Typical daily menu

[atropa]

Sorry if this has been posted before. If TSHTF and we were eating our food supplies, what would a typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner consist of for you? I have just begun to prep, and thought I could probably get some good ideas from you guys. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how much of everything I would need for a decent stock.

 

[BREWER]

BREWER

atropa: I copied this from a PM I sent out earlier this week.
The first thing you need to do is to look at what YOU and your family REALLY eat. Start a list of all your meals Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner on seperate sheets of paper in a spiral note book, legal pad, etc. The important thing is do you have children, what are their ages, and do you have an older parent or parents? Age and nutritional requirements will vary. Teenagers are bottomless pits. Young children are picky eaters, elderly parents have dietary restrictions e.g. sodium, allergies, diabetic, no spicy foods, etc. If we find ourselves in self imposed quaranteen for an extended time...everything will, more or less, revolve around the kitchen and meal preparation.
For instance;
Breakfast: cereal, oatmeal, toast, canned fruit[dehydrated if no fresh fruit is available], dehydrated/powered egg omelets w/bacon/cheese, etc. Hash and eggs. Again what do you eat for breakfast now? Write it down for the next two weeks. Multiply by 30 days...go to the Costco or Sam's, or local supermarket and buy what fills the bill.
Lunch: Hearty soup(s) and sandwiches[learn to make your own bread..it is not that hard to do], cheese and crackers with fruit, rice dishes with canned meats added. Leftovers from last nights dinner.
Dinner: Pizza[everyone's favorite-make your own dough], beans and rice, tunafish cassarole, pasta and sauce, stews, stir-fry with rice, etc. Be creative. Again, what do you currently eat? Get back to me and I'll send you some links as to where to get most of the books and some equipment you'll need. Have FAITH...You can do it!!!

 

[theoutlands]

For purposes of this exercise, I'm assuming a TSHTF setting without trips to the store, but with electricity for refrigeration/freezing.

For breakfast:
Fresh eggs. We raise our own chickens. I also like to mix up some peanut butter & syrup to go w/ the eggs for flavor - also holds me longer. To that end, I bought some seed peanuts to start my own crop. Once they are harvested, I'll run them thru my Country Living grain-mill using the bean & nut auger to make my own peanut butter. Coffee and/or milk. I have a sizeable section of coffee in my cabinets, prolly a year's worth or more. The milk would be fresh from the goats, out there by the chickens.
Or homemade biscuits.
Or oatmeal with various dehydrated fruit bits tossed in. Several fruit trees went into the ground this spring, and more are in pots.
Pancakes from whole wheat, like the bread.

For lunch:
Hot weather would likely be sandwiches on homemade bread made from flour we grind from whole wheat bought by the bucket. Dunno what the meat would be - we gots lots of tuna and canned ham in the cabinets, tho. Greens & other veggies will come from the garden.
Cooler weather would be soup/stew made from rabbit or goat or chicken - all of which we raise - or maybe beef from the deep-freeze or from a trade or maybe deer from the woods. We have about a year's supply of rice in stock and veggies will come from the garden. Red beans and rice, maybe - esp. with a spicy green tomato relish or homemade pepper sauce!

For supper:
A basic repeat of lunch, either left-overs if there were enough, "eternal soup" where you take what *is* left over and add enough to it to make a new meal, or a whole new meal of the same pattern. We also like to have "evening breakfast" where we eat a "traditional breakfast" for supper.

desserts:
Well, chocolate would disappear from the menu pretty quick, sadly. But things like cakes made with honey (from bees we are going to be getting SOON!) rather than "white sugar," pancakes with jellies, cornbread or biscuits w/ honey or syrup, home-grown fruits and "fruit-leathers" from the dehydrator, and the like would be common. (wait...they already are!)

We'd prolly eat a lot more beans and the like than we do now - fresh from the garden, that is, during the summers. Squash, okra, tomatoes, potatoes, and so on.

Sure, tho - we have about 6 months of our "regular" canned foods.

 

[horse and hammer]

I understand that it is hard to imagine the amounts of different foods to store for different people for a set period of time.

What I did was to keep a diary of all of the foods we, Horse and I, ate for three months. I wrote down everything on a calender. At the start I wrote down the amounts in open packages like flour, sugar, coffee, salad dressing ect. Then everytime I opened a package I wrote down the whole amount say 3lb of noodles. At the end of the 3 months I made a list of everthing we ate minus the leftover amounts, like flour ect. I also had to add the amounts that Horse ate out. He wrote it down.

I now had a list of the exact foods we ate. Then I figured out the amount of calories we ate in that 3 months which was no small feat and determined how many calories we ate each day.

The exact foods don't really matter. You need to take in enough calories, grams of protiens, enough essential amino acids, enough vitamins ect.

Mary

 

[atropa]

Thank you guys for breaking it down so well. The foods you listed are pretty much what we eat now. Thankfully I have had to conserve and eat cheap all my life. It helps. I plan on growing some veggies this year and have my feelers out for a used pressure canner. Keeping a food journal would be an excellent idea. As far as calorie intake there is a website called fitday.com that has a great database of foods and what their calorie, protein, etc. content is. It can be a little overwhelming trying to figure it all up, but I have a much better idea now of how to go about it. Thanks again.

 

[VesperSparrow]

Well I guess around here if TSHTF I'm not going to be concerned with menus and 4 course meals.
For us, and it was like this after Ivan knocked everything down, I suppose our menu will be like this:
A can of corn, a couple sips of water.
An MRE, a couple sips of water.
Some crackers and sqeeze cheese, a couple sips of water.
Most people I know after hurricanes knocked out electricity and all things 'normal' weren't concerned about eating well, just concerned about havin the energy to eat in the heat and while trying to work at their regular jobs and then clean up the destruction afterward.
Its going to be a totally different situation when "IT" happens.
People are going to realize how great things were for us. And they're gonna wish to God they could go back and try to change things before "IT" happened.

But for me and many people I know, its not going to be a situation where we are going to be able to eat too well.

 

[PilotFighter]

Breakfast would be about whatever we wanted. Fresh bacon or sausage, and plenty of eggs, got my own chickens as well. Grits, got tons of grits and oatmeal. Lunch would just be something simple. We really don't eat lunch that much. Dinner, again would just about be anything we decided on. Got plenty of everything, and more growing every day. I'll miss my daily soda pop, but thats about it.

 

[Bicycle Junkie]

Here is a list of what I won't include in my prep foods:

trans fats, i.e. partially hydrogenated oils (poisonous, the number one killer in food items) It is found in most peanut butters except the old-fashioned kind, and in many other processed foods.

white flour, white rice (promotes diabetes)

sugar (stock honey instead, it has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs still edible)

monosodium glutamate

aspartame

What is the point in surviving Armageddon, to kill yourself slowly with poisonous food?