The 30 Evening Meal Project Explained

Put yourself in this scenario. Will you panic? Or will go home and say, "Oh well,
It would be nice to have fresh salad tonight, but that won't happen. At least I have my 30 Days of Evening Meals all planned out and the ingredients for them."

I have just finished posting 30 different evening meal menus (with menu ideas to spare still sitting in my file--I will post them later as Bonus Menus)!

I had assigned our Relief Society sisters, through our little preparedness calendar and at the first meeting of our Preparedness Club on Jan. 29th, to come up with meal ideas for 30 evening meals using only pantry items. You can repeat meals within the month, of course. You may find some ideas so appealing, you will want to have them more than once a month!

The conditions for this assignment were:
No refrigeration
No electricity
No gas
Limited water.
No grocery stores with any stock left.

This is a worst case scenario. It could happen for a variety of reasons,including forced quarantine during a severe epidemic. It could be biological warfare. Complete loss of anyone's ability to travel on the roads (due to extreme weather, damaged roads, no fuel for the trucks, etc.)

I wanted you all to think about how you would feed yourself and family if you could not even step out of your house to get something from your garden or to even search for dandelion greens. (It may be the dead of winter or there may be unhealthy, even deadly air outside.)

The menu ideas and recipes involve as little use of fuel as possible. The food is being heated in a cooking pot, or stir fried in a skillet, on a camp stove and you have limited propane canisters. So instead of cooking dry pinto beans from scratch (which takes 3-4 hours with a flame under it), you will use canned beans which are already cooked..and which can be heated in less than a minute.

If you have not yet finished this project, or have not yet even begun, I challenge you to do it. It is fun and it will stretch your mind and imagination. Your meals will be different from mine because everyone has different tastes. Notice I did not include any recipe with Spam. My husband and I do not eat items that have sodium nitrate in them (which Spam does have).

This is a great project and you will be so pleased when you finish it. You will experience what is called food security.