Growing up, my family's idea of food storage was a basement closet filled floor to ceiling with 10 lb plastic containers of wheat. I have no memory of any other food in our food storage nor do I have any memory of EVER opening one of those tubs and actually eating any of the wheat. And, I have no idea what ever happened to that wheat.
Now fast forward to 1999, I'm now married and have 2 young children. I begin to seriously start working on our food storage (I have to be honest here and admit Y2K played a huge factor in all this). Can you guess what I started canning like crazy? You guessed it, wheat! We survived Y2K and my food storage momentum started to die out. Then 4 years later, my friend Sarah gave me a book about natural disasters and I panicked. Again, I canned more wheat. I then had a pretty okay wheat storage, but I never had any intention of ever using it UNLESS there was a major catastrophic event. My panic subsided and I did very little for another 4 years. Then, last week I went to the cannery and (you know where this is going) I canned more wheat. I still have NEVER opened one of those cans. I guess I was carrying on the family tradition!
That all changed this morning. I woke up and thought to myself, "let's get crazy and open a can of wheat!" My kids thought it was a good idea, so together we grabbed some wheat and the grinder and made ourselves some flour! We then used the flour to make pancakes for breakfast and I'm going to use the rest for pizza dough tonight. And, ya know, it wasn't too bad. The grinding part was extremely simple and the pancakes tasted really good. Of course, a little syrup and powdered sugar makes everything taste good! The best part though is I "broke the cycle" and used some wheat from our food storage and even inspired my children to try something new.
Oh, I should also mention I broke another cycle several years ago and started adding other foods to my food storage!
