Pantry list help please

I'm somewhat overwhelmed. I have some starter items and a very basic list. Would someone please suggest other items for a family of 5 plus my 85 year old MIL whom I love dearly?
This is what I bought today and I do realize the quantities need to be increased:

This is what I have on my meager pantry list and I have not determined appropriate quantities as of yet:

Apple sauce, jars
Aluminum foil
Baked Beans
Baking powder
Baking soda
Barbecue sauce, Open Pit
Barley
Beans
-baked, canned Bush’s
-Black, refried canned
-Garbanzo
-Lentil
-Lima
-Navy
-Pinto
-Split Pea
Black strap molasses
Bouillon
Butter, canned
Catsup
Cheese, shelf stable
Chicken, canned
Chili, canned
Cocoa
Corned beef hash
Cornmeal
Crisco
Dinty Moores
Dog food
Ensure
Flour, unbleached
Fruits, dried
Greens
-Collards, canned
-Kale, canned
-Mustard, canned
-Turnip greens, canned
Hellmans
Honey
Lemon juice
Maple syrup
Mayonnaise, Hellmans jars
Meats
-chicken
-corned beef hash
-Spam
Milk
-condensed
-evaporated
-powdered
Molasses
Mushrooms, canned
Mustard, yellow
No Salt
Nuts
Oatmeal
Oil
-coconut
-Crisco
-palm
-olive, extra virgin
Oranges, Mandarin canned
Pasta
-egg noodles
-small shell
-spaghetti
Parchment paper
Pasta sauce
Peanut Butter
Pectin
Pumpkin, canned
Quinoa
Rice
-brown
-white
Salt
Saltines
Sardines
Sorghum
Soups, canned Healthy Request[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]Spices & Herbs
-basil
-cinnamon
-garlic
-mustard
-paprica
-parsley
-pepper
-sage
-sesame
-thyme
Split Peas
Sugar
-brown
-white
Tang
Tapioca
Tea
Texturized vegetable protein
Tobasco Sauce
Tomatoes
-crushed, canned
-diced, canned
-sauce, jars
-stewed, canned
Tuna fish, canned in oil
TVP (textured vegetable protein), canned
V-8 Low Sodium
Vanilla
Vinegar
-Apple cider
-white
Vitamins
-multiple
-C
Wheat, hard & soft
Yeast

 

Gosh.... it would have helped if I had remembered to add in my starter purchases:
1 Reynolds Wrap super strength 37.5 sq ft roll
1 Shure Fine non-fat dry milk 4 lbs
1 Honey 4 lb jar
10 lbs white sugar
10 lbs organic flour
10 lbs white rice
1 Sorghum Syrup 2 lb 12 oz jar
8 Prego traditional 28 oz jars
8 Motts Natural apple sauce 2 lb jars
8 Fisher peanut butter 4 lb jars
8 Hormel corned beef hash 25 oz cans
8 Bush’s Original baked beans 28 oz cans
8 Dinty Moore beef stews 1 lb 8 oz cans
1 3-liter Ortolana Extra Virgin olive oil
2 Centrum Silvers
1 Lemon Juice 32 oz

 

Don't feel overwhelmed, you have a good start. The bulk foods that I would add to your list are rolled oats-a 25# bag costs around $19.00 here. More rice & beans, a ratio of 5 parts rice to 1 part beans is a complete protein capable of sustaining life. Coffee, if any in your family drink it, use it for trade goods if they do not. Another good way to increase your food supply is to copy the canned goods that your family actually eats. If your family eats 2 cans a week of a certain item, you buy 3 or 4, rotate the stock using the older stuff first, and gradually build up a store of the stuff your family likes. There is no point in building up a store of foods that your family won't eat. For canned goods, in addition to the stuff you have listed, we like ravioli and tamales.

 

There's more to it than just food, take a look at all the material things that you use on a regular basis, and imagine what life would be like without them (soap, shampoo, toilet paper & etc.) then take the appropriate action.

 

I would add some of the dry packeged soups, ramen noodles, Rechargeable batteries/charger, penut butter, coffee, hot chocolate, bread mixes,potted meat.

 

It's hard not feeling overwhelmed once you read threads here then take the plunge making lists.... all my shortcomings are staring at me in black and white.

I'm waaaay behind recognizing the need to do something in the event of a solar flare that knocks out the grid or any other type of natural disaster or...manmade disaster. I'm holding off buying more rice or dry goods until I can figure out which vacuum sealer best meets my needs. I found a deli that'll give me their 5-gallon buckets for free and a place to order mylar and oxygen tabs so all I need is to decide on a vacuum sealer... easier said than done with prices all over the board. I did make another prep type list that's got soap, well bucket, solar cooker, and ohhhh about 25 other items I've identified as being a really good idea to gather before it's too late and I know that list's more deficient than the pantry list I started. Then I started making BOB lists (I just learned what a BOB was) for each one of us... no backpack for me or my MIL so I tossed our "stuff" in pillow cases which is better than doing nothing. My husband was rolling his eyes and snickering.... he thought I'd lost it until I showed him one of the threads here with the football stadium housing 1000's of Americans after Katrina not exactly living in peace and harmony and the mobile camps FEMA set up to "provide" for us. How soon we forget the chaos & mayhem we saw on the news after Katrina. He told me to add an airtight woodstove, plywood, and some siphons to "our" list and to go get an FOI card for me and his mother.

 

I WOULD GET MORE RICE AND BEANS.HERE IS A TIP.before you store your dry goods make sure you freeze them all, dry goods flour, corn meal, beans all them this kills any bugs or larva that's in them.then put them in a air tight container.freeze at lease 24 hrs.

 

Disciple> sorry... I was typing when you were typing. We mostly eat organic produce and fresh fish and poultry. Some venison when it's given to us. We're not fast food addicts and about the only cans we have other than what I've canned or dehydrated are mushrooms and pineapple for making cold jello salads around the holidays sooo... I'm totally not familiar with potted meats other than spam.... which I've never even tasted before but I'm somewhat of a realist and humans are animals and if we're hungry.... everything's fair game. I'll take some more suggestions for potted meats please when you have time.

 

when I say potted meats i mean the small cans of meat spreads you can buy at wal-mart. It's not the greatest tasting stuff but it does provide some protien that is digestible. Have you thought of investing in a dehydrator yet? If you had a dehydrator you could go a long way toward not having to buy the healthy request
canned soups. I have a small wal-mart special dehydrators and am having allot of fun dehydrating. I'm starting to make my own soups and wow they are alot better.
I try to do as much organic as possible but the cost is so much higher so I myself am hitting the farmers markets as much as possible.......Hopefully i'll have a garden soon.
But I do have friends around here who do give me stuff from their gardens. one thing I have been checking out is the website for honeyville farms..........They have their own freezedrying unit and they only process what they get from farmers in their coop
and I do believe their stuff is Organic.

Otherwise just keep plugging away, getting prepared is not just a process that tales one day or even one week.......It is a lifetime journey.

 

INRICK> I've had problems with pasta. I collected a specimen that floated to the top of my noodle water and was able to get a close look at it with our old binocular microscope. I"m pretty sure our "pest" was Oryzaephilus surinamensis... a grain beetle...extra protein I figured even though I'd really have preferred not to see them floating on top of my water. Don't fall over but.... I added pepper to the chicken casserole to make any of those little buggers I'd missed blend in. There were at least 20 of them I'd scooped off so I know there had to be more but no way was I wasting a bag of egg noodles. I've got a freezer that I can stick everything in you mentioned. I was wondering how many of these little buggers I'd find in vacuum packs opened up 5.... or 10 years from now but hopefully no surprises if I follow your tip. Thank you.
ghrit>(smile) I take it I'm Ecky? If Ecky is me... Ecky is basically a soccer mom now with one hairy legged teenager left at home that'll fly the coop for college next year leaving us with the last kid we adopted as an older child whose moderately handicapped and our eating machines that drop in to empty our frig while doing their laundry. It was nice wearing rose colored glasses until.... I read some of the threads here and started putting 2 and 2 together thinking about how we'd run home medical equipment and the pump to our well in a long term power outage. We couldn't. Are me and my husband freaking out.... him not so much but me a little once I backtracked and factored in existing and newly emergent solar activity science that's peer reviewed by non-UN "stakeholders" considerably less biased than the IPCC. So thanks to who ever started this site.

 

Disciple> "Have you thought of investing in a dehydrator yet? If you had a dehydrator you could go a long way toward not having to buy the healthy request
canned soups." Yes!!! I have a dehydrator and I've been learning how to use it. Next up is learning how to dehydrate ground poultry. I've tested some of my veggies in my soups and nobody could tell the difference. "Hopefully i'll have a garden soon." Big learning curve that's most humbling so it's great you'll have your own garden some day soon. I started my gardens by composting then moved onto building raised veggie beds myself. I can send you some non-GM seeds to start you if you'd like. We don't use any pesticides here so anything I'd send you would be clean.
adding, my treat on the seeds. A SASE or money for postage isn't necessary.

 

Thank you my friend I really appreciate the offer. I may just take you up on that. The only thing I am lacking right now is a big back yard. As of right now my wife and I live in an apartment, so a garden is out of the question, even a container garden, cause my neighbors would be helping themselves to the stuff I grow. So hopefully things shall be changing soon and we'll be moving into our own place out in the country so we can have a garden and I can get me a bigger and better dehydrator.
I really need to get caught up with my peps cause I have been disabled for two years now, and have used pretty much everything I had stocked up.

 

You don't need a big back yard. Start slow and get a feel for what it takes... you'll be shocked like me... it's no walk in the park. Maybe try thinking how tomatoes love carrots. That's a good enough companion start in a 2' x 2' container on a balcony if you're worried about space and even college kids won't get their hands dirty digging around in a container for a root crop like turnips or.... carrots. I know how to read a private message so just let me know if you want to try. I could even send you enough sterile medium and a few small starter pots so you wouldn't have to incur the expense of buying in quantity that you'd have to move to your new place in the country. Say... have you had any luck dehydrating avocados? That one's stumping me and those might be the 1st fruit we can't do anything with but freeze if they go on sale, Canned avocados could change markets and National Center for Home Food Preservation | How Do I? Freeze.

 

I grew up to a huge garden......My mom and her sister had a 2 acre garden when I was growing up in the 70's and it was reduced to a 1/4 acre when we moved it to the backyard after my aunt moved to kentucky. I used to ride a John Deere garden tractor with a tiller on the beck tilling it up in the spring and combine it with bull manure for fertilizer. Then planting the sweet corn,which was my responsibility. I just got to get back into that, and I will not be doing anywhere near a 2 acre garden. It is too easy for me to co-op with allot of the other gardners here and just work that way till we get everything built up to sufficiency. My wife and live in a small northwest Iowa town and the kids around here work on farms or the elevator so they do get their hands dirty................ I am starting to get quite a base built of farmers I am befriending, and we should be pretty good once i get on track with my health.

As far as avocados go, i tell you now I'm not sure. I certainly will look it up.

 

I know what you mean, I am still in the process of keeping a serious amount in storage. I bought some canned goods and hygiene supplies but now I am concentrating on bulk staples like rice and beans. So far have a few buckets of rice and will start getting some beans. The 5 to 1 ration is good to know.

5 rice to 1 bean right? Any particular bean is best for all around nutrition? I was planning on starting with lentils and maybe split peas since they are easy to cook.

 

avocadosource.com has a pdf that speaks on dehydrating avocados the orriginal article was done back in 1923-24 it's called investigations on avocado dehydration by a.w.christie and e.h.guthier. it's allot of work including a brining process and a sulfering process for color.

 

http://www.survivalmonkey.com/forum/back-basics/3366-food-storage-planner-spreadsheet.html

Guys, don't forget this handy tool Melbo posted not too long ago. A great way to plan/track your food preps. Add to it or modify it of you want to add/subtract anything including non-food items.

As to dehydrated Avacado -
Fashiontribes: Sink Your Teeth Into Raw Jamaican "Jerky" Made with Avocado Instead of Meat or Tofu - a Raw Food Recipe from RawGuru.com. FASHIONTRIBES RAW FOOD BLOG
A Jamaican treat. I would say experiment with this recipe to get variations on a theme.

 

5 parts rice to one part beans is right. For the beans, I prefer pintos or red kidney beans. With the red beans, you also have the option of making New Orleans style red beans and rice, if you have some spices to go with it.
Lentils are good, and can be sprouted and eaten as well as made into soups and other things

 

Disciple> "It is too easy for me to co-op with allot of the other gardners here and just work that way till we get everything built up to sufficiency." You're in better shape than me!!! I'm surrounded by thousands and thousands of acres of GM corn and GM soy with a spattering of little people like me with like zero zip nadda experience gardening.... we can't eat book learnin'. We're friends and all but.... it's basically the blind leading the blind sharing trial and error failures and successes with me leading the pack in failures but.... I do tend to "experiment" more than others.
Ajax> I read the 5 to 1 ratio here and checked it out online. It appears to be rock solid advice and it is rice to bean just like Gray Wolf said. Supposedly rice per person stored for a year should be 70#. I don't know if that's accurate but seems like a good goal. I've got 10 lbs so far.... only 340 left to go!!!
Falcon15> I'm thinking the avocado issue is dead unless I want to freeze them or purchase them commercially canned. Sort of a bummer since I personally eat a lot of avocados all different ways like fresh, tossed in salads, as a dip, in quiche, and in casseroles but....plenty more I can process at home and I can try your jerky recipe find.