Prepping on a budget - cooking

I’ve never been a social media kind of person but I’ve been enjoying my time on steemit so far. I’ve even found myself thinking about articles to write and one kept coming to me as I looked over all my preps and that was food after the collapse.
Now I don’t mean how you cook as in what type of method you use specifically; open fire, armish stove, solar oven, propane heater etc. I’m talking about the actual cooking.
I’m lucky. I was taught to cook by my Dad and I was at school when cooking was still on the teaching schedule (and I mean actual cooking from scratch not how to microwave meals) so I learnt the basics in cooking and baking. Because I was taught this from a young age it came as a shock to me time and again that so many of my friends over the years couldn’t cook even basic meals. I eventually came to accept that and get over random texts from friends asking how to solve a kitchen issue but I got a shock again when I started to become a serious prepper at how many preppers didn’t and couldn’t cook.
I’ve lived in England and now Ireland so MREs and freeze dried food is horrendously expensive over here and add water meals are filled with MSG and other crap so I based my food storage around cooking from scratch and storing the basic ingredients. I started to look online for recipe and technique ideas on the prepping sites and that’s when I found that outside of homesteading sites they weren’t many sites on how to say….make a sustainable and interesting meal from beans, lentils, rice, tins and spices.
Let’s take one example: chickpeas (garbanzo). Dried packs will last almost indefinitely in your stores and they are fairly cheap in the supermarkets. It’s extremely nutritious, high in protein, fibre, folate and containing good amounts of dietary minerals like iron,phosphorus,thiamine, vitamin B6, magnesium and zinc to name but a few. It also contains more goodness like lysine, isoleucine, tryptophan and more.
The things you can make with it as the main ingredient is vast as well; houmous, falafel, burgers, flour, curries, masala. Roast it with salt and you make a crunchy snack, add some sugar and cinnamon and you have a sweet snack that will appeal to adults and kids. Soups, breads, protein bars, sweet treat bars the list is figuratively endless on things you can do with just that one basic ingredient.
On top of all that you can plant them as well (there are caveats on this in that they can’t be too old if you want a high seed to germination yield and must not be irradiated) which makes them even more useful as a potential sustainable source of food.
So why is it main sites just don’t talk about foods like this? Why don’t they even really talk about cooking at all? I’ve seen sooooooo many reviews on this MRE or that freeze dried food. I’ve seen vids a plenty about peoples stores where they show me huge Mylar bags with oxygen free food but people don’t talk about the practical everyday aspect of cooking the food. There is an assumption that everyone knows how to cook all food from scratch so no need to talk about it.
And that is a problem.
If you don’t know the basics of cooking – the how of food cooks and how to cook it safely then people when the SHTF will struggle and that will be deadly. At best food will be wasted when it can least afford to be at worse people could die from food related causes. Let’s go back to our chickpeas as an example. They contain Lectins (a glycoprotein) and in its raw state, as in raw undercooked beans, they can cause gastrointestinal distress that can lead to death. But soaking them and cooking them properly eliminates this risk.
So in order to prep as cheaply as possible in many countries you have to get and store the basic ingredients and that brings us back to that issue that you have to know how to cook. So I would urge anyone who is serious about prepping or even stretching their money to live a little better or healthier to learn to cook.
Basic foods can be bought cheap and in bulk from supermarkets, cheap good cookware can be bought from second hand markets and shops (I have a kitchen full of stainless steel and cast iron cookware. None of it matches but it does the job very well) and cooking recipes can be got from the internet (please get them before the collapse) or cook books from second hand book shops. Side note – the older the book usually the cheaper it is and the older books tend to give you the basics needed to build on for cooking. Invaluable to have in a grid down situation that could eventually come.
But this all takes practise like all the ‘cool’ prepping skills. So I would urge anyone who is serious about prepping to go practise their cooking. You will get valuable skills for SHTF and you will get cheap meals for now which might save you money.
And back to our chickpeas one last time. Why don’t you practise those skills with a fun recipe? If the SHTF does arrive and it’s really bad if you can one day whip up some cookies from your stores it might just give you that mental boost in a crappy time to make it through one more day.
http://www.theluckypennyblog.com/2014/01/gooey-peanut-butter-chocolate-chip.html