Jim-
As always I love your site (that’s why I’m a 10 Cent Challenge subscriber), I am so sorry to hear of your wife’s accident and hope and pray she returns to her normal routine quickly.
Taking your inspiration (and some info from others) my wife and I have expanded upon a concept called “365 meals”. My original idea (after reading your info on “Dispensing charity from a safe distance” was to use our impulse sealer to make “quick meals” of some rice, bullion cubes and TVP to distribute in the event that we needed to dispense charitable food stuffs to others. It was also a great way to allow us to have home-made “MREs” that could be easily made by our children.
My good wife then said “Yuck, we can do better than that” and found/made several recipes that only require adding water and heat. We used our sizable stores of dehydrated vegetables, legumes and seasonings and TVP. We were originally going to make 365 (one for every day), but after testing, (and discovering that a little went a long way) we calculated that we only needed half as many. These meals are delicious, satisfying, and nutritionally balanced.
The great solace of this endeavor is that we now know for a certainty that we have at least one meal per day for our family, for an entire year. This is not our only supply of food, but an important part of it. We have made a four part, video presentation of a lecture we gave on the subject, at a recent Emergency Preparation seminar that I teach once a month. These can be seen on YouTube.
Thank you for all that you do. – Kory