Food Storage Analyzer

One of the most commonly-asked questions regarding food storage is, "How much do I need to store?" Emergency Essentials has created a Food Storage Analyzer that will take into consideration your family dynamics (number of people, number of males, number of females, and ages) and help you identify what you have and what you still need. Click here to view their site.

There are several great advantages to this site:
1.) It helps you calculate what you need based on your current family; so, if you have young children, you can prepare for their food intake now and not what you'd need to prepare for if they were adults.
2.) You can easily update your family and instantly see what you need, so every year you can add to your food storage appropriately as your family grows.
3.) Your inventory is all saved online, so no need to worry about tracking your food storage on paper, then losing it (as I did) Just make you sure you update it if you are using your food storage, so you keep track of what you use (unless, of course, you replace it).

The only disadvantage to this site is that they list their products, so you have to enter everything according to their product line. But, it's pretty easy to substitute what you have in terms of their product line.

Homemade Laundry Soap

I got the following from a friend I grew up with in California. The rest of this is in her words:

4 cups hot water
1 Fels-Naptha bar of laundry soap $1.09/ bar
1 cup Arm and Hammer washing soda $3.19/ 3 lbs 7 oz box
1/2 cup Borax $3.99/ 4 lbs 12 oz box

Grate Fels-Naptha bar (small grater side). Dissolve in 4 cups hot water over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, till completely dissolved (about 10 min). Fill a 5 gallon bucket 1/2 full with warm/hot tap water. Stir in dissolved soap mixture, 1 cup washing soda and 1/2 cup borax. Stir till completely dissolved. Fill bucket the rest of the way with more warm/hot tap water. Stir. Cover and let sit overnight so it can gel. Next morning, stir, fill an empty Costco liquid soap dispenser carton half way with newly made laundry soap and fill the rest of the way with water. Shake to mix. All done! Save the 5 gallon bucket to refill Costco container about 4 more times with same half and half method.

When you add up the cost, it's about $2 for the 10 gallon mixture - about a 6 month supply for my family of 8. To buy the equivalent Kirkland brand at about $15 a carton, that's $75. Spending about 20 minutes to save yourself like 90% is worth it in my book. So try it. Try it and you may, I say.

I got the recipe from googling "Duggars". They have a show on the discovery channel called "17 kids and counting." It's a documentary style program that shows how they make things work for a family of that size; making their own laundry detergent is one of their staples to financial freedom.


**Update: I realized that this is missing a key note: Once you mix the soap and water, each at 50%, into your Costco container, use 1/2 c. per load of the mixture for regular loads and up to 1 cup for large loads. I use 1/2 cup for all loads with my and my husband's clothes, and 1 cup if I'm washing my kids' clothes. For added stink-remover, put up to 1/2 cup white vinegar in a Downy ball (or add during the rinse cycle). You will not believe how well it works until you try it, and I guarantee no vinegar smell can be detected on the clothes!

Tip

Set aside a small amount of money each week to buy staples such as pasta, baking ingredients, and paper products. You may be surprised at how quickly you can build up a supply of these staples for only a few dollars a week.

Food storage calculator

While at our stake Provident Living fair this past weekend, a member of our stake provided me with a food storage calculator. By inputing the number of people in your family, you can see how much food you should store for a year's supply (you can even change the number of years, if you want to store more than 1 year). By inputing how much you currently have, you can also see what percent of the recommended total you have so you know where you need to keep storing. I'm going to try to put the file on the right-hand side of this blog for download. If I can't figure out how to do that, you can email me or leave a comment, and I'll send it to you.

Thanks to Bro. Barnes for sending me this file, and thanks to whoever created it.

Food storage website

A coworker of mine found this website: http://www.alpinefoodstorage.com/. You can bulk order items, similar to what we do in the stake. There is an order form on the site. Prices are pretty decent and include shipping to her home in Alpine (you'll need to pick it up there). Check it out.