Joseph
By Chef Keith Snow and Noah Darko
What does COVID-19 have to do with music? Not much, but read on…
Would you rather quarantine with a grand piano, or buckets of rice and beans?
Have you ever sat at a grand piano keyboard and had no idea how to play it? A stack of food you don’t know how to cook is as useless as a piano in a life-or-death emergency.
When you take cover where you are, skills trump things. The holistic approach to food storage begins with your culinary skills, and ends with a collection of ingredients you know will enrich beautifully in tried-and-true recipes.
A bag of beans is not equal to a hill of beans if you don’t know how to cook them. Stacking food on a rainy day is only half the battle. You must have a plan—and skills—to turn the dry ingredients from your buckets into something hot and savory on your table.
As we wake up to the fragility of the modern food delivery system – a just-in-time inventory scheme that means your grocery store has, at best, about 3 days worth of food on the shelf – and that’s on a good day – it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by a sense of urgency And to be fooled into spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a large pile of prepackaged storage food at its finest.
But have you ever opened those cans already? With piles of dry goods and a vague idea of what to do after it’s boiled down, you’re only half ready to take charge of your family’s nutritional needs while in a shelter.
You may be able to piece something together so you can silence the calories, and at the worst of times, this may be better than nothing. Or it could be worse than nothing, another source of stress on an already bad day. But until your eight-year-old struggles with the pangs of actual hunger—and learns the true meaning of “I’m starving”—you might have to bribe her with video games and candy to get her to eat tasteless porridge. You have gathered in despair while the world is disintegrating.
Don’t get stuck carrying a bag of dry beans…without the skills to use it.
The best preparations are the ones that will serve you well even if nothing goes wrong. And this is where the skills really trump the raw ingredients. A poorly prepared person may trade raw ingredients for several days—or even a cornucopia—for one well-seasoned, well-prepared bowl of porridge.
When you’re stocking up on food in preparation for closing, don’t forget to read your recipes. In other words, get ready!
my online course, Food Storage BanquetEndorsed by Joel Skousen, it teaches you to prepare delicious meals from basic stocking foods, so you can eat like a post-apocalyptic king.
Chef Keith Snow has run catering for some of America’s leading ski resorts, and is the author of The Harvest Cookbook and recently Food Storage Banquet.
