This weekend I was cleaning out my mother's house and came across perhaps 300 pounds of buckwheat honey from food storage.

I'm thinking about turning it into mead.

Has anyone here done this? Any other creative ways to turn Food Storage "swords into plough shares"?

We gave everything that had any life to it at all to the food bank - well, except for stuff we use all the time like spaghetti sauce and tuna. We only store stuff now that pays to buy in bulk because we use it so much.

One creative thing we did though, when the kids were younger, was to make a lot of playdough out of the old salt and flour. And once, we filled a plastic kiddie swimming pool with that nasty old cannery chocolate pudding that was past it's due date and invited the neighbor kids over for a food fight. Well, it was just a pudding fight but they all loved it.

There's FOOD and then there's FOOD STORAGE.

FOOD is what you cook and eat.

FOOD STORAGE is what sits in a basement for a few decades then gets thrown away.

It's nice to have a lot of FOOD in your pantry that you constantly eat of and replenish.

It's wasteful to have a basement full of FOOD STORAGE that nobody ever touches or would ever want to.

FOOD can be purchased in bulk and on sale and used as needed, that way you make best use of your money resources.

FOOD STORAGE is purchased but never used, so the money spent on it has just gone down a rat hole (in some cases literally!).

If I need food, there are plenty of TBMs I can acquire food from.

Oh, gosh.

I have been dumping these cans of Sam Andy food. They must be 30 years old. Maybe 40.

I called Sam Andy and asked about the shelf life. The person told me 25 years. Sometimes as long as 50. But after 25 years the nutritional value starts to decline.

I opened a can of apples and rehydrated them. They were actually quite good.

But still, I have been dumping them (into my compost). Even if they are still nutritious, I don't think I want them around.

I am feeling conflicted about this. What if we get the huge earthquake here in CA and I don't have this dried food around to eat, even if it is lacking in nutrition.

But the thing is: I have a large supply of food that we eat normally. Gad! A person could live on just peanut butter for some time.

I read once that you really should not store food that you don't normally eat anyway.

What I don't have a lot of is water. I'm working on that.

Someone I know who is really into disaster prep once told me that if you don't store water, you might as well not bother storing food. If I got a couple of cases of water, with my scrappy food storage, I'd be OK for long enough if there were an earthquake.

Meads can be obnoxiously sweet, but the best I've had is made with champagne yeast. It's light and crackling -- not quite sparkling.

First, you need to drink a case of champagne so you'll have the right kind of bottles, thick glass with a deep dent in the bottom, to prevent detonation after it's bottled. (Well, you could collect bottles from friends, too -- any weddings coming up?)

You need a honey, good water, some spices, a non-reactive (stainless steel or graniteware) pot, some sort of strainer, a large funnel, a carboy and bubbler, and someplace where the carboy can hang out and bubble. A winemaking store should have the equipment and yeast.

Sorry, I looked but can't lay my hands on the recipe. It was called "Christmas Mead" -- you make it in the late spring or early summer and it will be ready for the holidays. I googled it and found lots of recipes. I can't vouch for the ready-to-drink-in-two-weeks kind, but the 6-month-fermentation kind I did decades ago was great.

Just keep the honey-to-water-ratio set at "no, thanks, I don't drink syrup" and you should be fine.

Make sure you do your research before venturing forth. Don't waste it with uneducated mistakes. My brother and I tried to make some when we were kids, and it was the most god-awful stuff you ever gagged on.

Honey will last almost indefinitely if properly stored.

I put honey on my cereal, pancakes and in warm beverages. Also cook with it.

My story involved the infamous hundred pound bags of wheat and a conversation with my father.

Me: Are we ever going to eat this wheat?
Dad: Nope
Me: Why do we have it?
Dad: Your mother bought it.
Me: What good is it then?
Dad: If we get hungry we'll set it out in the back 40 and shoot some deer.

Food storage...what a concept. Dad but a storeroom and we had buckets of wheat (from our own farm) canned everything and cases of dehydrated potatoes and vegetables we had imported from Idaho.
I don't store much of anything. 3 weeks ago everything in my pantry that was overdue...some of it several years past...got chucked.

The Scroll Of Thoth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAp8WVZm3cc