What motivates me to spend so much time, energy, and resources prepping? Love for my family. A maternal instinct to nurture and teach my children to take care of themselves. This is reflected in the majority of my writing. Home is the perfect laboratory to experiment, practice and perfect provident living skills.
We involve our children in every aspect of prepping and they have sacrificed spending time with their parents so that we could write The Practical Prepper – A Common-Sense Guide to Preparing for Emergencies. When it came time for our big celebration launch party, we brought them to enjoy the moment with us.
Our 13 year-old son was feeling the excitement and wanted to give me a gift. He searched through the books at Cedar Fort and found one he thought I would love. Without hesitation, he pulled out $25 of his own hard-earned cash from mowing lawns and purchased a book for me.
I was busy talking to friends and autographing copies of books, when he walked up with a contagious smile on his face. He handed me a beautiful book, gave me a huge bear hug and told me he was very proud of me. He wanted me to have something to remember this night. I greatly appreciated the sincere gesture, but I was concerned that he had chosen to spend his money on such an expensive gift for me.
The night was crazy and I tucked the book away in a box with bookmarks, business cards, handouts, and other author supplies not really paying much attention to it. Days later when I finally got around to organizing everything, I discovered the book and flipped through it. This darling love-to-make-my-siblings-scream kid with a huge heart, had chosen the perfect book for me.
The Gourmet Food Storage Handbook by Stephanie Petersen is an amazing cookbook filled with tasty recipes using basic food storage. The photos are delicious looking. Each one of my children is assigned to make a breakfast and dinner each week with me. The photos make selecting the menu a lot of fun. This cookbook lets us use the basic ingredients we have stored and facilitates rotation.
Chef Tess has done a great job using the basics to create gourmet meals in this book. She uses Honeyville products in her recipes, but they can easily be substituted with other brands and basic food storage. We dehydrate quite a bit of our garden produce. In fact, our dried Russian kale won Sweepstakes at the county fair last week. It is wonderful to have this collection of recipes to make the most of our home dried bounty.
I have the feeling it won’t take long for this brand new book to have worn pages and spilled ingredients crusting the pages. I wonder which recipe will be the favorite. I think I’m going to start with Chef Tess Gourmet Chocolate Cake Mix. I’m a sucker for chocolate any day of the week.
Thanks Chef Tess for this beautiful, practical food storage cookbook! I’m excited to explore her other cookbooks as well. Visit her website for a variety of tasty recipes. Thanks to my handsome son for giving me a gift that I will cherish always due to his self-less sacrifice and thoughtfulness.
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