rotating long-term storage into your three-month supply

In the All Is Safely Gathered In: Home Storage Pamphlet, underneath the heading, Long-Term Storage it says, "A portion of these items may be rotated in your three-month supply." So what exactly does that mean?

I guess there are several ways that I process that comment. First, we can rotate products in our longer term supply by using a little bit regularly. Even if just one or two of the meals in our three-month supply contain longer-term items, it would allow us to very slowly rotate those longer-term supply products. Second, It would also help us to be familiar with meals made out of longer-term supply. An occasional meal of beans and rice helps to acclimate the kids to the idea of foods that might be foreign to them. Third, it teaches us to cook with our longer-term supply. Though you would probably not go hungry if you had to use your longer-term supply in an emergency, it certainly would be nice to have some knowledge of how to prepare those foods correctly. Some familiarity with the properties of grains and beans would likely help meals to be more palatable.

There are several three-month supply meals where our family uses (or could use) some longer-term supply items. Grains and beans make up the core of the longer-term supply recommendations now. I already have beans and rice on my dinner menu as well as refried beans. I also have bread, tortillas and pancakes on my menus. These are all easy ways to use wheat flour. Oatmeal is one of our three main breakfast meals and a great opportunity to rotate and use a bit of that stored oatmeal. You may want to add a meal or two to your menus that work in products from a grain/bean longer term supply. You might not have any grains or beans stored for your longer-term supply yet. But you can start by storing enough with your three-month supply for even a couple of meals.

There are so many great sites out there with tons of great longer-term supply recipes. Several are listed to the right. I'll do an in-depth post about those recipe sites once we start working on gathering our longer-term supply.