How I Put Together My Short-Term Food Storage

One of the hallmarks of preparedness is food storage.  Most people find gathering long-term food storage fairly straight-forward, but short-term food storage can be a bit more confusing, so I wanted to take some time to break down how I do a short-term food storage menu.  I want to give you pictures and screenshots to help walk you through it step-by-step.

Do you menu plan?

If your answer is “Yes!”  That’s awesome!! If not, now’s the time to start – even if it’s just for the next week or two.  Why?  Because you’re going to SAVE money AND get FOOD STORAGE!  Double win!!  You’re going to plan the next week’s (or more) menu from what you ALREADY HAVE.  This saves you on your grocery bill!  Do a happy dance with me!  Then we take the money that you’ve saved and put it toward short-term FOOD STORAGE!  WOOHOO!

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 1 – What do you already have?

Go through your pantry – NOT any part of your food storage.  For example, I have a pantry in my kitchen.  You will either see a picture of it on the left or above this paragraph.  It’s not a pretty place, but that one “closet” holds an abundance of food.  Add my fridge to that, and it’s even more amazing.  So this is what I’m talking about.  This is not where I put my food storage.  My food storage goes into my basement.  So go through your non-food storage area and come up with as many meals as you can from it.

Get creative.  Think of “old-fashioned” breakfasts like oatmeal.  Do you have cornmeal?  You can make grits!  Do you have frozen fruit and milk?  You could make smoothies!  Have extra eggs?  Have eggs and pancakes for breakfast or dinner.  Do you have flour and milk?  You could make biscuits and sawmill gravy.  How about some “shake” mix?  Am I the only one that has three different versions of a protein shake mix on hand?  That might be a quick breakfast or lunch.

Ya know that macaroni that’s been sitting in the back of your cabinet for FOREVER?  Yeah, that one.  Take it out along with the tuna fish that’s been in the cabinet next to it for over a year, and make you some tuna noodle casserole.  Have some ground beef and macaroni sitting around?  Why not try Mexican Pasta Bake?

Or better yet, instead of me sitting here listing off all these options that you *might* or *might not* have the ingredients for in your house, head over to SuperCook or get their app for Android or I-thingy.  Supercook is a website and app where you put in the ingredients that you have, and it will spit out recipes that you can make from what you have on hand!  I mean how awesome is that?!?

Fill out as much of the next week or two (if you can go longer – do)!  It will only help!  Once you have your menu set up with what you already have ingredients for (or the very vast majority of ingredients for) you can set that portion of your budget aside to beef up your short-term food storage. WOOHOO!  Filling up your food storage and not spending extra money?  I mean who is not up for that?

BUT before you head to the grocery store, you need to know what to buy to fill out your food storage.  Let’s tackle that next.

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 2 – Pick out meals your family enjoys eating

But that might be daunting for some of you, so let’s make it easy.  “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.  You find the fun and – SNAP – the job’s a game.”  Okay, I’m NOT Mary Poppins, and menu planning may never feel like a game to you, but there is a way to make it really easy.

Ask your people – you know the ones who you feed – hence “your people” – what their favorite meals are.  You want a total of about 20 possible lunch/dinner meals and at least 10 breakfast meals.  So if you have five “people” then get everyone to give you 4 suggestions.  If it’s just you and hubby – well, you each should try to come up with 10ish meals that you like (and hope there isn’t too much overlap).

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 3 – Choose the best food storage meals from your favorites.

Go through the list that “your people” gave you, and look at each request.

Ask the following questions:

1. Does it (or can it) contain mostly boxed or canned items?
2. For the items that are not boxed or canned are there easy substitutions?  For example, does the recipe call for milk?  You can easily purchase dried milk powder to substitute!  Does a recipe call for eggs?  What about using a powdered egg substitute?  Does a meal call for cheese?  Did you know that you can buy freeze-dried cheese?  I also buy freeze-dried meats like ground beef, sausage crumbles, or sliced chicken.
3. Does the requested meal call for large amounts of meat or fresh meat or fresh veggies in quantity?

Once you’ve gone through these three questions, you can determine which meals work well for your short-term food storage.  If a meal can be made with mostly boxed or canned items AND what isn’t boxed or canned can be substituted with other easily obtained items like freeze-dried meats or powdered milk or eggs, then you have an excellent food storage recipe!

If, however, your meal needs large amounts of fresh meat – like meatloaf – it’s probably not a great meal for food storage.  Cold cut sandwiches probably also wouldn’t be a good food storage menu item since you can’t store up cold cuts.  So go through the meals that your people gave you and weed out the ones that won’t work for food storage.

Let’s be honest.  Are you struggling to get to 14 lunch/dinner type meals?  I have put together a booklet with 15 food storage menu options and 6 bonus recipes.  Hopefully, between what you already have and this booklet, you’ll have plenty of options for meals to make.

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 4 – Create Your Menu

Because it’s usually easier to visualize something if you can hold it in your hands, I created a short-term food storage menu printable for you as well as uploaded it to my Printable Library.

I create a menu with 7 breakfasts, 7 lunches, and 7 dinners that can be made with shelf-stable ingredients.  I assign a day to each breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  So while we are eating from our short-term food storage, every Monday for breakfast, we will have oatmeal.  Every Tuesday for breakfast, we’ll have grits.  You get the picture.

Here’s my short-term food storage menu.

Once I have my menu, I decide how many weeks, I aiming for.  For my family, we shoot for 12 weeks (3 months).  How many weeks are you going to shoot at for your family?  Are you going to start with 4 weeks – One month?  It’s a great way to get things going!  Make this choice now.  You’ll need it two steps later.

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 5 – Write Out Your Recipes

What I did was used a spreadsheet to write out the ingredients in each recipe.  Take a look at the screenshot below.

It’s so much easier using sheets because I can tell it what to do, and it will do it all for me.  So what you see in the first column is the meal’s name.  The second column is the recipe broken down by ingredients.  The third column is how much of that ingredient I need to make the recipe once.

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 6 –  How many weeks?

Multiply the ingredients you need to make the recipe once by the number of weeks that you’re going to shoot for to populate your short-term food storage.  If you look at the example above, you’ll see that

The fourth column is where I take what I need to make the meal once, and multiply it by 12 (around 3 months worth) because that’s how many weeks we’re worth of food storage we’re shooting for.  How many weeks are you shooting for?  You’re going to multiply each ingredient by that number when you’re working on your food storage menu.

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 7 – Master Ingredient List

Once I wrote out all my recipes in this fashion, I created a master ingredient list at the bottom of the spreadsheet.

So every ingredient that I listed above for EVERY recipe makes its way onto my master list.  If I have black beans in three recipes, black beans only get listed once on the master ingredient list, but I add up how many black beans that I need for ALL the recipes.

Then I go through and see how much of each ingredient that I actually HAVE in my food storage area.  Of these few ingredients, I only need freeze-dried carrots and chili powder.  But this is just a small sampling of my ingredients.

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 8 – Use the money you saved

Use the money you save from doing Step 1 to purchase items that you need to fill our your food storage.  You can just use your master list to see what you need to purchase.

Right now because quantities are limited at most grocery stores, I bring my mom and my oldest daughter with me grocery shopping.  I mostly shop at Aldi because it’s cheaper, and Aldi limits many items to 4 identical items.  So I buy 4.  My mom buys 4 (for me), and my daughter buys 4.  This at least allows me to get one dozen each Friday when I go shopping.  At the moment, I don’t feel the need to fill everything back up in a short amount of time, so just taking it week by week works for me for now.

Then on my grocery app (I use Cozi – and, yes, they have a free version), I keep a running tally of what I have and what I need yet to buy and adjust it each week as I go shopping.

Short-term Food Storage Menu Step 9 – Keep your running list up to date

This is SO hard, but there are ways to do this if you want to.

Option 1 – Get a clipboard.  Once you either write out or print out each your master list, tie a pencil to a string and every time you add or take away from your storage area, you can change the quantity on your list.

Option 2 – Just go to your storage room and inventory it at least once a month.

Option 3 – Inventory your storage room (places in various rooms) now.  Shop from your storage room(s) each week while keeping track of what you take from your stash.  When you make up your grocery list for the next week, buy what you used this week to just replenish your food storage.

What About You?

What is the state of your short-term food storage?  How many weeks do you have vs. how many weeks are you going to shoot for?  Is there anything about putting together your short-term food storage that still stumps you?  Share your victories, trials, and questions with us all below in the comments so that we can all be better prepared.

Together lets Love, Learn, Practice, and Overcome

There are links in this post.  Some of the links may be affiliate links.  Some of the links may not be.  My promise to you is that I will only recommend the most economical version of the best quality of items to serve you. These are the items that I have bought for my own family.  You can feel free to use my affiliate links, of which I will get a small amount in compensation, or you can choose to search out your products on your own.