It would be easily served with Tator Tots or potato chips and then a vegetable tray where they can pick their own veggies.  (Notice I filled half my plate with them to try and make up for my chili dog creation!

Chili Dogs in a Blanket
1 can Chili (or homemade chili)
2 T. dehydrated onion
1/2 C. Shredded Cheese (optional)
2 oz. Cream Cheese (optional)
4-6 Hot Dogs (cut into thirds-lenth wise)
EZ Bread Dough (Click HERE for the recipe)

Mix bread dough according to directions and let rise until doubled.  In the mean time, combine chili, dehydrated onion, and cream cheese and heat until the cream cheese is melted.  Roll dough out to 1/4 inch thick and using something circular (about 5 inches in diameter), cut out circles from dough.  Keep rolling dough out and cutting until dough is gone (like you would for biscuits).  Put a thin layer of chili mixture on dough circles, followed by cheese, and a hot dog piece.  Fold side pieces together and pinch all edges together.  Bake at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.

© 2012, Crystal. All rights reserved.

Here were the rules: 1. No electricity 2. Turn the heater off 3. Only open the fridge 3 times 4. No cell phones (YIPES!) 5. still had access to water

To be honest, I thought about making it really fun and eating ice cream for breakfast…after all if you knew the power was going to be out for a couple of days wouldn’t you eat the ice cream before it melted?  Also, I was pretty sure my preschooler would think I was the coolest mom EVER-but I did refrain.  First thing on the agenda was to break out the Sun Oven (YEAH FOR GOOD WEATHER!)  I knew I would have to cook lunch and dinner in it since I had used the last of my bread the day before feeding the masses.  We warmed hot dogs for lunch and I tried a NEW Sun Oven recipe for dinner which was actually a great way to use some food storage and solar power.  I spent a whole day with my kids unplugged, made some Halloween decorations to hang in the kitchen and had a wonderful day.  The kids loved playing with the flashlights (you know the ones that go off when the power is out) but here were the things I learned

1. I officially learned how to exit the garage with no power!
2. I forgot that the fridge water wouldn’t work with out electricity (meaning no super nice filtered water)
3. I need to learn how to apple box or dutch oven cook-because what would I have done if the sun weren’t out?
4. Living life unplugged for a day was awesome!

You’ll notice we used the flashlights as our candles and had a wonderful dinner!  If you want to try it in your Sun Oven here is the recipe.

p.s. check on Monday for TWO ways to enter the Bosch giveaway!

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

FOOD STORAGE HALLOWEEN BUG PIZZA

Do you see them? All of those tarantulas crawling around on the pizza?  I also added green peppers (you know, grasshoppers), mushrooms (worms), and onions (okay, I couldn’t think of one for the onions-I just like onions on my pizza).  I, of course, used my famous 30 minute pizza dough recipe for the pizza dough and a can of tomato paste with some seasonings.  To turn your olives into spiders simply cut a whole, pitted olive lengthwise (hole to hole) use one half for the body and then cut the other half (and actually one more to get all 8 legs) into legs.  Place on your pizza and then bake!

BUG JUICE

We also drank Bug Juice.  A tradition from my family.  See, we wouldn’t drink rootbeer with our pizza we drank Bug Juice, titled by my dad.  It’s very simple to make.  You just need 2 liters of your favorite lemon lime soda and a bottle of Cran Raspberry drink.  Make sure you add the soda TO the cranraspberry (it mixes better that way).

HAPPY (FOOD STORAGE) HALLOWEEN!

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

It’s that time again! WOOT WOOT!  I love having the opportunity to give someone a Bosch mixer for FREE.  They are amazing machines that I’ve always loved (no joke, I have a home video of me at ONE playing with my mom’s machine…maybe I’ll try and find it).  Anyway, they can do amazing things like shred chicken, mash your potatoes, make many loaves of bread at once, and yes, they can make cookies (lots and lots of them!).

GIVEAWAY DETAILS

This giveaway ends November 30th 2011. Check on December 1st 2011 to see if you won! I’m only able to ship this to the United States (sorry!).  Check back every Monday for a new way to enter to win (READ: There will be lots of ways for you to get a lot of chances to enter win!)

BOSCH DETAILS

• 6 1/2 Quart Bowl
• 4 Speed Settings
• Cord Storage
• Suction Feet
• 800 Watt Motor
• Removable (mixing bowl) drive shaft
• Whip holder-dishwasher safe
• Speed setting one is slower
• Speed setting four is faster
• Higher dough capacity
• Sealed Transmission
• Refurbished 1 Year Motor and Transmission

THIS WEEK’S WAY TO WIN YOURSELF A FREE BOSCH!

Do you remember last month when I started the Food Storage Cooking Club?  We started with homemade jams (no pectin jam, regular jam, no sugar jam, and freezer jam) and this month was tvp (sausage, chicken, and beef).  Well if you were a one person club or got your friends together to take part in it, I’d love to hear about it…and so would others! So here are the official ways to enter this week:

1. So, head on over to my facebook page and talk about it.  Share a recipe, story, or picture!
2. If you didn’t have a chance to participate in the food storage cooking club-now is your time to start!  You’ve got a week to get people together and try some food storage cookin’
3. Alright, I know we’re all busy and Halloween is coming and your calendar is probably full, so if don’t have time to get people together-simply blog or facebook about the food storage cooking club.  The more people we get cooking the more recipes we have, stories to share, and ideas to spread!

After you’ve done one or all of these, shoot me an email at efsgiveaways (at) gmail (dot) com to let me know which you’ve done.  You’ll get one entry for each item you do!

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

This recipe is very simple, traditionally made in Bosnia for celebrations, it is served on a tray as people come to our house, everyone takes a scoop of wheat (with different spoon and no double dipping you only need wheat, walnuts and sugar the ratio is 1 to 1 to 1 by weight… so for example 1 lb wheat…1 lb walnuts….1 lb sugar
cook the wheat according to your recipe..so presoak and boil until cracked, drain wheat but only the water that it was cooking in don’t let it drain any longer transfer into a food processor immediately, some liquid is OK, puls few times this is really up to you how far you want to go, and do you want to leave some bits, use cheese grinder and grind up the walnuts, I use hand held, I tried it in different kinds of food processors and it didn’t work it only turns into greasy blob, when you use cheese grinder it comes out fluffy, add sugar and walnuts to the wheat and stir….of course you can adjust the amount of sugar or slowly add it to the wheat and walnut mixture.
This dessert is eaten chilled and just like that with a spoon, kind of like a pudding, some people like to add whip cream I prefer not to, hope you try it!

STASHA’S STORY

I’m 37 years old, wife and stay-at-home mom of three 8 year old girl, and two boys 22 months and 4 months, I home school and can’t imagine now not having the food storage. I come from a war torn country and food storage should been my way of life, I experienced hunger and life without electricity, gas and running water, but it wasn’t until few months ago when my sister in law started her own food storage and memories of the war came back. She sent me links to Crystal’s blog and youtube channel. Crystal inspired me and made it approachable. If I can do it anybody can, life is very busy around here, I have limited space and very limited budget, but we make it work.
I should probably tell you a little about myself before the war. Here’s the link to wikipedia about the town where I grew up, Banovici

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banovi%C4%87i

The 29 000 population includes surrounding villages, the town itself had less people. If you compare your family and mine side by side I’m pretty sure the only major difference would be the language we spoke. I had ordinary uneventful childhood, music and dancing was something I loved (Madonna, U2, Michael Jackson, Simple minds…I even secretly liked Wham, hey I was young ) art and books, going out with my friends, watching movies (can I just say Top Gun and any girl that says she didn’t like the movie I don’t believe her lol) My parents worked and my two brothers and I went to school always counting down to the next vacation. It is important to mention this so you know I didn’t go from bad to worse. Life was good, really good, and then one day somebody pulled the plug on all good things and if as that wasn’t enough they pulled the rug underneath me too. How did this happen over night? Well, it did and it didn’t, the stores were emptied over night and money lost all value but there were signs we ignored, prices going up, lack of certain items at the stores, riots here and there, news from other parts of the country….Why we ignored it? Because we were “special”, those things didn’t happen to us, this happens in other countries, it happens to those people, my family is different, my town is different….that will never happen to us. Human beings are amazing in convincing ourselves that bad things happen to other people. We actually think that if we stand on a railroad and see a train approaching fast, we can just close our eyes and think happy thoughts and the train will go around us.
So the war was the fast approaching train and all we did is close our eyes and counted to 10. My worst nightmare became reality, the war started in May of 1992 on the last day of my high school. We became CNN and BBC sensation. Now my family became “those people”.

During the war we had no electricity, gas or running water…..I don’t mean to go down “the war path” I can go on forever but I wanted to share at least few things with you which you probably already know
-The first thing that lost value OVERNIGHT was money, stores have been emptied overnight too, all the owners and managers refused to sell food and kept it for themselves.
-We were able to buy some food from other people for gold, I remember my mom exchanging her rings and other jewelry for sacks of potatoes, flour and rice but that didn’t last for a long, people got scared and the only way we were able to get food was through exchange for other food items.
-things that gained in value other than food itself, tools, any and all tools, if you didn’t have a shovel good luck planting, also seeds, if you had storage of seeds you can get “big items” for your seeds like oil, yes oil or any kind of fat was priceless
-we were lucky to live in a small town so we had natural water spring walking distance from our house but line was long and sometimes took hours of waiting in line to get water, which brings me to the third item of great value, water jug, or any container that you can carry water in and if grenades started falling on the way home you better have a container that you can close so you don’t spill water running.
-when it comes to medicine only three things were in demand, pain killers, fever reducers, and antibiotics

(We’ll go into her story later on in more depth of all the things she learned first hand!)

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

TANGY BBQ PINEAPPLE SANDWICHES

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE

MOUNTAIN MAN STEW

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE

SLOPPY JOE PIZZA

WARNING: This video is over 15 minutes long…so make sure you’ve got time to finish it! It also goes over Augason Farms WONDERFUL bread mix as well as some more foods storage tvp.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

TVP CHICKEN VS. FREEZE DRIED CHICKEN & CANNED CHICKEN

Okay, so I tried. I really, really tried to stomach the chicken tvp. I tried putting it in a really flavorful soup but here’s the thing, the fake chicken taste is hard to hide (in fact nothing I did hid it). It’s just so….fake….tasting. I personally could never really get past it. Not to mention that the texture goes from crunchy to soggerific (you heard me…soggerific…so soggy, it deserves it’s own word). So I don’t normally say things like this but in this instance, I would say to not waste a lot of time or energy on chicken tvp. Why? Well there are a lot of other options (that will taste just like chicken) you have for storing chicken. Things like canned chicken (you can purchase this from the store or can your own…videos on that to come later) or you can purchase freeze dried chicken. (Shelf Reliance has it on sale, right now-click HERE for more info)

MY REVIEW OF FREEZE DRIED CHICKEN

This was the first time I tried freeze dried chicken and I have to say I was really impressed. It tastes different from canned chicken in that it tastes like you JUST cooked it. Very fresh tasting, unlike canned chicken. I was also impressed with how easy it was to hydrate. You basically just pour water over it and BAM, hydrated! For this soup, I actually just threw it in the slow cooker and was impressed that it didn’t fall apart in the 5-6 hours it cooked.

FREEZE DRIED CHEDDAR CHEESE

As a side note, I also tried freeze dried cheese in the soup because I ran out of cheese (too many grilled cheeses…) and have sick kids (which means I haven’t left the house in more than 3 days *twitch* *twitch*) so I figured it was a great time to try this! Another amazing find! It tastes just like fresh cheese! It took a little longer to hydrate than I had hoped but once hydrated (I just threw it in the soup to hydrate) it was awesome! A great addition to keep you from running to the store! (Shelf Reliance also has this on sale right now, click HERE for more info)

 SLOW COOKER NACHO SOUP

ONE LAST FOOD STORAGE TIP

One more quick thing I learned in experimenting with this….when you’re not sure about how something may taste, make sure you try it in a small amount! Not a huge amount of soup that you may have to throw out later when it tastes bad..just saying!

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

Yep, you knew we had to go there some day….and today is the day!  The day we start talking about food storage TVP.   TVP is one of those dreaded foods in food storage.  WHY?  Because it has a bad rap 1) that it tastes bad and 2) that it has…shall we say…bad side effects.  Even my mother the food storage queen, could never quite love it.  Well like most food storage items this has come a long way and after experimenting with it I have some great ways you can use it.

WHAT IS FOOD STORAGE TVP?

TVP is texturized vegetable protein.  It is a meat analogue or nutritious meat extender made from defatted soy flour, a by-product of extracting soybean oil.  It is quick to cook, with a protein content equal to that of the meat, and contains no fat.

UH…I DON’T KNOW IF I COULD EVER EAT THAT STUFF…

If you think you’ve never eaten it-think again!  You may have eaten it with out even knowing it.  A popular burrito place (Starts with a “T” ends with an “aco Bell”) serves TVP in their “beef”.

FOOD STORAGE TVP NUMBER ONE TRICK

First and foremost, it’s important to never follow the directions on the packaging-which tell you to soak the food storage tvp in warm water for something like 5-7 minutes. Please-if you soak the tvp until it’s soggy and flavorless and then add it to your food (which will most likely be liquid-like) you can see how this is a recipe for disaster.  So, here is how you get around it-soak the food storage TVP in the food itself.  i.e. if you’re going to make spaghetti sauce with it simply drop the dry food storage TVP into the sauce and let it hydrate that way.

WHAT TYPE OF RECIPES IS FOOD STORAGE TVP USED BEST?

The best time to use food storage tvp is in something moist and as a meat extender.  Think spaghetti sauce, sloppy joes, tacos etc.  But you can also use it in regular recipes, as long as there is a way to hydrate it in the recipe.  See eggs below.

IS TVP CHEAPER?

MOST DEFINITELY!  It is much cheaper than purchasing meat and healthier!

MY NEW FAVORITE (AND UNEXPECTED WAY) TO EAT FOOD STORAGE TVP

So we all know that sausage and eggs are a great combination but sausage is expensive and, let’s be honest, not the healthiest thing in the world to eat.  So, sausage TVP can be a great solution to this problem-plus it’s FAST!  To try this out on your family (and trust me, I have-any visitor who has eaten breakfast at my house recently has had this served to them…and they’ve all asked for seconds) simply follow these easy directions:

1. Break fresh eggs into a bowl (yes, fresh eggs-after you try this and see that it works you can branch out into the food storage powdered eggs) and whisk with a fork.
2. Add food storage tvp (however much you’d like) and let sit for 5 minutes
3. Pour egg mixture into pre-heated pan and scramble.
4. Cook until firm.
5. Add cheese, if desired

WHERE CAN I PURCHASE TVP?

If you’re in Utah, you can purchase it any where food storage is sold (Wal-Mart, Maceys, etc.) if you’d like to purchase it online Shelf Reliance has it on sale right now in a lot of varieties, click HERE to learn more.

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

Who doesn’t love a good brownie recipe that also includes food storage? I was so happy to receive this recipe for all of us to try. It has beans, wheat, and honey. Sounds great! This recipe is from Sade and she says…

“Hey Crystal,
You inspired me to try these and I’m so glad you did!! These little morsels of heaven were fantastic!! And as you said we wouldn’t be able to taste the beans at all! Thanks so much, I’ll send along the picture and the recipe in case anyone else would like to make these, they are truly food storage brownies!!”

SHARE WITH US!

Do you have a great idea, recipe or food storage tip you’d love to share?! Email me at efsshowoffs(at)gmail(dot)com! We’d all love to hear from you!

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.

Staci says…”I just got this recipe today from my mom-in-law and just HAD to share with you!! I made it 100% with food storage! You’d be so proud!! I also baked up a loaf of Schwans’ Honey Wheat bread…. soo good! I’m not a bread maker — yet — so this will have to suffice. I’m sure your bread would be better! Here ya go! Thanks again for the great website!”

SHARE WITH US!

Do you have a great idea, recipe or food storage tip you’d love to share?! Email me at efsshowoffs(at)gmail(dot)com! We’d all love to hear from you!

© 2011, Crystal. All rights reserved.