WORKING PANTRY + HOW TO START YOUR FOOD STORAGE 2020 | 🥫Family Of 6

I'm sure you guys can tell by the title of this video that we are going to be talking about food storage and a working pantry and how all of that works. This is probably my most requested video as far as Instagram goes. Like when I talk about stuff on Instagram, people wanna know how to get started with a working pantry or with food storage and like what to store. They're not really sure where to even begin. So I thought today I would do a video on a tour of our pantry and a tour of our food storage room so you guys can just kind of get an idea of what we do and what works best for us. So we started this back in 2017. This is not something we just did overnight. It does take time to stock up as much food as we have but I'm going to just kind of be sharing tips along the way throughout this video that will hopefully be helpful. I also want you guys to leave comments below what information you guys need the most because again, today I thought I'll just do a tour and I'll talk about a few things that come to mind but as far as information goes, I don't really even know what information to share. So leave a comment asking specifics about food storage and then maybe I can get some more videos out on this topic because I know we talk a lot about it on Instagram, not so much on YouTube but I feel like YouTube is a better place so I can make like a full-blown video instead of just like little stories and then save them to my highlight. I just feel like this is a little bit easier. So we're gonna get started with the pantry. This is where I suggest everybody start when it comes to food storage. Start in your pantry and start with a three-month supply of foods that you already have in your pantry. So let me walk you through the pantry and I'll explain what I'm talking about. All right, I would say this is about a three-month supply of what we typically go through in our family. So we don't have anything in this pantry that we don't consistently use or rotate and I have found this system has worked the very best for our family. So we're gonna start at the bottom here. Our kids love Capri Suns. That's something that they go through in their lunches so we actually have a lot more of that downstairs too. We keep water, it's just at least one case in here all the time. We have a lot more water than that but these are just the water bottles we prefer. You get 40 in a case at Costco and they're like $2.40. It's so cheap. So that's something I would definitely suggest is stock up on a couple cases of water, at least minimum, at least probably 10 of them and you're gonna spend what, 24 bucks? Get 400 water bottles, that's a great place to start. Definitely recommend getting water ASAP. We love the Kirkland Popcorn. This is also from Costco. You get 44 bags and it's less than 10 bucks. So we always have at least one case of that upstairs. This next row is our cereal or our breakfast. We have like pancakes, the cereals that we go through and I'll explain these tubs here in just a second. Then over here we have our snacks. So we have these bins that we throw just different snacks in. Fruit snacks too, those are also from Costco. Costco. We always buy the big, huge bags and we actually get these at Walmart. Like Fruity Pebbles, Captain Crunch, those are our kids' favorite. Anyway, we get the big, huge bags and they're just really hard. I hate pouring cereal out of those. So we have found two of these containers and I will try to find the links for these. I got them on Amazon. Two of these containers is equivalent to one bag and this will last us a couple of weeks. So anyway, that's the way we prefer to do it. You can definitely just avoid that and use the bags but I love to have them sealed. It's just easier to pour cereal. And because this is in a box, we keep the Cheerios over here in its original packaging. Okay, up here is our breads and our buns and this is obviously something you cannot stockpile. So what we do is we just go grocery shopping every week for the different breads that we use. And when it comes to bread, what you want to store instead of obviously bread, unless you want to store them in the freezer, you can definitely do that and it can last a few months. But we just have ingredients to make bread. So we have flour and oil and all the different things you're going to need to make bread. And I'll talk about that once we get to the basement. Okay, and then this bin has our chips. We have rice cakes in here. This is where you're going to see more stock of stuff. Our family loves to go through these muffins. This is a great food storage item. They're good on the shelf for about a year. But this makes six muffins. They're like 80 cents at Walmart. And all you have to do is add water. So this is a really good tip when it comes to food storage is if you can find packaged items that say just add water, those are your best because you don't want to have to store eggs and those kinds of things. There's obviously alternatives you could use, but again, just adding water makes your life a lot easier. So our family loves muffins. We love cornbread, especially with chili. So we always have at least this much upstairs. And these are just some of our favorite crackers and cookies and some more snacks over here. Now this shelf is mostly dinner items. So we have our big things of rice. This is our family's favorite meal in the entire world is the roasted garlic Parmesan with noodles. And we love like the eggshell noodles. Something that we know as a family, to make one of these meals, our family will eat half a bag and one container of this. So right here with the four bags, I know that that will serve us eight dinners. And then we have six of these, which would equivalent to six dinners. Does that make sense? But basically what you want to do when it comes to your pantry is know exactly how much your family eats of something and how long that would last you. So this obviously is not like a three month supply. However, when you're considering all of the different dinners that you have here, we love just different kinds of soups. I need to go stock up on our green beans and our corn. But anyway, just knowing what your family goes through is the most important thing. How much of each of these food items would last you, how long it would last you. And that way you can kind of get an idea of what your family needs the very most. Up here we have our top ramen, macaroni. These are again, things our kids love. We absolutely love these kinds of drink powders. And I think this is another really good food storage item just because if there were some kind of emergency, it's just sometimes you want to have more than water. And I always just love adding a little bit of flavor. Right here, I don't really have like stocks of these items. I do keep them somewhere else, but let's see. Right here is just kind of like some random stuff that we have on hand. Now here, we're almost done with this peanut butter. So I'm going to show you guys an idea of when it comes to like running out of something, how I restock because there is some kind of system to doing this. So right here we have three peanut butters deep, but this will last about a month for our family. Like one of these big jugs anyway. We'll go through a little more than this every month. And then we have four jellies here, four ranches. Our family loves ranch. We go through way too much of that. Ketchup, mayo, we have a few of those, and syrup. So those are some condiments that we keep up here at all times. And then as we are running low here, we'll go down to the storage room and we'll shop from our storage. That's where we shop. We don't go to the grocery store. We go downstairs and we start to replenish the upstairs food with the downstairs food. Then up there on the top shelf is our cereal and that is well over a three month supply we have up there. Those are like four, or I think those are three bags deep. And then we also keep our cookies up here. If these were down low, our kids would eat them all day. So we keep those up really high. So this, again, is just an idea of the pantry food. We have lots of chicken and meats in our freezer and in our fridge. But as far as our pantry goes, this is what our pantry looks like. Now, just talking about this upstairs pantry. When it comes to stocking this food, my biggest tip would be to just get one extra when you're going to the store. So let's say you're shopping today and you have on your shopping list one peanut butter, one jelly, one ranch, one box of rice. If you can, budget for two, okay? So you're just getting one extra. And try to do that as often as you can, just getting one extra. And then you will eventually have at least a three month supply. And I feel like that's a great place to start. Knowing you have at least three months in your pantry, I feel like just takes this huge weight off your shoulders, especially what we're coming up on. We have elections, we have flu season, we don't know if COVID's gonna get worse. So I think just with the times we're in right now, and this is not to try to scare everybody, but just to be safe. I think the worst possible thing that could happen as a mom is not having food to feed your kids. So if you can find even five extra dollars in your budget, spend it on food. Get your three month supply ready and stocked, especially before elections, you guys. I'm just saying, things are crazy right now. This is a scary time to be alive. And so I'm just finding a lot more people interested in food storage. I feel like a lot of people's hearts are just turning towards that, and they don't know why. So if you have it on your mind, use that extra money and spend it on food and water and other supplies. Now, before I even get started on this big food storage room, I wanna say that I know not everybody has a room like this in their house. We were blessed enough that when we moved here, there was a storage room. These shelves were already built in here, and you know that because they are green and yellow. I would have never made green and yellow shelves. So this has been here since this house probably existed. Definitely 60s material. But this was another big telling point to me. I personally have to have a food storage room in my house and in all of our houses we've had one. So we already had this room. It is tiny. This is probably, I'm touching both of the walls right here. So this is not a big room by any means, but I know, again, most people don't have a room like this in their house. So when it comes to finding places in your house to store food, there are so many different options. You guys, I would even find a place maybe in the basement and throw up a couple shelves. There are some great shelves you can get just at Walmart. You can get some on Amazon. So get a couple of different shelves and just put them in a hallway in the basement if you have something like that. Anywhere you can find some space, even under beds because there is no sunlight. And that's another thing. This room is like in our basement. There's no lighting in here at all unless I turn the light on. That's the only light this food ever sees. The other thing I wanted to say is, again, you guys, we have been doing this since 2017. It was actually August of 2017 was the first time I ever bought my first item of food storage. And since then we have been working on this every single week. So this has been like a three year process for us. And anytime we get extra money, bonuses, whatever, we spend it here. I don't want you guys to feel overwhelmed with like, oh my gosh, this is how much food I need. But we wanted to make sure we had a good supply for our children for longer than three months, longer than six months even. So we're looking at some of this will last us well over a year. And that's if we couldn't go to the store one time. So with that being said, I will show you the rest of this room. Real quick, since I'm going to be showing you this fridge, this was also left here when we moved in. It doesn't work. However, we should get it to work because that's like a big deep freezer and I would love to have a deep freezer. But again, this is something we didn't even have to buy. They just left it here when they moved. So that would be a great thing to have in your food storage. We'll just start up here. We have like our condiments. Again, lots of Pam. I have like Pam everywhere in this room. I don't know why it's scattered everywhere. But one tip I would have for you guys is to store all your items together. Just recently, we finally reorganized everything and we put everything together because we had no idea how much like peanut butter we had or how much ranch we had because it was kind of just scattered all over the place. So that's like the best tip I could give you is make sure all of the things are stored together and always be taking inventory of what you have. So we have a lot of things that only last like six months, like these crackers, they expire pretty quickly. But the canned foods are the best for food storage because they last the longest. Even if it says it expires in a year or two years, just know if it's a canned food item, it does have an indefinite shelf life. You can go and look this up. What that means is that your food will last way longer than it says. However, if there's dents or dings, then you do not wanna be eating food past expiration date because it probably has gone bad. This is if a can has stayed perfect. The nutritional value can go down. It might not taste as good, but it can still sustain life. And that's what's important when it comes to food storage. One item that was not upstairs that I wanna talk about, this is a food storage item we don't really touch because we get like fresh meat all the time. And this has a five-year shelf life. Like on the can, it says five years, but see 2025. This is good by 2025. But again, like I said, it'll last a lot longer. Each of these cans are one pound of meat and you guys, they're delicious. So this is a good way to store ground beef without having to refrigerate. That's another thing. I don't like to have a huge supply of things in the freezer and the fridge, just in case you lose electricity because that seems to happen a lot when it comes to like natural disasters, right? Like we've lost our power so many times this year with all of the crazy weather. Some of the meats, again, that are my favorite are the Keystone ground beef. These are kind of hard to find because people love them. We get ours at Walmart and they're around $6 or $7 a can. I know that is kind of expensive, but if you want to have really delicious meat in your food storage, then this is a good way to go. Another one of our favorite meats are these chicken breasts from Costco. And we get these cases. I want to say these are like $9, but you get like six giant cans of it. And they are so good. We love this chicken. Speaking of chicken, we've eaten like so much of it. You guys, we used to have this whole top row was just complete chicken. So if you miss that video, I actually can my chicken. This is a way for you to store chicken on your shelf again, so you don't have to store it in your fridge and it's already cooked. And that is an entire quart of chicken. It's huge. There's a ton of it in there. If you miss that video on how to do that, I will have that linked below. Something else we store is milk because our kids love milk. I mean, with all that cereal, right? You're gonna need some milk. So this is, I'll show you a few different ways we have milk. We have this nonfat dry milk. And with all the milks we have total, I think we have like, we have the inventory sheet somewhere, but I want to say we have 200 gallons worth of milk. Now, something else you want to think about is if you're buying this stuff, make sure you have water, enough water to mix with these things, because what good will this do if you don't have any water? And if for some reason your water is contaminated, make sure you have at least some kind of filtration system or you're storing water so that you can make all these things. Otherwise, a lot of this stuff on your shelf is no good. So again, we have, this is, this kind's from Walmart. I want to say this was 15 or $14. We get this from our church actually just on a website and I'll have that linked below. The best milk you will ever, ever, ever have that's from food storage is the Morning Moose. Okay, this is the best milk. It tastes exactly like regular milk. You cannot taste a difference. And at our grocery store, we get this for $16. On Amazon, it's like 25. So if you can find it in your stores, and that's actually not even Walmart. I know our Walmart carries it, but I've never seen it in stock, not one time. Anyway, all that to say, powdered milk is a great thing to store. Another kind of milk we store is this almond milk. And this is also from Costco, it's the Kirkland brand. And this is a good way to store, like if you want the liquid kind of milk, our family loves almond milk too. So me and Thomas especially could easily go through this in just a couple of months. Okay, over here we have more baking supplies. So we keep like vanilla. We always just use imitation vanilla, and I think it tastes just the same. This is like a big thing of baking powder. We have our Crisco. I actually do have, I need to buy a little bit more of that. That's a really good thing to have in your food storage. We have flour, we have our sugar. And the reason I actually keep these like small flours and sugars up here is just because those are a lot easier. Like this is for our rotating pantry that we would use. But right here, this is just two of the drums that we have of flour. So those are both completely filled with flour. We get our flour at Costco for just a couple dollars and it will fill up one of those things. And then we put some oxygen packets in there. So depending on how much flour and how big the container is will depend on how many of these oxygen packets you're going to need. So this just helps this stay fresher for longer. You can buy these off Amazon, but I have found them a lot cheaper at a store local to us. That's called Smith and Edwards. I'm not sure where you guys could find these. There is a sticker on there that also says Ace Hardware. So inside of our Smith and Edwards, it's also like an Ace Hardware. So maybe you could find some there at your local Ace cause I know that those are kind of everywhere. Something else you're going to want to store is salt. So we have a big, huge sucker of the pink Himalayan salt. And this is from Costco. And if you can see back here, we have a ton of butter stored. So we looked up videos on how to can butter. Now they say don't do this, but you know, it's not like super recommended, but we've actually watched some videos where people opened up their butter from like 10 years ago and it was still perfect. So if you do it right, I'm not going to make a video on how to do it, but you can go find some YouTube videos on how to store butter and also how you know if it's rancid. You know, when you open up a can, if it's good or not, just by the smell, the texture, whatever. We actually have like a hundred million of these. I don't know what these are doing in here cause we don't really store any like non-food items in here. So I should probably move those. You can see some of the stuff we've just kind of thrown up here cause it's really random, but we love refried beans. There's some random light gushers. Over on this side is mostly like our kids' snack stuff. Now, one tip is again, you guys, the only thing we're storing is things that we go through. So obviously like Goldfish and Rice Krispie Treats are not something that will last here for 25 years. Like some of these things will. This is stuff we just regularly buy and what our kids love and what our kids would eat. So if there was some kind of emergency, it's not like our kids are just eating beans and rice and there's no actual food that they like or snacks that they like. Oh my goodness. Let me see what you got. You found me a rock. Yeah, another rock. Thank you. Can I have it? You're so sweet. And this one for me. Okay, good. If there's one thing I've learned when it comes to food storage is storing things you will actually eat. Do not store a bunch of stuff that nobody in your family likes. Just makes no sense, right? Down, let's see, we got our cereal down here. Lots and lots and lots of cereal. My biggest tip is again with the Cheerios, two boxes for seven bucks at Costco and they're huge boxes, like the biggest boxes I've ever seen. You can see this is like a normal size box compared. So seven bucks and you're getting two big old things of Cheerios. And again, these are the bags of cereal my kids love. So you're gonna see Alfredo just like everywhere because I told you this is something our family loves and we eat sometimes more than once a week, if I'm being honest. Lots of pancake mixes, lots of muffin and cornbread. There's some more cornbread over there. We have some oats down there. More cans, lots of potatoes. We actually love potatoes, so we have a lot of that. And lots of oil. You're gonna see that just everywhere over here. I don't really have a good spot for that yet. I do need to do a little bit more organizing down here. These number 10 cans are something else I wanna talk about because this is long-term food storage. So when we're talking food storage, there's lots of different kinds. We have our short-term, which is like the stuff that we just go through every single day. And then we have our long-term food storage that could literally store for 30 plus years. 25, 30 plus years. Typically, these things you're going to find in these number 10 cans are long-term. So they have at least a 10-year shelf life, if not longer. And it's literally just how they are stored because they are sealed airtight. No light can enter them. They have a much longer shelf life. So this is something we do not ever touch. This flower down here, like if I were to run out of flower. Thank you so much. If I were to run out of flower or potatoes, I would not touch these. This is literally for emergency only. And if we were actually living on our emergency food and we couldn't go to a store and we had no access to a store, that is when we would tap into this food storage because I don't wanna touch anything that has. So some of the things that we have in these cans, again, all-purpose flour. We have our instant potatoes. We have a ton of rice. And these are like four cans deep. Like, not four, I guess two rows deep. But they're stacked four, if that makes sense. So each row is like four cans. And that continues over here. Like our red and our white wheat right here. And then some macaroni. We have a lot of sugar, a lot, a lot of sugar. And again, you guys, just think of things that you would possibly need if you had to make stuff. So this is basically for bread. This is for bread or like scones or rolls or whatever. That is the only reason I store flour is if we didn't have access to bread. We have muffin mixes. I personally love these apple slices. We grew up on these because my mom was like an avid food storage person. And we ate through our food storage all the time growing up. So I know what it's like to eat this stuff. And the apples are so good. We got these back in 2017. And this is before we had chicken. So we got some like egg mix, which I think is really cool that they have that. Okay, what's down here on the shelf? Lots of random stuff, I don't know. We have some taco shells back there. Popcorn, because we have our popcorn machine. Lots of cream of chicken. That's one of our favorite meals. We have a lot of meals we make with the cream of chicken. Lots of tuna. That's another really good meat item to have. More noodles. You can see up there, we have four of these giant containers of, we have pancake batter and we also have cereal. So that's what those are. And those are things, again, we don't touch unless an absolute emergency because those have a really long shelf life. Okay, when it comes to like rotating your food, this is how you're going to do it. So I just took the empty can of peanut butter from here. What I want to do now is bring all of these forward, okay, because this is like in order of when they'll expire. I just brought this one down from the food storage. So I'm going to put this one on the very back, okay, and then put these ones in the front. And we're going to start using this one. Now the next thing I'm going to do is I put peanut butter on my grocery list and when I go and buy some peanut butter, I'm going to then put it on the back of my food storage shelf. So that way you're always using your food storage in order and you're not letting any food go bad in any of your food storage areas. You don't want it to go to waste. Cut.