BY #37: Again with the easy...

My BY for the day: Can of sirloin burger with country vegetables soup

If I were adding anything to go along with this, it would be: You could put this over any kind of potatoes, I would think--baked, mashed, boiled. Or noodles or rice, but personally my first thought would be potatoes...sounds familiar, huh? :)

Yeah, another soup. Just pick up a couple of extra cans of the kind you like next time you go shopping, and put them on the storage shelf. Just don't forget to rotate them every once in a while--newest cans go in the back... (this from a person who is not the best at rotating the storage, but who can always get better... :)

BY #36: Sometimes it's all about easy...

My BY for the day: Can of potato soup (ready-to-eat)

If I were adding anything to go along with this, it would be: The usual--crackers, cheese, bread--in other words, anything else that I could get my hands on in my pantry/hopefully still working refrigerator that could feasibly go with soup in a semi-normal situation.

You can buy a bunch of things that you could put together in a soup, as mentioned in earlier BYs, or you can have cans of soup on hand that are ready to eat, and there are advantages to each. If you have three different items that could be combined to make soup, and you just didn't happen to be ready for an emergency when an emergency struck, you could s-t-r-e-t-c-h out those ingredients to cover more than one meal/snack. Combining them in any situation would be more work. If, however, you have a can of soup ready to eat, you eliminate the work aspect, but when that can is gone, it is gone--no saving of other cans for another snack/meal.

I guess it's just more convenient to be prepared, so that you can choose between the easy and the not-so-easy... :) Gotta love options.

BY #35: Separate or together...

My BY for the day: Chicken Vienna sausages

If I were adding anything to go along with this, it would be: Oh, maybe that bean/broth soup I wrote about in the last post... :) I haven't tried a soup like that, but it sounds pretty good to me. And, as the post title indicates, any of the three cans mentioned (beans/broth/sausages) could be eaten together or apart. But let's say you can't buy a can a day, or want to reduce the number of cans you would use per day--if you combine some of your cans to make a soup or casserole, it might work to feed more than one person, and you can make your cans last longer, depending on the size of the group you are responsible for.

Well, I hope people are still participating in the BY series. Better yet, maybe they were able to get all 53 items at once, so now they don't have to worry about it anymore, and are now adding to the cans at their leisure. Or maybe they will wait until Dec. 31st to get the last cans into storage. Or maybe they were prepared before I started this series. So many possibilities... :) Just hope that there will be more people prepared for emergencies than not...

BY #34: Putting it all together

My BY for the day: Can of navy beans

If I were adding anything to go along with this, it would be: One of the cans of chicken broth that I have, if I can spare it for a meal, and if there's hopefully a heat source to improve the meal overall. I actually thought I would do this before I ever saw the recipe for soup on the side of this particular can of beans, but that recipe asks for a lot more ingredients than just broth and beans. I do think that it is fitting to mention that the recipe there calls for 3 cans of beans/2 cans of chicken broth...I wouldn't hesitate to just use what I had available, no matter what the ratio was, in an emergency.

Do you have any food storage-friendly recipes that requires all cans? One I think that could be useful, though I have not had this in mind, is this one for taco soup. I've never used it with canned chicken, but I would use canned chicken in place of the beef in a can-only situation. Other meals that I might make that have very few/no ingredients other than cans are:

---Soup --you could get enough soup for lunches and dinners (and, let's face it, even breakfast if you wanted) for three days and call it good, but it might get a little monotonous.

---Shepherd's pie made by your favorite stew covered by some mashed potatoes would be good--two ingredients, if you get mashed potatoes that are of the "just add water" variety.

---Canned tamales covered with chili sounds like it would work out in a pinch, and as mentioned in an earlier post,  I think it could be heated in aluminum foil in an alternative heating source if necessary. Haven't tried it, but I wouldn't hesitate to try...

---You can always eat cold cereal dry, but it might not be the meal of choice. No refrigeration needed for canned milk--but you do have to have the cereal stored also. Two ingredients isn't so bad...

---There are "just add water" pancake mixes, and if you have a heating source and cookware that can be used on a grill, etc., you can have a "typical" breakfast food with two ingredients, if you call water an ingredient. I would call it that if it helps you to put more in storage... :)

How about you? What do you have planned in case you have to use your cans in a 3-day (ish) emergency? 

BY #33: Going tropical...

My BY for the day: Can of pineapple

If I were adding anything to go along with this, it would be: Well, kind of drawing a blank after the other things I have mentioned, but I sure do like pineapple juice. I might add some dried fruit for variety to my storage, but when you add dried fruit, don't forget to add more water....

How are your BYs coming along?

Buying ahead, blogging ahead: BY #32 for Dec. 9

My BY for the day: Canned chicken

If I were adding anything to go along with this, it would be: The ingredients to make this dough so I could put the meat and whatever little things I could think of to make it taste better (olives, perhaps? :) into some kind of "chicken bomb" meatpie kind of thing.

No time like the present to say that if you like tuna, it would be a great thing to add to your BY list. I probably won't since I don't like tuna, but who knows--it may show up sometime anyway... :)

BY #31: Got milk...again

My BY for the day: Evaporated milk

If I were adding anything to this, it would be: If I weren't going to use the milk for, say, breakfast--over cereal, oatmeal, etc., I would probably use it with macaroni and cheese or the like.

Wow, 31 days in. If you were doing a meal's worth of cans a day, rather than a can a day,  you would now have enough food stored to have at least one decent meal a day for a month, and it wouldn't matter which month it was... :) That may not have been the goal--it would obviously be more ideal to have more than one meal a day--but it sure shows how quickly putting aside little food can add up...