Blender Wheat Pancake Recipe

My mother-in-law told me that if you don't use wheat within 45 minutes after you grind it into flour, the wheat looses a large part of its nutritional value. I don't know what that exactly means for the wheat flower sold at the grocery stores, but it is no big deal if you use your food storage wheat right after you send it through your wheat grinder. However, if you're like me and have a huge, honky-tonky, wooden wheat grinder from the 60s that's extremely impractical to use in an apartment setting on a regular basis, then it's rather discouraging to hear that I can't get the full nutrition out of my wheat flour a week or even a day after I go through a wheat grinding binge.

I found hope when I found this recipe (and hopefully I'll find more like it) in a Iowa City Wards cookbook from my sister. It's a recipe for wheat pancakes using wheat grains/berries, what wheat is when you buy it from the Cannery before you put it through the wheat grinder.

Blender Wheat Pancakes

3/4 c. wheat grains (not ground into flour)
1 c. milk
3 eggs
1 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 c. oil or melted butter

Pour wheat grains into blender with milk. Blend on high for 4 minutes. Add remaining ingredients; blend. Pour onto hot griddle.

Word of caution: The blender is very loud when you're blending the wheat grains and milk, and you have to endure the noise for 4 full minutes. I don't recommend doing it a 6:45 on a Saturday morning if you live in an apartment with 4 other apartments connected to yours. I did, and...yeah...I won't do it again.

Kids might need to get used to their taste. My son, Josh (3 yrs), hasn't been too excited by them because they aren't Bisquick pancakes like we've always had before, but he'd nearly eat a whole one everytime I give him one for breakfast. I think they are great, but my opinion might be skewed because I feel so cool making them...using my food storage wheat in my blender and all. They make a lot. I freeze the ones we don't eat and eat and enjoy them later.

One more thing about this recipe, I found another one just like it in my husband's grandma's Provo stake cookbook. In that sister's recipe, it was nearly the same, but it called for only 1 tsp. baking soda and half the oil or melted butter.

If you'd like to try the recipe and don't have wheat grains, let me know. I have plenty that I can share.

ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm starting a recipe drive. I'd like to make a booklet of food storage recipes people in the ward use. Email me if you have any recipes you use, please.

Thanks! Happy Food Storage Cooking!

Video Food Storage Tours

Food Storage Tour with Kyrsten Part I:



Food Storage Tour with Kyrsten Part II:



Food Storage Tour with Kyrsten Part III:



Food Storage Tour with Kyrsten Part IV:



Food Storage Tour with Julianne Part I:



Food Storage Tour with Julianne Part II:



Food Storage Tour with Julianne Part III:



Food Storage Tour with Julianne Part IV:



Food Storage Tour with Julianne Part V:



Food Storage Tour with Julianne Part VI:

Kid Friendly Food Storage

*Handout by Emily Roberts given at the May 2010 Relief Society Meeting

Plan your food storage with your little ones in mind. To get you started, here are a few special considerations for family-oriented food storage. And at the bottom of this page, there are some great resources to keep you going.

• Take the time to figure out what your family eats regularly and store those items
• Store appropriate quantities for your young people—see http://www.melindabeth.com/food_storage/
• Make sure to store foods kids need
  o Fats (e.g. vegetable shortening)
  o Vitamins (e.g. supplements, fortified fruit drink mixes)Extra milk
• Make sure to store foods kids want
  o Things they are used to eating
  o Things they are not allergic to
• Try out foods from your long term food storage in your everyday cooking (e.g. powdered milk, ground wheat). And have your kids cook with you with those ingredients so they’ll like it. Practice making bread--it’ll be fun to learn together!
• Plan and plant a garden together
• Have your kids help with food storage organization
• Teach them the importance of self-reliance and following the prophet

RESOURCES:

• Ward Food Storage Blog: http://hpfoodstorageandemergencyprep.blogspot.com
• Excellent information about building a healthy and kid friendly food storage: http://www.melindabeth.com/food_storage/
• Preparing and storing baby food: http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/Resources/feedinginfants-ch12.pdf
• Another website about preparing for babies in your food storage: http://preparednesspro.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/preparing-for-babies-in-your-food-storage/
• FS for children with Autism: http://www.1800prepare.com/pages/4-Food-Storage-Must%252dHaves-for-Children-with-Autism.html
• "How to start your food storage for $10 a week" article: http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/hagan59.html
• Kids Emergency Preparedness Site: http://www.ready.gov/kids/home.html

Dehydrated Food

Food Storage-Part Two

Dehydrated Food
by Carrol Draginis

Why dehydrate ??

1. To Preserve foods in the most natural way possible. Foods retain more of their nutrients & beneficial enzymes during the drying process. Baby foods are more nutritious when blended from dehydrated vegetables and you control the quality!
2. Foods that are packaged properly and stored in a dark cool environment can last for 30+ years! Canned foods generally are out of date after 2 years. Freezing usually only lasts for up to a year (best case scenario) and is dependent upon electricity.
3. Extremely convenient to have a store of dehydrated onions, peppers, vegetables and herbs for cooking purposes, really easy to prepare a soup or other dish from your own pre-packaged meals. You always know exactly what is in the food! No sulfites in tasty fruit snacks, use crushed vitamin C tabs mixed in water or lemon juice instead, or ascorbic acid.
4. Takes up less room than canned or boxed foods, weighs much less, can be placed in 72 hr. packs or taken on road trips or camping. Backpackers have been using dehydrated meals for years. Makes food prep a breeze for Dutch oven cooking while camping.
5. Initial outlay of $$ is less than buying a freezer, less than buying a canner and jars, etc. Can be very modest if a stackable type is purchased. If you can do the initial outlay of $219.00 - The Excalibur is by far the best of the home dehydrators. It has a 10 year warranty, and is top of the line.
6. Very easy to learn and to fit in to a busy schedule! Can do a little or a lot and lots of ways to take the “work” out of it. Perfect for the home gardener!

www.Dehydrate2Store.com

This is an amazing website and the one that inspired me to take up dehydrating! There are videos showing the actual process of preparing foods for the dehydrator. Showing what to expect after dehydrating, packaging and storing for best results, cooking with dehydrated foods.
Also recipes, helpful hints, and she even has a two part video showing all the steps on building a storage rack!

Freeze dried foods
These can be extremely useful for food storage. It permits us to store foods long-term that we otherwise could not, without commercial equipment to work with. It enables us to build our own prepackaged soup mix with the addition of meat or poultry, and baking mixes with powdered eggs, honey powder, shortening or butter. We can add to our long-term pantry such items as cheese, sour cream and buttermilk. Some of which can be dried but using commercial equipment (ie. Instant milk, buttermilk).

Food storage should be a mixture of dehydrated, freeze-dried, and canned or bottled foods.
Don’t forget to store water! Its needed especially for the dried foods.

Websites for obtaining Freeze-dried and Dehydrated foods:
www.providentliving.org. (Church website for the LDS Cannery)
www.Dehydrate2Store.com (Highly informational-with instructional videos and links to Excalibur dehydrator and DC Interprises for equipment and bags for sealing. Also drawings for winning a dehydrator and discounts for Honeyville Grain.)
www.Honeyvillegrain.com
www.survivalacrers.com (Will honor lower prices from other websites. Read his Blog, very interesting comments about the state of world, etc.)
www.beprepared.com (For emergency essentials)
www.freezedryguy.com

These are just a few, do some research and you might come up with even better ones than these!

Also, tune in to www.youtube.com as there are a lot of informational videos to be seen both for dehydration and in general survivor preparations.

Promised recipes!!

Chicken Chili Soup

¼ cup dehydrated onion
2 cups dried beans (soaked overnight) or use canned
1 cup dehydrated sweet corn (or add last 10 min. of cooking if fresh/frozen)
½ cup tomato powder (or 2 cups tomato sauce)
1 tblsp chicken bouillon powder (continue next page)
1 package chili seasoning (I use McCormik-mild)
2 cups of freeze dried chicken, TVP, or can use fresh cooked
3-4 cups of water (may need to add a little)

Place all of the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer 45 min. OR place in a crock pot and cook on low heat for 2-3 hours. Correct the seasoning.


Beef Barley Soup

½ cup dehydrated carrots
¼ cup dehydrated onion
¼ cup dehydrated celery
2/3 cups Quik barley (if using regular use longer cooking time)
4 cups freeze dried beef dices
6 tsp bouillon or 6 cubes, 1 tsp garlic, 1 tsp dried parsley
6 cups of water

Place all ingredients into a crock pot with 6 cups of water and slow cook for 2-3 hours. If using reg. barley, slow cook for 5-6 hours. Good with dehydrated peas and corn added. Correct the seasoning.

Vegetable Soup

½ cup dehydrated zucchini
½ cup dehydrated potatoes
1 cup dehydrated tomatoes
½ cup dehydrated bell pepper
¼ cup dehydrated celery
¼ cup dehydrated onion
1 cup dehydrated corn
½ cup dehydrated spinach
½ to 1 cup macaroni (optional)
6-8 chicken or vegetable bouillon cubes (or tsp) of granulated/powdered
1 tsp dried parsley, 1 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp black pepper (if desired)

Place ingredients in crockpot with 8 cups water and slowcook for 3-4 hours.

Banana Nut Bread

1/3 cup of oil (I used corn oil)
½ tsp vanilla
3 eggs
½ cup sugar
1 ½ cups mashed banana
1 cup chopped walnuts
2 tsp cinnamon
2 ½ cups bisquick
½ cup honey

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease bottom of loaf pan or use muffin pan with liner. Beat with a spoon (I used an electric mixer) for 30 seconds. Bake 55-65 minutes for loaf pan/15min. For regular size muffins.
Note: On this you could use freeze dried shortening, powdered eggs, dehydrated bananas and powdered honey in this recipe in order to prepackage and store long term!

Deep Dish Apple Pie

1 tbsp apple pie spice
½ tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
3 table spoon butter
3 tbsp corn starch
5-6 cups dehydrated apples
1 cup sugar
1 pie crust

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place dehydrated apples into a large bowl and fill with enough boiling water to completely cover the apples, cover and let sit for 5-10 minutes. While the Apples are still hot add the other ingredients and mix then dot with butter. While this mixture cools prepare your pie crust. Assemble your pie, remember to cut several vent holes. Sprinkle liberally with sugar and bake for 40 minutes. Will probably need to protect your outer crust with a tent of foil to prevent over browning.

*For questions about dehydrating, ask Sister Draginis (rdraginis@yahoo.com; 972-955-3696).

Thursday, May 20 RS Meeting Recap

At our Food Storage Part II Relief Society meeting last Thursday night, we took a virtual tour of Julianne Price's and and Kyrsten Crawford's food storage. They each stored their food in a varitey of places threw out their home, i.e. hall closets, bedroom closets, behind beds pulled forward from the wall and in kitchen pantries and cabinets. Sister Price also stores some food in her garage. She knows that, being outside, the food's self life decreases dramatically, but she plans on using her food more frequently than the 20+ or 30+ year self life.

One thing that I noticed in both Sister Price's and Kyrsten Crawford's food storages was dried fruits and vegetables. Although fruits and vegetables are not one of the basic staples of a longer-term storage, they would provide necessary vitamins, minerals and variety to your diet if you ever needed to live on your food storage.

Both Sister Price and Sister Crawford mentioned the necessity of having a plan when building and maintaining a food storage. Although neither went into specific detail about their plans, Sister Price mentioned how much easier it is to run a food storage with a plan, and Sister Crawford said that she is making a detailed monthly menu based on her food storage to help her know how to best use her food storage when crisis comes.

Thank you Sister Price and Sister Crawford for sharing your food storage with everyone. What great examples you guys are!

One thought that I had while watching the videos was how important it is for our food storages to emulate what we normally eat on a daily basis. For example, it's easier to store and rotate wheat when it's something we naturally use daily or weekly. If you don't use wheat in your cooking, either have different grains in your storage or learn how to use it and gradually make it a part of your family's diet. The same goes for rice, pasta, potato flakes/pearls, oats, pinto beans, black beans, dry milk, and other common items found in a food storage.

We also had an awesome dehydrating food demo, but I'll go into that in a new post.

Happy Food Storage Planning!

Food Storage Recipes

These are some food storage recipes that I thought were fun. I've tried the hot chocolate mix recipe, and it is very good. I haven't tried the Rice A Roni recipe, but it looks like fun and a good basic recipe to expand and experiment with.

Hot Chocolate Mix

6 c. powdered milk
3 c. powdered sugar
1 c. unsweetened cocoa powder
2 c. non-dairy coffee creamer
2 pkgs large instant chocolate fudge pudding mix

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl. Store in airtight container.

To serve: Add 1 c. hot water to 1/3 c. chocolate mix.

What's fun about this hot chocolate mix is you can experiment with the flavor of the coffee creamer you use to change the flavor of the hot chocolate.

Rice A Roni

1 c. long grain rice
1 c. broken pieces of vermicelli pasta
2 Tbs. butter or oil
1 Tbs. chicken bouillon granules
1 t. dried parsley, crumbled
1/8 t. white pepper
4 1/4 c. hot water

To serve:

Brown the vermicelli and rice in a saucepan with the butter or oil. Add all other ingredients and cook for 20 minutes. The rice will be light and fluffy. Serves 4.

If you have any fun recipes using food storage items, email me, and I'll post them.

Thanks!

Living Essentials on the BYU channel

Hello Everybody!

I'm visiting my in-laws, and I discovered something on BYU TV. They have this show called Living Essentials. I don't know how often they talk about food storage, but when I turned on the TV Monday, they talked about dehydrating food.

Here's some little blips from the show and online...

"Dried food can be a great staple in food storage and an inexpensive way to prepare good convenience mixes for fast cooking. Knowing how to dry foods and use them can give you additional variety for your cooking and food storage."

"Dried foods are used to create convenience mixes which can add quality and convenience to your cooking. Dehydrated foods add variety to home storage as well as everyday cooking. They are easy to store and take much less space than canned or fresh foods."

They gave a recipe for Instant Oatmeal Packets

• 1 1/2 cups instant oatmeal
• 3/4 cup powdered oats
• 1/2 cup powdered milk
• 1/2 cup flavored fruit bits (strawberry, peach, or apple)
• 1/4 cup sweetened drink mix (lemonade, peach or apple)

Mix all ingredients together. Store in airtight container.

To Serve: Add 1 cup of water to 1 packet. Cook over medium heat until thickened or microwave 1-2 minutes.

This recipe would work well in pouches (especially if you have your own personal pouch sealer) or put them in separate little bags and put the bags in a well sealed jar.

I don't know if they still have information about dehydrating food on the Living Essentials website, but they do have other interesting information you can check out.

Other websites recommended are...
www.uga.edu/nchfp
fiascofarm.com
cheesemaking.com
DairyConnection.com
SurvivalistSkill.com
grandmascountry.com

Also, at our next food storage Relief Society meeting, there will be a demo on food dehydration. So come!!! It's Thursday, May 20th, 7:30-9:00 in the Relief Society room.