Survival Planning: Dried Soup Mixes & Pasta

I've mentioned my love for dried soup mixes in a previous blog post. I'm totally sold on these as a valuable addition to basic food supplies for emergencies. In our emergency planning we keep a 3 month supply of 7 basic suvival foods on hand.  To supplement these 7 basic foods, I also keep dried soup mixes, pasta, and other food items (more on those in future blog posts)

Why pasta? It goes on sale regularly and keeps forever. It can be used in a variety of ways to extend your meals, and it counts as a grain. You could use it in place of rice or other grains. If you have enough stored you can just consider it an "extra" to be used to extend a planned meal. You can make a cold salad from pasta - just cook it and let it cool then add a dressing (oil and vinegar or whatever else you can create) and some  of your lovely sprouts or onions or chopped vegetables from your garden or re-hydrated from dried vegetables.

Pasta & Chili
I can make a bean "chili" and have it on top of cooked pasta. Chili's a great thing to make even if you only have pinto beans to put into it. Add some ketchup (you do have ketchup stored I hope), lots of chili powder, cayenne pepper and paprika (remember those 3 spices were all high in Vitamin A), and other items such as parsley (hopefully you are growing your own or have it stored as dried parsley), onion flakes or dried onions or garden-grown, garlic - fresh or dried - and you've got emergency chili.

Mac & Cheese

With pasta and a couple of other items, I can use some of my powdered milk and powdered cheddar to make macaroni and cheese. Add my wonderful sprouts to that and I've got mac & cheese plus a salad. Pretty good for emergency cooking.


Pasta & Dried Soup Mix

With pasta I can break it into small pieces and add it to a big pot of soup - made from those amazing dried soup mixes! Remember that dried soup mixes are very high in sodium (salt) so you probably don't need to add more. But go ahead and add other food items that you have on hand - maybe you've got some dried carrots? Or some fresh from your garden if the season is right. Or some from your root cellar. Carrots are a powerhouse of nutrition so if you've got some, add 'em!

I tend to concentrate on stocking one soup mix which I buy in bulk, and that is beef vegetable. I buy that because it has that little bit of meat (for protein and flavour) and vegetables which are missing in the 7 basic food storage plan I follow (grain, beans, fats, milk, sugars, water and salt).

My husband accidentally bought mushroom soup in a dry mix in bulk so I plan to use that  to  create a mushroom sauce for pasta for a different flavour. I can also make soup from it but I'm not crazy about mushroom soup so that won't be high on my list.  I can add it to stew if we are lucky enough to have meat. It'll help the flavour of the stew and give us  more nutrition.

Bouillon Cubes
I also like to stock up on bouillon cubes when they are on sale. I buy vegetable, chicken and beef because they keep indefinitely and can be used to make soups if you don't have any dried soup mix, to add to dried soup mixes for more robust flavour, to toss into stews or chili or almost anything you can dream up that has water or some other liquid. They add salt and flavour to your diet. They do dry out over time but just chunk 'em up and toss them into your liquid and they'll dissolve.