Practicing Preparedness Skills

Whipping Thrive Egg White Powder

There are certain preparedness blogs that I truly enjoy reading and Apartment Prepper is definitely at the top of that list!   So many of his posts take a common sense approach to preparedness.  Today's post, Having Gear Does Not Guarantee Preparedness, is a great one!  I'm still in the acquiring gear process and this was a great reminder of my plan to learn to use what we have.  In addition to the points made in that blog post, I want to add to make sure that more than 1 person knows how to use your preparedness gear.  It doesn't do us much good to have gear and the only person who knows how to set it up or use it, isn't there or is unable to assist.  I know it may be a silly example but here it goes.  For our birthdays (they're only a couple days apart), my mom bought us a gas grill.  That was in October.  It's now February and it was just a week or so ago, that I had my husband show me how to use it.  How is that preparedness related?  The gas grill is one of our powerless cooking options.  On a normal day, I could probably find a tutorial on the internet (I've become very dependent on learning to do something via step by step tutorials).  But if the power was out and my husband wasn't home, I'd have had a difficult time getting dinner made on the gas grill.  And with the current weather being in the single digits, that is NOT the time I want to be outside figuring the grill out.

And before we move on to my favorite practice, I'll throw in that some of your equipment does you no good if you don't do something with it.... Hint hint, if you buy water storage containers but don't put water in them?  Or put certain foods in your 72 hr but never rotate them before they go bad?

Gear is not the only thing you need to practice with.  Think about the food you're storing.  How much of the food you have stored is stuff you WANT to eat?  Do you know how to prepare it?  I experiment with our Thrive Food storage all the time.  I am learning what foods my family actually likes (my girls don't like the green beans because they taste like green beans straight from the garden, not the french cut green beans from a can) and how to use it.  I want to know which recipes we already love I can use Thrive ingredients in, and discover which ingredients I'm missing.  I've heard comments from many people who just go to the big box store and buy the bucket of 30 meals.  I will admit I've looked at several of those in the past.  And then I kept on walking.  They were not things my family would eat if made fresh and definitely not something they'd be willing to eat from storage.  I also took a look at the ingredients and they made me cringe.

Because we're practicing with our food storage, and our various preparedness gear, in an emergency, these skills will be seamless.  My girls may not even realize we're in "emergency mode" as we calmly go about our tasks.  An emergency is NOT the time to be figuring all of this out!

A side benefit to practicing with our food storage?  Getting to eat it!  The picture above is from when my husband decided to try using the Thrive Egg White Powder to make divinity.  The experiment worked (as have many of our attempts) and we'll continue to make that sacrifice, enjoying the results today and in the future.