- Today, I want to chat with you about how we can inflation
proof our prepper pantries. Hi Sweet Friends, I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's Nest where I teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient dense foods like bone broth, ferment,
sourdough, and more. So if you enjoy learning
about those things, consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every
time I upload a new video. Even if you've not been
tuning into the news, you may have noticed when
you go to the grocery store that prices on certain items
are starting to increase. I usually shop at our local grocery store as well as Costco and Sam's. And when I was shopping at Costco, I was surprised that the
prices that I had been used to paying for certain items had gone up and in some cases, rather considerably. Now I want to mention, if you
open the description below underneath this video,
I'll have timestamps that'll basically indicate
the different subjects that I'm going to talk about in this video so if you want to jump around, it'll make it really easy for you. So how should we be inflation
proofing our prepper pantries during a time like this when prices do look like
they're starting to go up? So to begin with, I think
most of us are familiar with the term inflation but if you're not, basically what I'm talking about when I say inflation proof is
that if we can buy something for a dollar today, and then in two months or three months or six months,
that same item that we bought for a dollar is now going for $2, but we stocked our prepper pantry when the price was a dollar, we've basically inflation
proofed our prepper pantry because we have a nice supply on hand for which we paid a dollar for so six months from now
when that item is $2, we don't have to worry about buying it because we've purchased it at a dollar. So what's the first
thing that we need to do? The first thing is we
need to take an inventory of our pantry. And when I say pantry, I'm talking about our four corners pantry, our working pantry which
we access every day, our refrigerator, our freezer, and our extended pantry, or
what we call our prepper pantry. And speaking of the four corners pantry, if you are on a journey moving from a processed foods kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen and you need help with
what to put in your pantry, I have a 36 page pantry list. It's a free download over on my website and I'll put a link in
the description below and that walks you
through all of the foods that you want to start
thinking about incorporating and this is slowly little by little, you don't go out and
buy everything at once, but this list will help
you to start thinking about real foods, traditional foods that you want to start
incorporating into your pantry, into your kitchen as you make that transition
from a processed foods kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen. And I think you'll find
the list very helpful because it's not just a list of items, I also have a lot of links to
videos and printable recipes that show you how to use
these foods to make meals. Once you do your inventory,
then you know what you need, you know what you're low
on, what you use a lot, what you need to stock up
on and so on and so forth. So I think you'll find that pantry list very helpful, very useful. And there's one other thing I want to add if you're new to the term prepper pantry. What that means is generally I often call it the extended pantry cause I see it as an extension
of my working pantry, but the prepper pantry or
extended pantry is another place where you store backup supplies that can replenish your working pantry. So it's usually non-perishable items. And the nice thing about
having that extended or prepper pantry is it allows
you to stock up on things when they're on sale and also when you can
find something in bulk and then you can store
it in your prepper pantry and use that to then
replenish your working pantry when your supplies go low. So that's a wonderful way
to inflation proof basically your working pantry and it's
also a wonderful thing to have on hand as a backup those
items in your extended pantry if you're ill, if you lose your
job, if the weather is bad, if there are shortages
in the supply, problems with the supply chain and then shortages at the grocery store or if there are situations like we just went through in 2020. There's so many reasons
to have an extended pantry so that you never find yourself in a situation where
you've run out of food. Now, as you're doing your inventory, there's another thing you
want to start thinking about. During 2020, I think a lot of us had changes in our household. We may have more people living with us, we may have less people living with us. So you really want to start focusing in on how many people you're going to be feeding and what types of food do they like cause there's nothing worse
than stocking up on foods that nobody's going to eat. You don't want to waste money. So once you've done an inventory and you see what you're going to need and you've taken into
consideration how many people that you're going to need to feed, that's when you can put your list together and get ready to do your shopping. And the first thing that you want to do is just start looking for
things that may be on sale and go to those type of
grocery stores where you know that you've found good
bargains in the past. I know many of you have told me that you've found exceptional bargains at places like the dollar store. The next thing that you want to do is to think about those things
that you can buy in bulk because the more that you
can buy in terms of size, the lower the price per ounce or per pound or whatever
the case may be comes down. Now, I really like to
buy my grain in bulk. Now I have a grain
mill, I have a Mockmill. I love it, I did a lot of
research on my Mockmill or I did a lot of research on grain mills before I bought my Mockmill,
but I'm really happy with it. It's a stone grinding mill. And I was so happy with the Mockmill that I contacted the
people over at Mockmill and asked them if they would
give a discount coupon code for my viewers. And so be sure to open the description underneath this video
because all that information is in there and you can use
that discount for anything. If you already have a grain
mill, that's no problem. They sell a lot of things,
including ancient grains like einkorn, spelt,
emmer, so on and so forth and you can use the discount to get a... You can use the discount to
get a discount of whole grains. And they're just a wonderful resource. And so I like to buy
my whole grain in bulk. I'll often buy it in 25 pound
bags or 25 pound buckets. And then I've always got that on hand because something you want to think about when you buy in bulk, there are a lot of foods that
have very long shelf lives, and there are even some foods that are considered forever foods. And if that's something more
that you want to learn about, I have a whole series called
like the prepper pantry videos, prepper pantry video series where I talk about all the
different foods that you can buy. You don't need anything fancy. You don't need anything
like freeze dried foods that are very expensive. You don't need any of that. You can shop for real foods at your grocery store
and not processed foods. I'm a traditional foods home cook. I buy real food and real foods,
I have a lot of information about how so many real foods
have very long shelf lives and then how to store them properly so that they do last for a long time. So the things that I
really like to buy in bulk as I said, a whole grains,
I buy rice in bulk, I buy dried beans in bulk,
I buy powdered milk in bulk. There are a lot of things
that you can buy in bulk and then store in a way that
will extend their shelf life. And I know some of you have shared with me that you have apprehension
about buying powdered milk and I understand that completely. I try to search out powdered milk that has been low temp
dried, not high temp dried, and preferably from cows
that have been grass fed. And the reason that I do this and like to keep that
type of product on hand is because in a shortage
or in an emergency or like I said with illness or jobless, there's so many things. The fact that I can have
some powdered milk that not only can be used to be
reconstituted and drank, but can be used in recipes
to add protein to the foods that I'm preparing so that's
why I like to keep it, but this again is all
about personal choice. You buy the real foods
that you like to eat and that you feel are the most... The least processed
and most usable to you. Now, this is an example of rice that I've stored in a Mylar bag. These Mylar bags are very reasonable. You drop an oxygen absorber
in and you can seal them. I use an iron. If you have a curling
iron, you can use that too. I have a whole video series
on how to properly store food and how to properly store
different types of food and I'll be sure to link to
all of these in the iCards. If I run out of iCards,
I'll put everything in the description under
this video, but for example, I can buy rice in a 25 pound bag or a 50 pound bag at places
like Costco and Sam's and this is Jasmine rice, and
this is five pounds in here and I put this in here on
9/2020 so September 2020. And this will last me a very long time. Now this is white rice. I do buy white rice. I tend to not buy a lot of
brown rice because brown rice can't really be stored all that well. It's one of those whole grains that because of its high oil
content does tend to go rancid very quickly and has limitations
on how you can store it. But I do like white rice because I find it's a wonderful vehicle for
getting other ways of nutrition into my family's diet. I can cook this in bone broth, I can add gee or butter or
another type of fat to it. And so I'm always looking
for ways to incorporate a better nutrition into our diet and white rice can be a
very nice vehicle for that, but this is a great way to store it. This has a very long shelf life. I have a blog post where I go
over all of the shelf lives of all the various
items that you can store in your prepper pantry and
I'll be sure to link to that so you can read everything. And I believe it's Utah State University has a wonderful extension
service where they go into great detail on how
to store food in bulk and what you can store safely and how long the shelf life
will be when stored properly. So I linked to all of that,
all of those resources in the blog post, and they
also have wonderful printouts, I think you'll find it very interesting. And that leads me to... I'm looking over there at my table, I've got some canned goods on my table. Canned goods actually have
a very long shelf life and that's another
article that I linked to in the corresponding blog
post that I'm talking about. The United States
Department of Agriculture basically says that
store-bought canned goods can pretty much last
forever if stored properly. And that means in a cool dark place, away for water, so on and so forth. And granted, yes, when they're
opened 25 years from now, they may have degraded a bit in nutrition, but I found this information fascinating and that they talk about
how the sell by date really just means when
it needs to be sold. But they're not really indicating that it's gone bad and generally
it can still be quite good and quite nutritious five
years after its sell by date. But interestingly enough on the USDA site which I linked to in that blog post, they say they're pretty much
indefinite if stored properly. So there are a lot of
things you can stock up on and store correctly to
extend their shelf life so that you're really protecting
your pantry from inflation because if we do continue
to see prices going up, what we buy today and store
properly will serve us very well in terms of protecting our grocery budgets from not having to buy
these things six months or a year down the road when the prices may have
increased significantly. And not only do we need to worry about the prices increasing, if you've been following on the news or reading in the newspaper, there also are sometimes
shortages in the supply chain. So you may find that sometimes when you go to your grocery store, there are certain things
that are simply not in stock and in some cases may never
be coming back into stock because certain food companies
are just sort of shrinking what they're offering because of problems with the supply chain in terms of problems of hiring people to work in the factories
and so on and so forth. So there's a lot going on
under this umbrella so to speak of the food supply. We not only may have
inflation to deal with, we may also have shortages
in the supply chain and when it comes to stocking
your extended pantry, you can even start with as little as $5 a week added to your grocery budget. And little by little, you'll be able to build up your supplies. I have a video where I
show you how to start with just $5 addition
into your grocery budget and how to go about it and what are the type
of foods you should buy. And before you know it, you're going to have a two week supply and then a month supply and
then maybe a two month supply. And it's really up to you how much backup you want
in your extended pantry. Some people are happy
with a couple of weeks, some people a couple of months, sometimes six months, a year. It's really a matter of what
you feel you might need. So don't feel that you need to rush out and buy a lot of stuff right away. If you're just starting with $5, you can do this because
there's no need to panic. There's no need to have a
lot of anxiety about this. Once you have your plan in
place and I talk about this more in my prepper pantry series as to why we need a prepper pantry,
but it's not about hoarding. It's about having a plan in place and just following through with that plan little by little every week. And so if you can start this week and then within six months,
you've got a nicely stocked extended pantry and prices start to go up over the next six months
or over the next year, you're still ahead of the
game because you started now, but there's no reason to panic,
no reason to have anxiety. You've got your plan in
place with your pantry list, with your inventory, and you just start
working through your list. So do your inventory, think about how many
people you have to feed and what they like to eat, try to shop the sales best you can, buy in bulk when you can and what you can, and then store what you
buy in bulk properly to extend its shelf life. This is going to help you tremendously to inflation proof your pantry. This is another way that you can really inflation proof your pantry if you garden. And it can be something as simple as a sunny window sill or a patio garden, or a full-fledged kitchen garden. And I have a video where I
discuss some of my favorite books for starting a kitchen garden. And the reason that I like them is because they don't require
you to have a big garden. They talk about window sill
gardening, patio gardening, and then just sort of your
smaller kitchen gardens. And the nice thing about
gardening is that when you... There's nothing like growing
your own food from seed and once you learn how to
start growing food from seed, you can harvest it and serve it. And if you have an abundance,
you can home can it. And I have a whole series of
videos where I talk with you about and or teach you
how to water bath can. Now you can't water bath can everything, but it can be a nice entree
if you're new to home canning. Other than the canning jars
and the lids and the rings, you don't really need
any special equipment the way you do when you pressure can. And we'll talk about that in a minute, but if you grow tomatoes,
which can be very easy to grow, you can home can your tomatoes and add them to your pantry,
both your working pantry and your extended pantry,
your prepper pantry. And I show you in the video how to water bath canned tomatoes and I go through a lot of
detail step by step by step, those videos are for the beginner and I don't rush and I take my time. And so that's a great
place for you to learn. I also have videos where I show you how to water bath canned
pickles and how to water bath homemade jams and marmalade. So there's a lot that
you can water bath can. So if you grow these things in the garden, that's a real wonderful way to
inflation proof your pantry. And even if you're able to
buy these things in bulk like if you go to those
pick your own type farms or maybe you can get a
bargain at the farmer's market who maybe has some imperfect
foods and things like that, that's the time to stock up
and then home can these things. Now, if these are things that
need to be pressure canned, then you have wonderful
resources on YouTube. You've got Linda over at Linda's pantry. You've got Lisa over at Sutton's Days. These women are really the... What did they say like
the divas of home canning. Alrighty, well now let's go forth and stock our prepper pantries. And if you'd like to learn more about how to stock your pepper pantry, be sure to click on this video over here where I have a series of videos to show you why you need a prepper pantry, how to stock your prepper
pantry with real food, how to do it on $5 a week, how to store your food
properly and lots more. And I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill country kitchen. Love and God bless.
