How Did Our Prepper Pantry Work Out in the Texas Ice & Snow Storms?

[Music] hi everyone welcome back to faith in flower if you're new here my name is robin and today we are back in our pantry so my last video was all about organizing our pantry getting it to look better and to function better so if you're interested in that i will have a link up in the cards and also down in the description box so you can check that out but today i want to talk to you about how our pantry served us during the recent texas snow and ice storms otherwise known as snowvid or snowpocalypse i am from the east coast i've lived in the north and also in the south part of the east coast and i've seen some pretty big snow and ice storms and it really was a big deal here but more than that the infrastructure and the homes and the people just aren't equipped to handle something like that especially because we had temperatures that were below freezing for over a week and it never went above so things didn't have a chance to thaw out people did lose power and water our neighborhood was dangerously low on propane but just to let you know right up front our family did not really have a hard time at all not only did our pantry serve us well but we also didn't lose power and we didn't lose water we weren't really able to use our propane because our neighborhood has propane tanks and the trucks couldn't get in to refill those so we had to be careful with that but we really just did not suffer the way others did we had some frozen pipes we were able to thaw out without having them burst so we didn't really come out with any damage or anything like that and i know that if you or someone that you know had a more dire situation then our situation probably doesn't seem bad and i totally get that but i just want to talk to you a little bit about why having a sort of prepper pantry really helped us so we were basically snowed in we had had a layer of ice over everything and then we had about six inches of snow on top of that and then an even thicker layer of ice over that over this week period and so the roads were completely impassable it was totally unsafe to go out some people did and there were a lot of accidents and people had to abandon their cars and things like that but we didn't have to get into any of that because we had lots of reserves and even if i hadn't been able to cook we didn't use our stove much because we were conserving propane and we have a gas stove i still found ways to cook if we had lost electricity we have a camp stove that we can use so we were prepared in the event of something like that happening i'm also going to talk to you about water today and how we prepared in case we lost water and i think we would have been fine if we did and i will talk to you about that in a couple of minutes but basically we have at least a four to six week food supply i would say i've been working towards getting up to about three months and we do have a really large pantry as you can see but our home doesn't have a basement and we don't have an attic storage area which i wouldn't necessarily recommend for storing food anyway but just that to say that we have a lot of built-in storage on the main levels of our home and so we are blessed with quite a large pantry and i can keep most everything in here which is great but if you don't have all of this space there are some options i know you can find in your home of course if you do have a basement that's a wonderful place for food storage because it's generally a little cooler than the rest of your home and that's perfect for food storage otherwise i've heard of people putting boxes under their beds you can find extra space in closets and some items can even be stored in the garage depending in addition to not having a large pantry or feeling like you just don't have places to store extra food it might just not be something that culturally is done where you live and i have gotten a lot of comments from people in different parts of the world where this is something that they've just never even heard of and that's okay too as long as you have ways of obtaining food in an emergency situation so we have a lot of family in switzerland that's where my husband is from and generally i would say people are within walking distance of stores and of course they're completely prepared for snow events but there are other things that could happen that would keep them from going to the stores as the recent pandemic has shown us but they have a little bit easier access to food and culturally they are used to shopping more frequently you know replenishing their fresh food more often and things like that where we live and it's not the same all across the united states but here in texas and in a lot of places where i've lived there's a good distance that we have to travel to get to a store which means you generally will have to drive there and of course in the snow event that wasn't a safe thing to do and so it is important for us to have some extra food as a backup in an event that we can't leave the house that said i was just speaking with my father-in-law this morning and he was recalling when he was a child and this was right after world war ii that in switzerland people were strongly encouraged to have a two-week backup supply of food you know the basic items things that can easily be stored things like rice and other grains if they could keep bread or butter and you know you're just basic essentials on hand that was seen as something very prudent to do and you know the swiss are generally very practical people are traditionally very practical they are the inventor of watches and things like that they have a great sense of order and you know they were able to plan ahead in case of an emergency and this was something that generally a lot of people have done but you know in recent years with us being able to access food at any time a lot of us have gotten away from doing that and i'll have to say that even when i lived on the east coast we had more weather events that i had to be concerned about we often had ice storms snowstorms hurricanes often we had power outages so this was something that i have been doing for a long time but i have to say i kind of slacked off when we moved to texas because we didn't have the same circumstances there weren't the same weather problems that we had on the east coast here and so i didn't pay attention to keeping up my food stores the way i did before and then when the pandemic came it was a little tougher to get food and we had to do without a few things that we enjoy for an extended period of time i recall especially flour and yeast were really hard to come by and bread was almost non-existent on the store shelves for a long time now we could do just fine without those things in fact we generally eat gluten-free so i do have usually some extra gluten-free items on hand just because sometimes they're hard to find in general and we didn't have much of a problem but i did start to see the need for building up our supplies again and that's why i've spent some time doing that and i'm going to have all of my prepper pantry videos i have them in a playlist down in the description box so you can watch that to see what i've done but today i just wanted to cover kind of how our food store served us during this event and so we had no problem at all i did not shop at the grocery store for two weeks solid because after the freeze event was over and things started to fall out and people could get out of their homes the store shelves were completely cleared and the trucks were having a hard time coming in during that week so supply was very low in fact even now as i'm recording this at the grocery stores things are starting to come in but there are limits on things so you can only buy you know two containers of milk and two cartons of eggs things like that so while we don't depend on those things for long-term storage you can see where things were going to be scarce again for a while and because i had plenty both on these shelves we have a small um freezer just one of the drawers in a sort of french door freezer so we don't have a large freezer but i had enough in there and enough milk and eggs and things like that in our refrigerator that we were okay of course if we had lost power we would have needed to come up with some ideas for storing those things so that we didn't lose them and i'm pretty confident that we could because we've had some experience like i said on the east coast with packing coolers if necessary and it was cold enough here that we could actually even have stored things outside and kept them frozen so that wouldn't have been a problem the one thing that i think could have been a really big problem for us is if we didn't have water for that entire week we were storing water and i had two of the blue i think one is six gallons and one seven gallon tanks i filled those right away and those are made for storing drinking water so we would have been able to ration those and probably made it through the week but it would have been a little tough and we also filled our bathtub with water and this is something again that i learned from previous experiences to fill a bathtub so that you'll have plenty of water for flushing toilets because that becomes a big problem when you don't have running water and you're stuck someplace for a week and also you can boil that water and drink it if it's absolutely necessary i did order a berkey water filter before all of this happened but it got delayed because the trucks are all behind with their deliveries and it only just arrived today so it wouldn't have helped me at all during the the snow event but it's something that we have on hand now and i'm really grateful that we decided to go ahead and get it they're quite expensive but in the event of an emergency we can filter water even from our pool in the backyard we can take water from the bathtub and filter it or any other water source that we can find can be filtered with the berkey water filter and would be drinkable so that is great peace of mind to have something like that on hand and i also justify buying it just to use on a daily basis and we also have an rv and we would like to maybe do some dry camping sometime and it will be really nice to have that along to have for filtering water if need be this video is not sponsored by berkey i just wanted to give you guys a little bit of extra information because i know some of you will have questions we chose the travel size berkey which is the smallest and it serves three to four people which is perfect for us plus it's much easier to travel with and as i mentioned before we have an rv and so it was really important for us that this would be quite portable it uses two carbon filters you can see them here in the top it's a pretty simple form of filtering but one of the most effective our family has always been concerned about the contaminants that are present even in city water and i won't get into all of that but i am going to have a link down in the description box to berkey so that you can learn more about what it does we found that this was the best option given all of the different options on the market for our family and it will be great for us to use from day to day but it will also be great in the event of an emergency [Music] i chose to place it right here by our kitchen sink because it'll be very easy to refill here but also because it will remind us to use it as we're getting used to having it and i know we're really going to enjoy it the water tastes great and it will also be really good for when i'm mixing up my sourdough starter because it's important to have very clean water when you're making that too so i definitely want to encourage you to think hard about how you would store some water in case of an emergency if we were going to go through another event like this or even just to have on hand at all times i'm going to keep those tanks full and i'm also going to have the berkey water filter so hopefully those two things would keep us with water as long as we need be and you know we actually do require quite a lot of water they ask you to plan to have at least one to two gallons per person per day and that is a lot of water we generally have three to four people living in our house and i don't even know where i would store all of that so the berkey water filter is a great solution for that and if you guys have other ideas about water storage definitely put them in the comments below i'd love to hear and i know that everybody watching would really love to have those ideas as well so i'm careful to store a lot of things that don't take much preparation and i did a video on some sort of pantry recipe ideas recipes where i can just come in here and grab things and have a really great meal for my family we eat those things i rotate them in every once a week or every other week so that we are rotating through all of the items in our pantry and i try to incorporate as many things from here as possible in our regular meals and that's really important because we don't want to store anything that we're not actually eating so the expression eat what you store in store what you eat that's super important to keep everything fresh and to make sure that you're not letting anything go to waste i've talked a little bit more extensively about those things in in my previous video so check those out the other really important reason for having this and one thing i'm super grateful for is that afterwards when all of the snow and everything was gone i didn't have to worry about restocking my pantry or i wasn't desperate to get items and i also saved our family a lot of money because i like to buy things when they're on sale stock up then and then sort of shop my shelves when i need those items and so that saves money over time but it also helps keep us out of that fray when everybody's going crazy you know at when they heard about the snow storm stocking up we didn't need to do that because we already had what we needed and i didn't need to take items from food shelves that other people really did need that applies to both before and after the storms because after the storms people were desperate for food in a lot of cases they couldn't get out of their homes for a week they might not have had you know water or electricity so they might have run out of the things that they could eat without you know having any way of preparing them and they needed to get to the store they needed those items on the shelf and they didn't need me there taking things for our home when we didn't really need it we already had everything we needed and i didn't have to worry about it i didn't have to be concerned that i was taking something from someone who did i hope that this video answers some of your questions about why we keep a prepper pantry and how it served us during an event and you just never know when these things are going to happen so i was really happy that we had prepared in advance and it gave me confidence that what we're doing is the right thing for our family so if you have any questions about this of course i'd love to hear from you down in the comments section thank you guys so much for spending your time with me and if you're new to my channel i want to invite you to subscribe we really love to have you join our faith and flower community and make sure you activate the bell icon so that you'll get a notification every time i upload a new video thank you so much for watching i will see you in the next video and until then have a wonderful week [Music] you

Channel: Faith and Flour

Views: 44,937

Rating: 4.9307957 out of 5

Keywords: emergency food supply, food storage, food storage for beginners, 3 month food supply, 3 month food storage, how to start food storage, emergency preparedness, emergency food storage, food storage ideas, food storage room, prepper pantry, food storage tips, 1 month food storage, 4 week food storage, extended pantry, pantry tour, kitchen pantry, denise jordan, marys nest, jennifer l scott, Shes in her apron, texas ice storm 2021, texas snow storm 2021, winter storm

Id: vHfYz3T0h2o

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021