beginning book for the basics of cooking with dried milk and other easy to find food storage items, this is a good book.
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