Wednesday, March 28, 2012

What We Store and How We Prep: Meats

I am such a guilty carnivore. A fair amount of my friends are either vegetarians/vegans, due to the fact that we all like volunteering our time for animal causes/rescue (pets), but I struggle giving up meat products, mainly due to personal beliefs and preferences.
My in-laws bought us a freezer a few years ago, and at the time, we didn't buy much meat because it was essentially two of us eating (our oldest was no more than a few months old at the time, and on formula), and we felt that meat was very expensive, let alone having somewhere to store it. Between the new freezer, and finding a local butcher where the meat was high quality, locally grown, and grain fed for less money, we ran out of excuses.
Now, I consider meat a vital part of our family's three month supply of foods. We keep on hand at a time (these are averages):
-10-15 pounds of ground beef
-10-20 pounds of chicken (boneless)
-about another 10-15 pounds of various chicken parts or fryer chickens (bone in)
-about 5 pounds of ground turkey
-10-15 pounds of various sausage products
-5-10 pounds of bacon
-10 pounds of roasts (about two of them)
-10 pounds of hot dogs
-5-10 pounds of fish (this can fluctuate, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on sales)
-a few pounds worth of ham steaks (I usually try to keep 4 or 5 ham steaks on hand)
-10 pounds of various other meat products, like an occasional rack of ribs, steaks, pork tenderloin, pork chops, and the like
The main worry I have with this aspect of our food storage is that it is very electricity dependent. If the power goes out for several days (we've lost it for two days before), then what? This is something we are still working on figuring out. We have started looking into canned meats and meat alternatives. We have a few cans of tuna (the hubby really doesn't like it, so we don't buy it much), have started keeping canned chicken (several pounds worth), and are venturing into using textured vegetable protein, a soy based meat alternative, that you can get in various forms, like bacon flavored, chicken flavored, beef flavored, and even taco beef, but we only have 2 #10 cans of this, with plans to buy more in the future.
Any experience with canned meats? Self canning meat? Ideas how to preserve freezer items when the power goes out? Good recipes using TVP?

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