One thing to do now is to practice feeding my family from my food storage.  Not just making meals entirely from storage, although that’s good practice too, but just using what’s there so it gets rotated and such as I go.  While working on tightening up my finances, I started creating monthly menus to reduce food waste, make multiple meals from one cut of meat, make shopping lists easy, and cut back on my impulse purchases.  Sometimes I need to be flexible to take advantage of what’s in my CSA box or what’s on sale at the store, but overall I am finding my menus useful.  This dinner made use of all those things.

White Beans & Ham, Skillet Cornbread, and Sautéed Greens

I had a meaty hambone in the freezer from an earlier ham dinner.  I put it in with lots of meat on the bone with the intention of using for a lentil soup or something like that.  I had collard greens, leeks, and some peppers in my box, so I weighed out a pound of white beans and set them to soaking the night before.  The original recipe below.  I added leeks and peppers in addition to the onion, and I sautéed them a little before adding the other ingredients.  I reduced the sugar by half, because I don’t like overly sweet beans.  I also tossed in a bay leaf (removed before serving).  Instead of the diced ham, I threw in the whole bone, then at the end pulled it, pulled off the meat, diced it up, and tossed it back in.  It took longer than 2 hours to get the beans tender enough.  Cooked up some cornbread in a cast iron skillet, and made super simple greens with a bit of lemon since everything else was so rich.  Yum.

White Beans & Ham

1 pound dry great Northern beans
1/2 pound cooked ham, diced
1 small onion, diced
1/2 cup brown sugar
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon dried parsley

Rinse beans in a large pot; discard shriveled beans and any small stones. Add 8 cups of cold water. Let stand overnight or at least 8 hours. Drain and rinse beans. Return beans to pot and add ham, onion, brown sugar, salt, pepper, cayenne and parsley and water to cover. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until beans are tender. Add more water if necessary during cooking time.

Two things – the basic recipe would be very easy to make all LTS.  With spam instead of ham (I think I would add it in the last 30 minutes; it’s not as sturdy as real ham), and dehydrated onions, you could create it completely from shelf stable foods.  I think dehydrated carrots would be tasty in there.  And you could switch up the seasonings.  Ooh, I think mushroom powder would add  nice umami undertone too.

And … How do people weigh the benefits of storing dried beans v. canned?  Canned are so much heavier and take more space and are more expensive unless you get them on sale.  Plus they are way saltier, and what else is in there?  But dried beans, while they store easily, can last practically forever when stored properly and are dirt cheap, take so much more time to prepare.  And more water.  And lots more fuel. If you can nestle a Dutch oven in your heating fire, or you have a wood stove, maybe you can let them cook slowly away while you heat your space and kill 2 birds with one stone.  But if you are relying on a one burner camping stove, or a rocket stove, that’s a lot of fuel to one pot of beans.

Its one thing if you are “only” planning and prepping for a short term emergency or recoverable disaster.  Space isn’t as critical, and a bit of extra salt and crud in the cans in the short time frame won’t make much difference I suppose.  But for the long haul?  Some of each?  How to balance it?

p.s. I’m still not smoking.  I had some nicotine gum to take the edge off a couple times (I already had it from a flight last February, so no money wasted), but I haven’t had an actual cigarette in my hand for over 48 hours.  I’m grouchy. I’m hating it.  I’ve wanted to buy a pack soooo badly.   But I haven’t yet.