Prepping: Rice and Beans for the Right Reasons

hi friends prepared suburbanite here not too awful long ago we had the pleasure of sitting in on a seminar given by Bob Gaskin it was called the morals of survival after the shtf and he made a promise at the very beginning of that presentation that he would change the way I prepped them and you know he did and I'm going to get into how that change affected me and what we're doing with our preps so stick with us so Bob told a story that he was in line at a Walmart grocery store Supercenter kind of a thing and he was behind a lady in line who had picked up a box of double stuffed Oreo cookies and a 12-pack of coca-cola and he looked down and saw that the total price of those two items was $9.88 or thereabout now $9.88 for some frivolous kinds of things seems like stuff that we do all the time now you buy a 12-pack of coke or you get some cookies or this or that but it's $9.88 so figure 10 bucks and if you were to take that $10 that you would frivolously spend on stuff that may not have any good nutritional value at all and spent that $10 every time you went to the grocery store buying rice and beans and the kinds of things that you can stock up on in your preps you're going to be a heck of a lot farther ahead I'm figuring 10 bucks a week just for rice and beans and we'll get into what we're doing right here in this video I've been doing this for 3 weeks now and I've got 45 pounds of rice I've got 22 pounds of dried beans already that's three weeks all right now how does that equate to future usage well according to the USDA there are seven servings of rice long long grain white rice in a pound so there's seven servings and a pound that's a cup no it's it's a half a cup it's a half a cup all right so if it's a half a cup there's seven half cups in a pound of uncooked rice it's going to require a little bit of water to cook the rice in and the rice will basically almost double in size once it's properly cooked so out of the 40 pounds of rice that I've picked up over the last three weeks we expect to get 280 servings just of rice now when we get into the beans the beans very similar in construct that 1/4 cup of dried beans when they're fully moisturized and cooked will turn into approximately 1/2 cup of cooked beans so there's 24 servings of a half a cup dry in a 2 pound pack okay so if we've got 22 pounds that's 12 servings a pound that's 264 servings of rice so between the two we're all over 500 servings of rice and beans now what we're going to do and we invested in this quite a long time ago because with this machine over here this is the Westin Pro 2300 vacuum sealer they're going to go in these vacuum sealed bags and they will get vacuum sealed will throw in oxygen absorbers in each package and then we'll double bag it into mylar bags and seal those but not vacuum seal a if that makes sense when we first started prepping in 2012 there abouts one of the things that was on a very original list was rice and beans and we did stockpile a little bit of rice and beans as time went on but that got old and we filled up a couple of storage buckets with rice and beans so we've probably got 2025 pounds of rice down there and maybe another 15 to 18 pounds of dried beans already put up that we put up I think in the late part of 2012 first part of 2013 somewhere around in there and we haven't really tapped into it because we haven't haven't needed to because there hasn't been any survival type situations we do enjoy rice meals and and doing joy rice and beans from time to time but you know digging into a one-pound package of rice one pilot package of beans doesn't really deplete your resources all that much and we may do it three or four times a year and that's about it well in a survival type situation after the shtf event one of the things that you're going to really need to be concentrating on is making sure that you can stretch your food now based on personal experience I have found that rice and beans just cook does rice and beans you boil up some water you soak the beans you boil the rice cook everything together maybe throw it in a crock pot or maybe throw it on up cast-iron skillet and warm it up that way just by itself is horribly bland so I'm going to recommend that as part of your preps that you also invest in things that will augment the rice and beans we generally have quite a quite a good stack of canned chicken and we do put up our own chicken from time to time we buy it in bulk and buy it 40 pound bags boxes at a time and well can some of that up and freeze some of it for ready use but the canned chicken we've still got we've probably got Oh two dozen points of our own canned chicken put up but we buy this canned stuff at our local BJ's Wholesale Club get a four pack around eight pack somewhere between eight bucks and twelve bucks that kind of a thing so you get four good-sized cans there are twelve and a half ounce cans that's going to add some protein to the mix you're going to need flavorings so I'm going to recommend that you spend a couple of bucks out of that $10 a week get yourself some Pad Caged seasoning mixes this one is curried rice this is broccoli and beef for stir-fry this is um oriental seasoning mix for rice and that kind of a thing you can cut up a canned ham put that in there for some flavor and some extra protein can of tomato sauce really goes a long way to give the thing some flavor give your casserole some flavor you can mix in dry soup mixes onion soup vegetable soup that kind of a thing comes in handy you can season it with your favorite hot sauce teriyaki sauce but best of all is to have a ready supply of beef and chicken bullion if you don't have anything else but to work on the flavoring for your rice and beans that I'm going to recommend highly that you invest a few bucks in a bulk purchase of bullion cubes for both beef and chicken and together they actually taste even better than they do individually so take that as it may we're going to be spending the day today taking all the rice taking all the beans breaking them down into ready-made serving acha jizz so that we've got enough for one or two maybe three meals and then enough for if there's a bigger group of people so we'll have a little bit bigger bag that can do enough to feed four to six people for a day or two that kind of a thing and then we'll take the beans do the same thing with them break them down into individual packaging servings and put this in these sealable tote bags tote boxes that I picked up at Lowe's Home Improvement Center we got about three that have come up empty now over the last couple of years so we're planning on filling those up and every week we're going to continue to spend that $10 I'm more rice and more beans and every month or so we're going to package it up and seal it one of the other things that Bob mentioned during his seminar on the morals of survival and it really did kind of hit home is what are you really going to do when the neighbor shows up at your front door and they have totally run out of food and their eight-year-old daughter is emaciated they don't that they didn't stock up they're not Preppers all they had in their larder was just enough for a couple three days because they always knew they could get to the supermarket and buy whatever they needed but now there isn't anything out there since the hit the fan so here we are they're knocking on your door you know them you live next door to up down the street from them go to church with them maybe see them at the community we'll see them in and around the community at the homeowners meetings those kinds of things you know who they are they know who you are and whether they know you're a proper or not they may be just not going to in the door saying can you help us are you going to help them do you have what it takes to say yeah I can help you well that's what the rice and beans are going to do because we're going to package those up into individual care packages for lack of a better term two and a half gallon plastic jugs five gallon plastic jugs and we're going to put enough of that kind of stuff the rice and the beans and some seasonings that kind of a stuff to at least get them over the hope hopefully until they can begin to learn how to stand on their own two feet I don't want them fully dependent on me but I am willing to help them out and this little bit of extra 10 bucks here ten bucks there is going to go a long way and allow me to sleep at night the other item on our agenda for today is to take these green beans from our garden and get them snapped get them cleaned up and get them pressure canned in our pressure cooker the pressure cooker sitting here behind me canning jars are there on the stove we've got to sterilize the lids wash the jars get the beans snapped and all that our garden has been pretty much a failure so far this year it's been so hot and maybe way too wet for a too long a period of time and now it's been almost near drought conditions where I've had to water every day the tomatoes have burned out the squirrels attacked the tomatoes so we're going to have a very very poor poor tomato harvest this year we're going to have to go to the farmers market and buy a couple of bushels of tomatoes - canned up for our winter stores for that but we've had good luck with green beans we've already got maybe 30 points put up right in here in these two bags there's another six or eight points that we're going to put together today just to complete the green bean harvest I think it's pretty much done right now so that's also any agenda for today so today's our day for prepping it preparing our food this is the prepared suburbanite reminding you to be prepared always out for now you

Channel: Prepared Suburbanite

Views: 155,793

Rating: 4.8693442 out of 5

Keywords: Preps, Prepping, Preparing, Rice and Beans, Survival, SHTF, Moral Survival, Vacuum Sealing, Vacuum Sealed, Food Storage, Morals of Survival, Bob Gaskin

Id: 7pwl8Wt0qJw

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/illiniwarrior]

rice and the common beans like pinto, black and navy are your bulk buy and bucket long term store items - then buy in bulk and save $$$$$ ... you pay twice as much buying in 2lb packages ...

the LDS Church is selling 25lb sacks of rice at $8.50 and beans at $14 - pinto beans even cheaper at $11.50 - and some public bulk stores are even cheaper ....

[u/cbrooks97]

Good video. Beans can get old real quick (God bless those people who live on that day in and day out, but most of as haven't grown up that way), but the idea is sound. A few extra cans of veggies, a box of instant mashed potatoes, some dried fruit -- it's easy to put back a little hear and a little there.

The hard part is space!

[u/zmanhawkeye]

Love the ideas as to how to add flavor to the rice and beans. I can't tell you how long it took me to add flavor. It truly sucks by itself, flavor makes a world of difference.

[u/ReverseEngineer77]

Very entertaining little prep video. :)