One of the benefits of having a blog is meeting new friends over the internet in the blogoshpere. Megan, from My Food Storage Cookbook, is one of myfood storage blog friends.The reason her website caught my eye was her amazing food storage recipe organization. Her recipes are organized into several catagories, cross referenced, color coded, so at any given time she knows what recipes her family eats and what she needs to shop for. If there was an emergency and she had no power, Megan can look at her recipe book and can see exactly which recipes are for a Wonder Box, or cook top,etc. It really is a great system for rotating and using your food storage!! Plus, she shows you how to make your own recipe book with instructions and videos!She is also truly inspired when it comes to finding new ways to prepare and cook every day food by using your food storage and shelf stable ingredients. I have learned so much from her website. Take a look at My Food Storage Cookbook and you'll see why I was so impressed with her organization and recipes.
Megan had a giveaway for the book "Soup In A Bag" and I was lucky enough to win a copy in return for reviewing a few recipes from the book. The concept of "Soup In A Bag" is a cookbook collection of soup recipes that use all dehydrated and shelf stable ingredients that can be stored together, in a bag or jar, to have on hand for food storage emergencies, busy nights, etc. I selected a few recipes, spent one day dehydrating ingredients for the different soups, another afternoon making up the recipes andsealing the soups in mason jars using my Foodsaver. I made four different soups from the book and my family let me know which one was their favorite one.
There are a few foods that will make or break a recipe when it comes to food in #10 cans. Powdered cheese, butter, sour cream, eggs, etc. will be different from one company to another, and that will determine the outcome of a dish.I usually don't mind using a generic version of grocery store foods because I don't see a big difference in quality, but I have learned, by trial and error, that there is a big difference between the many food storage companies out there today.
One example is butter powder. I really don't like to mention company names when I don't like a certain product, so I am just going to say that I have 3 different butter powders at my house right now that I don't like to use in my cooking. They have an obvious non-butter taste and don't even smell close to real butter. I have read on several blogs that Thrive Life has a really good butter powder. I finally broke down and paid the $25.49 + shipping and ordered a #10 can of it. I am so glad that I did!!!!
The firstthing I noticed right away when I opened the can is it smelled like butter. It was light in color and not a fake yellowy color. I mixed a small amount with a little bit of water and it reconstituted into a buttery spread. It spread onto bread so easily and tasted good too! It won't make a cube of butter but if you need some butter on your toast, this would work!! I have since made brownies and cookies with the butter powder. The brownies worked great and I couldn't taste any fake buttery flavor at all. But the cookies were another story. My one complaint for butter powder from all companies are the reconstituting directions!!!! There are none for baking!! I want to know how much water I add to the butter powder for say, 1 C of butter in a recipe. I tried looking online and I couldn't find anything. So if any of you know, please send me in the right direction :) That is how I messed up my cookie recipe. It called for 1 C of butter, so I added 1 C of powder to my bowl and slowly added water. I added too much water and then had to add extra flour. I couldn't ever get the batter to form a cookie dough, so I baked it in a 13x9 pan and we had cookie brownies. It still tasted good, but I need to research the water to powder ratio some more. Again the "cookies" tasted like they should without an off taste that I noticed with other butter powders.
