Shopping List

I've been trying to come up with a shopping list for the food storage.  Something that outlines everything I need, yet can get a little at a time. I found a wonderful website that has been an immense help.  Actually, I think its a group of 3 or so sites by the same 2 or 3 women (I'm not really clear).  Anyway, the first one I found is called foodstoragemadeeasy.com. There was another caled everydayfoodstorage.com and another called theobsessiveshopper.com.  I'm not sure anymore which was which or what I found on which one. They were all very good and all had some great ideas.

One of them has an excel sheet that helps you figure how much of which ingredients you need to feed your family three meals a day, plus snacks, for 3 months.  I downloaded it yesterday and started filling it out.   It will take a while, I'm afraid, but it will be another month before I have money to go grocery shopping again anyway.  

I did my shopping for September yesterday.  I was able to get some things from Costco for the food storage.  For now, I've been setting aside $100 a month to put into the food storage.  Usually I go to Costco and get things that can be stored easily that we use regularly.  Or sometimes I will go to the Emergency Essentials store and get some items in #10 cans. 

I also started re-organizing my kitchen cupboards and putting items into plastic containers that stack and have straight sides so as to be able to get more in the cupboard and see where everything is. 

I've drawn up a floor plan of how to arrange the food storage in my extra bedroom.  I've just got to get some shelves in there that I can put things on.  I already have some self-rotating can racks that will sit on the shelves.  I love these things by the way--they hold a lot in a small space, rotate the can automatically, and I can see at a glance what I need when its time to go shopping.  The are called "cansolidators" and are sold by a company called Shelf Reliance.  I will add a link to their website to the list.  

So all in all, we're off to a good start.  As soon as I get the shelves moved into the other room, I will need to inventory the items I already have, then we can get a better idea of what I need.