Food Storage Recipe: Tamale Casserole.

I LOVE tamales.  Love them.  I discovered them when we moved to Ogden, and I can't get enough.  Problem is, they are a. expensive and b. not that easy to make.  I ran across a substitute on a food blog a few weeks ago that I thought might be acceptable.  It wasn't. The leftovers languished and were tossed out. So I tweaked a few things, and  it's better now.  It's still not smothered tamales from Javier's in Ogden, but it's good enough to make every couple of weeks, and it's food storage friendly, which makes me happy.  One of the kids ate it, and the other just at the cornbread off the top, but that's not too bad for a new meal.

The dish is a seasoned meat mixture topped with cornbread.  The sauce from the meat mixes with the bottom  of the cornbread, making that really good seasoned corn flavor that I love from real tamales.  Overall, I like it, and I'm happy to have a new food storage recipe to add to my rotation.


Bottom layer:
1 pound ground or shredded meat.  I used ground turkey, but chicken, beef, elk, or whatever is in the freezer or in a can on the shelf would work just fine.   That strange TVP stuff might even work, but I haven't been brave enough to try it yet in anything.  Or even buy it.  Or even look at it too closely.
Onions.  I used dehydrated, which I put in the pan with the meat when it was mostly cooked. 
1 small can tomato sauce
2 small cans green chiles
Cumin
Red chili powder

Put meat in pan and brown it.  Add the onions and brown them, then the other ingredients.  Stir until cooked and seasoned.

Topping:
1 1/4 cups flour
3/4 cup corn meal
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
dash salt
1 cup skim milk (or powdered substitute)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 egg or two egg whites (or powdered eggs)

Mix dry ingredients.  In a separate bowl, beat egg with a fork.  Add milk and oil.  Combine wet and dry ingredients and stir until just moistened.

Put meat mixture in a square casserole dish.  Spoon cornbread over the top.  Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes.

Food Storage Meal: Chicken and Rice Soup

Chicken and Rice Soup (food storage edition)


1 onion (or dehydrated onion)
2 stalk celery (or dehydrated celery)
2 carrots (or dehydrated carrots)
1 can chicken breast
2 cups chicken bullion
3 cups water
1 1/2 cup rice
Oregano
Pepper
Salt

Cook celery, carrots, and onions in oil until soft.  Add chicken and broth from bottle.  Add broth or bullion, water, rice, and seasoning.  Cover, cook for twenty minutes.  Add more water if necessary.

Food storage meal: Pizza Pockets

Pizza Pockets

1 recipe white bread dough, or frozen or refrigerated dough

Pasta Sauce
Dehydrated peppers, onions, and mushrooms
Cheddar cheese (optional)

I used the same sauce that I use for pasta, but only half as much.  The leftover sauce can be used for pasta, or frozen and used another day.

Spread out the bread, and fill with sauce and cheese.  Fold the dough like a burrito, pinching the edges.  Bake for about 15 minutes, until browned.

The cheese keeps this from being a true food storage meal.  There is such a thing as freeze-dried cheese, but I haven't dared try it yet.

Food storage meal #1: Pasta

Food storage meal number 1:

Pasta with tomato and vegetable sauce

1 jar Pasta sauce (I use Prego, which I buy on sale for about $1.25 a jar)
Dehydrated mushrooms, peppers, and onions
1 pound pasta.  I buy this in bags when they are less than 70 cents a pound, or in the bulk bins at Winco for 73 cents a pound

Put the sauce in a saucepan, add the dehydrated food and cook until heated.  Pour over cooked pasta.

This is before it's cooked.  It looks better afterward, I promise

Granola

After months of loving oatmeal, my kids have decided that granola is now the best breakfast food ever.  Granola's price is way out of our budget, but it's really easy to make.  I made a visit to the bulk bins at Winco, and only got as much of the nuts and craisins as I needed, so it turned out pretty inexpensive.


Coating:
1/3 cup oil
1/4 C brown sugar
1/3 C honey (may need more)
1 t vanilla
1 t cinnamon

Granola:
4 cups oats
1 cup of chopped raw nuts and seeds (almonds, cashews, pecans, sunflower seeds)
Raisins or dried cranberries to taste

Mix dry and wet ingredients seperately, then combine.  Spread onto a baking sheet and bake at 300 degrees for about twenty minutes, stirring halfway through.  Store in an airtight container. 

This cost me under three dollars, and the girls love it.  It is good with milk, or eaten plain.  I especially love it, because it requires no fresh ingredients; it can be made entirely with food storage items.

Homemade oatmeal packets

My kids eat oatmeal for breakfast almost every single day.  When my little one wakes up, the first word out of her mouth is often, "O-meal?"

I buy the oatmeal packets when they go on sale.  They are one dollar per box, or ten cents per packet.  They eat three or four packets per day between the two of them, so we use three boxes per week.  This means that I spend $156 dollars per year to feed my kids breakfast, plus the milk we put on the oatmeal.  This isn't a lot, really, for breakfast for an entire year.  I was pretty sure that I could reduce it significantly, though.  Plus, those packets only go on sale every few months, and what happens if I run out before then?  I don't have the room to store a full year's worth of boxes of oatmeal packets, so then I have to make it on the stove.  Making oatmeal on the stove is cost-effective, but it is a lot less convenient.

During the caselot sales in September, I bought fifty pounds of quick oats.  I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with them, but I knew I'd figure something out.  I definitely wasn't prepared for how much room fifty pounds of oats takes up; I used three and a half five-gallon buckets to store them all.

I paid $18 for the oats.

Today, I went to the Honeyville Farms store in Brigham City.  I paid $23.70 for cans of freeze-dried blueberries and strawberries.  I then sat down to make homemade oatmeal packets.

Oatmeal packets:
1 3 pound canister of quick oats
       take two cups of these oats and put them in a blender until they are powder
Add 1 cup of sugar
2 T salt
Add fruit; raisins are cheapest, but other freeze-dried fruit works well.
Shake the container until the oatmeal is mixed.  Add the oat powder and shake again.
Optional add-ins: powdered coffee creamer, powdered milk, cinnamon

To use: boil 1/2 cup of water and add to 1/3 cup oatmeal mix. 


I made about 100 ounces of this in two large oatmeal cylinders, one with strawberry and one with blueberry mix.

Cost: before adding fruit, a canister of this mix costs me under a dollar.  After I added the fruit, the price went up to about three dollars per canister.  Each canister will make approximately 32 servings.  The same amount of oatmeal in packets would cost about twice that amount.


I love this method because it saves money, it leaves out the preservatives and artificial flavoring, it allows me to make exactly as much oatmeal as my girls want to eat, and it means we can choose our flavors.  I've always wished I could buy the blueberries and cream oatmeal all by itself.  This way, I don't have to be the first one to open the box to get my favorite flavor.

Crock pot chicken and pasta

We got a recipe for chicken cacciatore years ago from Shawn's boss, and the family loves it.

We cut up and cooked the chicken yesterday while making fajitas. This morning, Shawn put a handful of chicken in the crock pot with a jar of Prego (purchased a long time ago during a great sale), and chopped mushrooms. Then I cooked a pound of pasta, and made a loaf of herb bread. It's an easy, relatively inexpensive dinner that everyone loves. Plus, there are awesome leftovers for lunch!

One of these days, I'll remember to grab the camera before we eat so I can post a picture