The Prepper's Cookbook

So you have all these food storage supplies. Now what? How are you going to cook them?
by Leon Pantenburg
One of the most common questions from newbies related to food storage is: How do I cook the stuff?
Good question. After Y2K never happened in 2000, I was left with stores of food I was unfamiliar with using. So I just started.

I learned to bake different types of bread to use up the flour. We ate a lot of fried rice and used the stored beans in chili, burritos and soups. I experimented with dried milk and eggs in cooking.
Using the familiar beans, rice and flour was easy. But some of the long term storage foods tend to be less intuitive and user-friendly. And this can create a problem.
It doesn't matter how much food you have - if you only know a couple ways to prepare it, your group can run the risk of developing food monotony.
This is a syndrome that can affect anyone, but particularly very young and old people. In some instances, people will just quit eating because they are so sick and tired of the same old food, meal after meal, day after day.
So it's a good idea to learn how to mix storage foods with fresh and that's why "The Prepper's Cookbook," by Tess Pennington is going to be so valuable to the prepared cook. Pennington is the founder of ReadyNutrition.com, a prepping website based out of Houston, Texas. She is a lifelong prepper.
The cookbook has 300 recipes to turn storage food into tasty meals. The recipes range from rice cereal to fish tacos to chicken pot pie. The selections are easy to prepare and quite good. (I love reviewing cookbooks - I enjoy reading them for content, and then trying out recipes for flavor.)
A couple of these sections I already had first-hand experience with, such as expanding canned goods meals. In collage, as a broke student who worked at a grocery store, I'd buy dented cans of food at a substantial discount. My roommates and I would stretch a can of Dinty Moore beef stew with a can of mixed vegetables and some instant rice. Or we'd take vegetable soup, and add cooked rice or a can of corn or peas.
Either of these recipes can easily double the volume of a can. The cookbook has a page of suggested stretch recipes.
Other sections include recipes for hot cocoa mix, spiced tea, rice pudding, 20 ways to eat beans and rice, and 25 ways to make interesting baked potatoes.
The book is an easy read, and entertaining. This would be a good addition to your storage food supplies, a great gift for a friend and you won't regret buying a copy for a reference book.