Saturday, April 19, 2008

Wheat Wheat Wheat



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!




9 comments:

Valynn said...

Very impressive Carolyn! For some reason my wheat has always been intimidating to me. I need to crack open a can or two and just try it….I mean, it’s just wheat.

I was at Spokane Discount yesterday and they were selling the can organizers (same company and all) that we bought at Time Out for Women. They were selling them for $16.99….we were robbed!

Carolyn said...

Valynn - I know, I was at Kimberly's tonight and saw hers! Blasted shelf-reliance. :-)

Kristin said...

I'm going to have to hit Spokane Discount ASAP!! We need to have a little wheat recipe exchange or something. 101 ways to eat wheat.

Anonymous said...

Ummmmm Pancakes....yummy.

andrea said...

Looking good. Since I started using my wheat I actually prefer it, especially for pancakes, etc. I love your shelf reliance shelves. I can't believe Spokane Discount has them. I'm sure they are long gone by now.

I actually worked on my food storage today, organizing it and getting it all lined up. I thought about those shelves and I think they would be so great to have. It's so hard to keep it rotated otherwise.

sugarcoatedcyanide said...

I am seriously impressed with all you guys. I'm with Carolyn's family. I just thought all those boxes in the basement were for the nuclear holocaust. You're actually supposed to open them and (gasp) eat them???? I'm not sure I can even get through the old baby equipment and Christmas decorations to even find them!

Lara said...

Way to go!!!

Anne said...

I have a great recipe for bread. No kneeding, just grind the wheat and throw it in the mixer. Turns out great every time!

The best part is that NO ONE believes its 100% whole wheat bread. We get this reaction everywhere we take it!

http://islandschoolhouse.com/?p=373

Anonymous said...

Great idea with the food storage. Keep it up. Price of oil is never going down again, and until we figure out non-oil dependent transportation, price of food is going to keep rising too!