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Letter Re: Grab-and-Go Soup Mix for Bug-Out Bags
Hello Jim,
First let me say how much I appreciate your site and how much I've
learned from it. I visit it usually a couple times a day as I'm trying to fill
in gaps
in my preparedness plan. I thought I'd share a few tips.
Over the past couple years, I've bought about a dozen Nesco American Harvester
food dehydrators and have set up an assembly line to dehydrate several cases
of fruits, vegetables and meats every week. In the off-season when fresh produce
is relatively expensive, I switch gears and buy cases of canned vegetables
and proceed to dehydrate the contents, then put the dehydrated product in Mason
jars with oxygen absorbers. As one example of the space efficiency of this,
eight 29-oz. cans of diced tomatoes fit into a one-quart mason jar after dehydration--a
great way to go if you don't have much storage space. (I save the vegetable
juices in ice cube trays and use the juices in broths later, so nothing is
wasted.)
I've got a couple hundred quart-size mason jars of various vegetables, plus
several hundred pounds of rice and varieties of beans that I toss together
as a soup mix and put about 20 lbs. worth in a 2-gallon-sized Mylar food storage
bag and keep it in my bug-out bag so that if I have to hit the road on short
notice (flash-flooding in my region this summer was one such instance), I have
food to last me for quite a while--compact and nutritionally complete. I hope
this idea might benefit some of your readers as well. Keep up the great work! - Chad S.
