Judy's Prepping Challenge

Are you participating in Judy's Prepping Challenge?  I'm thinking about jumping in later in the year, if my life gets a lot less exciting. In the meantime, I'm reading the posts and soaking up information.

The May challenge is to go a week eating all meals (and snacks and drinks) at home.  We could do that here. We've done that, plenty of times, because my goal is to make as few grocery runs as reasonably possible. If I'm at the store more than once a week, it's because I'm combining trips with errands and activities. Or it should be. Sometimes I'm just not as organized as I'd like to be and there's a last minute dash so we'll have what we want for dinner.

Over the past few months, it would have been such a huge help to have a well stocked and organized pantry to draw from. The key phrase there is "well stocked." I started with plenty in the pantry, and I've been drawing from it steadily, but reading about all of Judy's canned soups and different meals makes me wish I had food storage like hers to draw from. (The only reason I don't -- because I didn't make the time to do it.)

Assuming that the zombie apocalypse probably isn't going to happen, and that none of the volcanoes erupts, there are still plenty of things that can happen to get in the way of the regular grocery run.  Winter storms come with some warning, but feverish kids, bad migraines, car trouble....lots of things can happen that would be so much easier if you didn't have to fit in a trip to the store.

One thing that's been nagging at me lately -- the idea of keeping the food storage easy to get at. It wouldn't take much of an injury to make things difficult. (Thinking of my own knee surgery here and how it put the garage and sewing room completely off limits to me and how many of my kitchen cabinets are so high that I need a step stool.) At the very least, some of it should be easily accessible and the rest should be well enough organized and labeled that the rest of the family can find it.

Right now, I've got eight cases of unlabeled vegetables from the cannery's "Country Store." I know what order I stacked them in and what those cryptic scribbles on the ends of the boxes mean, but if anyone else rummages through them before I take a Sharpie and label the cans, we might be having corn, or beans, or carrots for dinner and not know which until I open a can.