Week 2

All right, we’re on WEEK 2 of 52 weeks of Growing your Food Storage.
I’m gonna have you purchase two different items. Your budget is $20 and you’re gonna purchase honey and cinnamon. So let me tell you why. Most homes I think, have both of these things in them. They’re very common ingredients, they are multifunctional, and they have a long shelf life.

Cinnamon

So let’s start with Cinnamon. This right here has a shelf life of one year. I don’t have to repackage it. I don’t need to worry about oxygen absorbers or purchasing it from a food storage company. It’s good for a year on my shelf in my pantry. Our family will go through about one of these a year, so you probably are only gonna need to buy one of them.

Just think of:

• Seasoning your oatmeal with it
• Baking, especially breads like in the fall time
• You can also use cinnamon and sugar to sweeten something,
• sprinkle it on as a topping
• Cinnamon rolls

Things like that.
So, cinnamon actually has quite a few uses, and it’s good to just have an extra one in your pantry at all times. So if you don’t think you’ll go through something this large in a year, then find a smaller one.

**Important Note:

Expiration Dates
You do want to be checking expiration dates when you purchase these items.
With the budgets that we are sticking to, you’re not going to have enough money in that budget that week to purchase an astronomical amount of anything that I’m recommending this year. So most of the time, expiration dates aren’t going to be an issue. However, if there are only one or two people in your home, or if it’s an item that you don’t use on a regular basis, then it’s always a good idea to just look at expiration dates while you’re in the grocery store. Don’t wait till you come home. It doesn’t have to take you very long. It doesn’t have to be a big to-do. Just as you pick up the cinnamon in the grocery store, look for the expiration date, take a look at it and say, yeah, that’s reasonable that I would go through this. Or, I would go through five of these canned beans before the expiration date that is showing here.
We’re not gonna get down to the nitty gritty of calculating exactly how many of each item you’re gonna go through in your household before the expiration date, but just being aware of it and doing a quick estimation in your head ought to be enough for the level that we are doing this year. So I just wanted to make you aware of that.
Just get in the habit of checking expiration dates when you are purchasing extras of items so that you don’t overbuy and end up wasting food at the end of that shelf life of that product.

Honey

Our other item this week is honey, and the reason I chose honey is much like cinnamon. It’s versatile and it has a very long shelf life.
Even the expiration dates on honey can be pushed if you’re willing to heat it up a little bit to kind of loosen everything and stir it a little bit. So it can be used not only for things like peanut butter and honey sandwiches or putting honey on your oatmeal or something like that, but you can also use it as a sweetener in breads. It can totally replace sugar in bread and other recipes and baking. So again, honey has a long shelf life and lots of uses. You don’t wanna be caught without it. So those are your two items. Your budget is only $20 because you’re probably not going to need to buy very much of this.

This thing of cinnamon was I think $6 or $7. So that leaves me $13 or 14 bucks this week to spend on honey. So for my family, that’s plenty of honey and cinnamon to make me feel good about how much of those items I have in my pantry.

Conclusion

So that’s it. This week is super easy; honey and cinnamon, $20 budget.
And as always, please reply to this email. If you have any questions, let me know how it’s going, and if you’re choosing to use the printable, remember to just jot down what you purchased this week, how many and the expiration date on it, and we’ll see you next Sunday!