Over the summer our cannery specialist noticed a challenge on one of the food storage sites I enjoy. The challenge would be sometime in September, and would involve feeding the family for a week without going to the store. During times of financial stress many years ago I did this on occasion, but I haven't done it in many years, with the storage I have now, with the husband I have now, or the child at home now. (I didn't even tell the 16-year-old.)
The challenge was to be sometime in the month, but we would get no warning, it would just happen. On the website there were many challenges within the challenge, and limitations and exercises each day of the challenge. I opted out of those, going only for living off our storage for the week, and not shopping for any groceries. The challenge began last week, and today is the last day. Yay!
I cheated twice. The first day we were out of milk, and hubby and son are cereal eaters. Dilemma! I had soymilk (a little, anyway), since I don't drink milk, so I was fine and offered to share. I went ahead and bought the milk, in the spirit of the peacemaker, and Allan abstained from it in the spirit of preparedness. No granola! He did well and ate a lot of hash-brown-and-egg breakfasts that he made himself while I was on my walk. He is such a man of habit/routine that I was surprised by this, but he is also faithful and flexible. It showed this week.
The other cheat was Saturday. Silas was to work for his soon-to-be-brother-in-law on a house painting project after our weekly trip to Port Orchard for a check-in. He needed to be at the workplace by 10, and generally doesn't eat before the PO trip. I bought him a sandwich for breakfast, not having thought ahead on that one. Oh, well.
All in all we did pretty well. I got out the crock pot and made 2 kinds of chili and tuna and noodles, all new recipes. I fixed homemade treats more than usual, since the granola bars ran out. We ran out of apples, a lunchtime staple, but lived through it. I made some homemade whole wheat bread, which I like to do anyway, but had to since we ran out of bread. Sourdough biscuits were tried and enjoyed. We have lots of butter in the freezer. There are blackberries on the vine right now around here, and my daughter's fruit trees are ready with plums and asian pears, so there wasn't a shortage of fresh fruit. We enjoyed a few things from the garden. I even did the unthinkable and got up at 3:00 am and fixed sausage gravy for Allan to eat before his leaving on a business trip this morning. I find that having purchased 1/4 of a beef last winter has really paid off, too. All in all it was a fortunate week to need to rely on what was around.
One of the things that made everything so easy is that we are almost empty nesters, and Allan is so easy to live with. He's just happy when there's dinner on the table! When kids were around, since we had the milk, it was no big deal--pretty much the way we live anyway. We did have an ice cream request last night, but we said no, that brownies alone would have to do this time. I did miss my weekly-ish date night, which usually consists of going out for dinner (and circumstances came up that would have precluded that date anyway). I also felt the pinch when I was out and about at noontime and yearned for a whopper junior. But that's okay, I don't want to be doing that anyway!
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