RV DOOMSDAY PREPPER?!? Food Storage Hacks for Small Spaces and Quarantine. Fresh to Freeze Dried...

I live in an RV and I camp in some pretty remote places, which means I'm not close to a local grocery store. So I've learned to make my food last longer, but recently I've taken that game to a whole new level. So if you live in an RV and you boondock or you just don't want to go to the store right now to get a bunch of supplies every week or every month, I'm going to show you how I have enough food stored in my RV right now to last two people six months. Don't get on me people. I know that this video is going to make me look like a crazy doomsday prepper, but desperate times right? Since I live in an RV and I boondock, I'm usually about 30 minutes one way away from a local grocery store. I've learned to make my food last and how to do that. But recently I've taken that game to a whole new level because when I'm camping, I want to make sure that I have the security that I can stay where I want to be for a long period of time. So if I don't want to go into town or the services in town are shut down, or let's say they don't have something like toilet paper, I know that I have everything I need in my rig to live for months. I'm going to show you everything that I do, including how I plan in stages to use fresh food, frozen food, and shelf stable food. And I'm not just talking about eat your fresh food first. I'll show you all of it now. Let me say that I know not everybody has an RV as big as mine. I started out in a 25 foot B plus van and then I moved to a 25 foot class C and now I'm in a fifth wheel. One of the reasons is that I wanted a bigger refrigerator and I wanted more storage for food because I like to cook and I like to camp for long periods of time out in the middle of nowhere. When I was in those smaller rigs, I really had to conserve and be careful about how I used my food. So everything I'm going to talk about here can work for anybody in any size rig, just maybe on a smaller scale. So it's really important for me to have all of the different kinds of produce and fruit that I can have inside of this house. Of course, that stuff goes bad like real quick. So I'm going to show you my method for making fresh food last longer. That's stage one. The first thing you have to know is that different kinds of fruit and produce should be stored in different ways to get the longest life out of it. There are some things you buy and they go bad really quick, right? Like berries. But here's my hack for that. If you buy fresh raspberries or blueberries or grapes or strawberries, don't just leave them in the containers that you bought them in. What you want to do is you want to give them a little bath in some cold water because I conserve water. I do this in a bowl. I don't just run the water. And then I add just a teaspoon or a half a teaspoon of regular white vinegar into the water and I swish it around. It does not make the berries taste like vinegar at all. What it does is it kills any of the little bacteria that's already on the berries that make a breakdown and decompose. So you just swish it around, give them a good cleaning, and then you rinse it with clean water and then you set the berries out on a paper towel so that they completely dry. This is super important because moisture is what kills the berries. Then when they're completely dry, I store them in regular plastic bags or Tupperware, but I do it in rows. So I put a flat row of the berry and then cover it with a paper towel and then do another row of the berries. If you do this, they last like two weeks. Another hack is that if you have broccoli or celery, these two things you can actually wrap up in foil paper. I know it sounds weird, but there's something about sealing them in there in that environment that makes them last forever. Broccoli in my experience will last a week or 10 days, but the celery will last like three weeks. The other thing that I like to have, which usually goes bad really fast, is fresh herbs. So if you're buying like parsley or cilantro, you know that in like three days they're just dead inside of the refrigerator. There are two different ways that you can store these to make them last longer. The first is to cut off the bottoms, just like they're flowers, and then you can put them in a little container with just like an inch of water in the bottom and then tear off what's on the bottom of the stalks, just like flowers, and put them in like the door of your fridge. They don't want to be too cold, so don't put them in the back. In the door, in some water, they will last two or three weeks if you keep changing out the water and cutting the stems. The other thing you can do is wash them and then store them the same way that you did the berries. Dry them and then put them in stacks in some paper towels so they stay dry. And here's my actual fridge. You can see I've got all kinds of stuff in here and I actually sort it so that I can eat the stuff that goes bad first. So I start with the bagged salads. I have a bunch of bagged salads here. I actually have them filed by expiration date so when I reach in I can grab the newest one first. The next hack I'm going to tell you about was a game changer for me. It's something for your freezer called a super cube. Now this is what they look like. This is not the same as freezing something in Tupperware and I'll tell you right now one of these things is like 35 bucks and it almost made me not buy it, but listen these things have lids and they actually help me eat produce longer because when my bananas start to go bad or my apples or my broccoli or my zucchini or whatever it is I can actually cut it up and freeze it in the super cube. What's great about this is that unlike a bag or other types of Tupperware they just stack like little bricks inside of your freezer and that produce that you weren't able to get to can be frozen and eaten later. I use these freezer cubes for everything from broth and soup to smoothies and cut up herbs and whole meals. Like you can have a layer of rice and a layer of stir fry and you just put it in the cube and you give it a little shake so the air gets out and you freeze it and then pop it out. Another trick you can see here in my freezer is that when I buy frozen food in the bags I don't keep them in the bags because RV refrigerators and freezers heat up and cool down all day long and your stuff goes bad and those bags get freezer burn like crazy. Plus they're shoved in the back and then I forget what's back there and I don't eat the stuff and then I end up just throwing it all out. So what I do is I actually while I'm in the grocery store parking lot I cut open those freezer bags full of food and I put them in square Tupperware containers that stack inside of my freezer and look I actually measured my freezer to see what was the best thing to put in there that would actually fit a standard bag of like frozen vegetables. This way I have a place to store my Tupperware. I store it empty inside of the freezer once the vegetables are gone and I can see what kind of vegetables are in there so I actually eat them. Okay we've talked about the fresh food and we've talked about the frozen but now I'm actually going to show you my shelf stable food which is really what's going to make me look like a doomsday prepper. You guys this is my actual pantry. Here's the thing I wanted to come out to the desert and camp for a long time and not have to go into town so I decided to get a couple of extra supplies and for the first time ever I decided to try a freeze-dried food. Now I'm not talking about like that multi-level marketing and way kind of a food that everyone you know is trying to sell. No disrespect that might be great but what I tried was Auckuson Farms that I got on Amazon and no I did not get this for free. I actually paid for it because I wanted to try it. The first thing I tried was the bananas. If you've ever paid for dried bananas like at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's or something like that you know these can be really expensive but they can also be tasty. In fact I liked it so much I bought a lot of different kinds of dried food and I measured my cabinets and looked at how many ounces each container had to figure out how I could put the most in my pantry as possible and that they wouldn't fall out while I was traveling. The bananas, the blueberries, the tomato powder, the potatoes, everything is really great. There's peas, there's carrots, dehydrated peppers, and one of the best parts is when you open up the container they just smell like the freshest vegetables. Now you have to follow the instructions to rehydrate them. You can't just rehydrate the bananas and expect them to taste like a fresh banana. You have to expect that you're going to put it in something like oatmeal or muffins or something like that. The corn and the peas and all of the fruit I could eat straight. The rest of it you actually need to rehydrate in usually some hot water. The directions vary or put it into something that you're cooking like in your instant pot. And if you look at how much this costs compared to the grocery store it's actually cheaper. The only thing I don't like about the freeze-dried food is that it's not organic. But to me that's kind of a trade-off because I don't have to go into town and get more which makes me feel more secure. I can stay out here as long as I want and know that I still have a lot of fruits and vegetables in my diet. In addition to that I have containers full of different kinds of rice and flour and beans. But hold on we're not done with the pantry. Let's go to the bedroom closet. Now again I know my rig is bigger than some but anybody can take these ideas and run with them. The back of my RV closet has these weird little shelves that are meant for maybe shoes or baseball caps something like that. Well that didn't really work for me because I don't have a lot of shoes on the road. The first thing I did is I went and got these little containers that have a handle that fit perfectly behind my clothes back inside of my closet. I can pull them out and that's where I keep all of my condiments and jars because they don't fall over then when I'm traveling. I filled up all the shelves that way but then I actually put canned goods all along the bottom of my closet and stacked them and then on the top of each one I wrote what was in there. Because one of the things I hated about traveling with canned goods is that I thought do I have chickpeas? I think I have chickpeas and then I'm rolling through like 40 different canned goods and I couldn't find it. So now I have everything sorted and everything actually stacked upwards so I know that if I have diced tomatoes on the top under that is a diced tomato and another diced tomato. When you are fitting a lot of stuff into a small space to me you have to do it this way. I'm not that organized naturally but this helps me from going crazy and then I know what I actually have and what I have to eat before I get to something else. And finally I found that the closet is a great place to store the potatoes and yes it can get a little bit warmer in there so I actually line that portion with a little Reflectix on the inside but it gets airflow and I just keep them in their regular bags and they stay back there in the dark and they're good for months. And finally I keep a good amount of toilet paper and tissues and paper towels in my outside bin. Now I was camping around January, February, March. I could not find toilet paper to save my life just like you guys. So now when I see it I try and buy a little bit extra and I keep a little bit in the house and I keep the rest in an outside bin. I don't keep food out there because I have had jars actually explode being stored in the outside bin because of heat and I don't want that and I don't want to attract any vermin. So I try and keep all the foodstuffs including even cat food inside and anything that won't attract animals or rats or squirrels stays on the outside. Whether you live in an RV or just want to know that you have enough stuff stored to feel secure for the next few months I hope this video helped you and I hope you're all doing well out there and staying healthy. I hope to see you soon. Until then everybody hunker down and be free.