Welcome to Food Storage Feast
Food Storage Feast is your inspiration to create delicious, healthy, inexpensive meals using basic food storage items such as grains, beans, canned and freeze-dried goods, and condiments. We’ll teach you to use these, paired with game you hunt, and garden-grown and local produce, to create beautiful meals all year long, in good times and bad.
Food Storage Feast is built on three keystones:
Articles. We explain what foods to store, how to store them, and how to use these foods in your kitchen. We get into the nuts and bolts of each key ingredient, and give you all the knowledge you need to integrate your preps into your daily life before you need to depend on them in a crisis.
Recipe videos. Step-by-step, in high definition, Chef Keith shows you how to make each recipe. We encourage you to try every recipe at least once, then pick your favorites, and make these dishes the foundation of your personal food storage plan.
Community. Food is for sharing, right? After you share it at your table, please share your results and experiences —with us, with other members via our threaded comments, social media and in person to friends and family who might benefit from this information.
Your comments and suggestions enable us to play an active part in helping you.
We welcome your comments, suggestions, questions, feedback, recipe reviews, and photos – especially in our threaded comments, but also via email and social media. Food Storage Feast may look like a website, but there are two very real people, with families, behind it, and we want to help you succeed at food security.
Who are these guys?
Chef Keith Snow says:
In the fall of 2008 I was producing my own cooking series for television, with a full crew and a major corporate sponsor. When the banking collapse came, our sponsor told us no more payments would be coming, as all expenditures were frozen. I froze, too, as I could no longer pay the six people working for me.
I was scared spitless. I had a HUGE mortgage and a baby coming in less than six months, and that was on top of the business expenses. I got to thinking about my responsibility to feed my family, and I realized I had little of lasting substance in my pantry or freezer. It was all fresh, fancy foods, like expensive cheeses and meats. I had never even heard the word “prepper”.
The penny dropped hard, and in a panic I turned to the internet (never a great place to go if you’re already in a panic). One day I stumbled on a YouTube video of Judge Andrew Napolitano interviewing a self-described modern survivalist named Jack Spirko. I started listening to Jack’s Survival Podcast where he talked about storing food and other crazy stuff like guns, home security, water, precious metals, generators, alternative energy, permaculture, raising ducks, etc. And he was talking about all this in positive terms, as a way to improve your quality of life, if times get tough or even if they didn’t.
As a proponent of the local food movement, our family was already gardening, raising dairy goats, using raw milk, making cheese, canning vegetables, etc. But my dive into the internet launched my journey into prepping. I had a lot to learn, and storing food was a logical next step.
Soon after that, I embarked on a national tour to promote my Harvest Eating Cookbook. The long trips away from home scared me even more. What if the collapse hit while I was away? What would my family eat? How would my wife and kids get by? Mulling over these questions made me even more determined to proactively build security into our lives, from food security, to home defense, and beyond. I knew that living sustainably needed to be built into our lives from the ground up. And that’s why we moved across the country to rural Montana.
My audience at the Harvest Eating site and podcast already included a lot of homesteaders, so it was natural to begin sharing our family’s new direction towards preparedness, and as a result, my audience grew. I knew I was onto something that a lot of people cared about.
Even though we socked away a lot of dried food in buckets, I didn’t really integrate it into our daily diet, and I knew that just having it wasn’t enough. I felt uneasy every time I walked past the stacks of buckets in our pantry and wondered what I would actually make with all those dry ingredients. It’s one thing to come up with a single meal on the fly, but another thing entirely to scramble for enough new recipes for a whole week of lights-out.
In April of 2016, I decided to put an end to my near-daily runs to the grocery store, and try to cut down our grocery bill, which was then almost $2000/month. I began cooking every day with the bulk commodity foods that we stored.
They say small is beautiful, and less is more, but I still wondered if my skills would be up for the challenge. How many great meals could I really make from prison-food ingredients?
If I missed a beat, my wife and my kids (14, 10, and 6) didn’t notice. They loved the simple, hearty, delicious meals coming out of our kitchen. I loved the food, too, and found that eating less meat and more low-fat carbs started making a big difference in how I felt. And, our grocery bill plummeted by half.
I had two decades as a successful chef under my belt, including a great deal of recipe development. Even so, I was apprehensive when I ventured into cooking with storage food. I imagined how completely unprepared folks in my audience might feel when opening a bucket of dry beans in the middle of a crisis. I knew I had to dive into help them… and my own family, too.
And thus, Food Storage Feast was born.
I had already written one book, and learned that I strongly prefer making videos and podcasts to writing books. But I knew Food Storage Feast was destined to be a book one day. My wife suggested calling one of our off-the-grid Montana neighbors, Noah “Darco”, since he comes from a long line of pen-wielding misfits, and has proved himself handy with a typewriter before.
Here’s his story.
Noah Darco says:
I was a globe-trotting tech guy trying to get off the road and spend more time on the land with my kids.
Homeschooled from a time when most people thought it was illegal, I grew up in the sprawling southern countryside and amidst my parents’ equally sprawling library, including their set of The Mother Earth News, dating back to issue #1, when it was an endearingly scruffy, self-published affair. At 17, wanting a term to describe my career plans, I came up with “stealth peasant”.
I later married a farm girl from Southeast Asia, who turned out to be a culinary genius. Several children later, we moved to Montana for reasons much like the Snows’, and when we met these new neighbors, our families became fast friends. My wife taught Keith some Thai dishes, and many great meals were shared around our tables.
In his podcast, Keith once made passing reference to me as the guy who “can’t even boil water.” Yep, I’m that guy. My family had, however, been experimenting with different ways to keep some extra food for emergencies, and I figured that if I couldn’t compete with my wife’s cooking on quality, I could at least find some creative ways to use our storage food.
So when Keith approached me about co-writing Food Storage Feast, I knew that I could sincerely bring the perspective of you – the person who wants to store food, but lacks the cooking skills that are just as important as the buckets of beans.
Learning to cook with storage foods takes practice
Have you ever sat down at the keyboard of a grand piano that you have no clue how to play? A pile of storage food that you don’t know how to cook is as useless as that piano.
When it comes to being ready for hard times, skills trump stuff. A holistic approach to storing food begins with your cooking skills, and ends with a trove of ingredients that you know will sing beautifully in tried-and-true recipes.
A sack of beans isn’t worth a hill of beans if you don’t know how to cook with them. Stashing away food for a rainy day is only half the battle. You must also have a plan – and the skills – to turn the dry ingredients in your pantry into something hot and appetizing on your table.
As you wake up to the fragility of the modern food delivery system – the just-in-time inventory system that means your grocery store has, at best, about 3 days’ worth of food on the shelf at any one time – it’s easy to get caught up in a sense of urgency and end up spending hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on a big pile of pre-packaged storage food.
But have you ever actually cracked open those cans? With a sack of rice and only a vague idea of what to do with it beyond boiling, you’re only half-prepared to take responsibility for your family’s food requirements in a crisis.
You may be able to throw something together in a way that makes it possible to gag down the calories, and in the worst of times, this may be better than nothing. Or it may turn out to be worse than nothing, another source of stress on an already bad day. But up until the time your eight-year-old experiences actual hunger pangs – and learns the true meaning of “I’m starving” – he will probably have to be bribed with video games and candy to get him to eat a tasteless gruel that you’ve thrown together in desperation with water in a saucepan.
The best preps are ones that will serve you well even if nothing goes wrong. And this is where skills really trump stuff. The ability to make delicious food out of basic ingredients is a skill that will enrich every single day of the rest of your life, in good times and bad.
Food Storage Feast is designed as the keystone of your carefully-chosen stockpile of storable ingredients, and will teach you to prepare delicious, attractive meals that belie their simplicity and ease of preparation. Chef Keith Snow has fine-tuned each recipe to provide you with maximum value and enjoyment.
Don’t get stuck holding the bag… of dry beans, without the skills to go with it. Instead, you can enjoy the Food Storage Feast.
Skills trump stuff: A holistic approach to food security
What does COVID-19 have to do with music? Not much, but read on…
Would you rather be quarantined with a grand piano or buckets of rice and beans?
Ever sat down at the keyboard of a grand piano that you have no clue how to play? A pile of storage food that you don’t know how to cook is as useless as a piano in a life-and-death emergency.
When you’re sheltering in place, skills trump stuff. A holistic approach to storing food begins with your cooking skills and ends with a trove of ingredients that you know will sing beautifully in tried-and-true recipes.
A sack of beans isn’t worth a hill of beans if you don’t know how to cook with them. Stashing away food for a rainy day is only half the battle. You’ve got to have a plan – and the skills – to turn the dry ingredients from your buckets into something hot and appetizing on your table.
As we wake up to the fragility of the modern food delivery system – the 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 beat down by a sense of urgency and get duped into spending hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on a big pile of pre-packaged storage food in its rawest form.
But have you ever actually cracked open those cans? With piles of dry goods and only a vague idea of what to do beyond boiling them, you’re only half-prepared to take responsibility for your family’s food needs while sheltering in place.
You may be able to throw something together so you can gag down the calories, and in 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 gets actual hunger pangs – and learns the true meaning of “I’m starving” – you’ll probably have to bribe her with video games and candy to get her to eat a tasteless gruel, a pottage you’ve thrown together in desperation while the world is coming apart.
Don’t get stuck holding the bag… of dry beans, without the skills to go with it.
The best preps are ones that will serve you well even if nothing goes wrong. And this is where skills really trump raw ingredients. A poorly-prepared individual might trade you several days’ worth of raw ingredients – or even a birthright – for one well-seasoned, piping-hot bowl of gruel.
When you’re laying back food in preparation for lock-down, don’t forget a run-through of your recipes. In other words, prepare to be prepared!