Shelf stable nutrition is a big part of creating a sound food storage program. Nutritional diversity should be something you concern yourself with while you are building up your deep pantry and your long-term food storage solutions.
This is one of the reasons why you are seeing preppers focus much more on food production like gardening, livestock and even hunting. We all understand that a decade of rice and beans doesn’t offer the type of nutritional profile that anyone really desires.
You have more say in what goes into your body than you think.
Homemade Food Storage
What was once a buyer’s game, food storage has become just as much about DIY in the prepper’s journey. One thing you can say about preppers is that our skills and motivations evolve quickly. We are talking about a group that has only existed, in name, for a decade.
The media portrayal and main sources of information taught us early on the fact that preppers were stock pilers who worked hard to buy and train their way to survival in a post collapse, SHTF landscape. This could include dried foods, guns, bunkers, and any other extreme measures to survive.
Eventually, the movement started to round out. It got injected with some of the homesteading fever and before long preppers were looking at the quality of life overall. Massive changes started taking place and if you got the average prepper of 2010 in a room with a 2020 prepper, they would be speaking different languages.
Ownership is probably the right word. We have taken ownership of processes like food storage, food production, food preservation, community relationships and these things have made us much more formidable.
Understanding how to cook and make your own food is the basis of homemade food storage. I am going to show you how to create a dense vitamin bar that is filled with nutrition and has a 1-year shelf life. Now, making bars is a lot easier than you would think. I hope you give this one a try.
Ingredients:
- ¼ Cup of Sunflower Seeds
- ¼ Cup of Chopped Almonds
- ¼ Cup of Dried Cranberries
- 2 Cups of Quick Oats
- ½ Cup of Honey
- 1 Cup of Almond Butter
- 2 TBSP of Coconut Oil
- 1 TBSP of Turmeric
- ½ TSP of Salt
- 1 scoop of Protein Powder
Process:
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
Mix your nuts, seeds turmeric, cranberries, and oats in a large bowl.
Add the rest of the ingredients to a small saucepan and warm the mixture up together. This mix doesn’t have to simmer or anything, just warm it up, so it is pourable and mixable.
Mix everything together in your large bowl and be very thorough. Try to coat every single oat with some of that mixture.
Spread the mix out in an 8×8 baking dish. We are going to cook this mix for 30 minutes on an exceptionally low heat and try to dry it out for long term storage.
Once they have cooled, cut them into squares.
You can now increase the shelf life of these bars even further by slipping them into a mylar bag, with an oxygen absorber and sealing them. You can get a year and beyond if you store these vitamin bars this way.
Nutritional Content
These vitamin bars pack a seriously nutritious punch! The nuts, seeds, turmeric, and oats take this mix to serious heights and the addition of your protein powder elevates things like Vitamin K, A, C, and Iron. Using protein powders also gives you the ability to increase things like Vitamin C without adding a bunch of sugar, with some types of dried fruit.
In the batch that I created in these pictures I excluded the cranberries and the mix was fine.
Oats are a complex carbohydrate, and this means you have a source of energy that burns slowly and consistently to give you energy throughout digestion. Processed sugar burns fast and enters the bloodstream like a blitzkrieg. It forces your body to release insulin to deal with it. This is a bad way for you to manage your energy systems.
All these benefits combine to make this simple, nutritious vitamin bar that can be stored for more than 1 year.
