Staying Prepared » Oats, the Queen of Breakfasts

August 30th, 2014

post by policysup | | 0

Oats, the Queen of Breakfasts

Usually, breakfast is the easiest meal for stocking up, but I’d like to suggest, for food storage, you consider meals that are hearty, filling, and nutritious. Cheerios and dry saimin won’t cut it.

My favorite breakfast for storage is either oatmeal or granola. Both can be “adjusted to taste” by adding nuts, dried fruit, honey, and many other possible additions. Even if your kids aren’t big fans of oatmeal and granola, surely there’s a customized version that will make them happy.

Figuring out how much to store is easy. Calculate how much each family member eats in a typical breakfast, keep track of the various add-ins and come up with a total per breakfast. When you multiply those amounts by thirty, you’ll know just how much to stock up on for a full months-worth of breakfasts. Here’s the tally for the four of us in our family — enough to last a month.

Oatmeal: 60 cups (1/2 c. per person, per day)

Brown sugar: 8 cups (1 T. per person, per day)

Raisins: 8 cups (1 T. per person, per day)

Walnuts: 2 cups (1 T. for 30 days – I’m the only one who likes walnuts.)

Sometimes I pour a bit of milk over our oatmeal, and for variety, replace raisins with the same amount of chopped, dried apricots or apples. Here are a few more tips for utilizing oats in your breakfast meals and storage.

When oatmeal becomes tiresome, and it will, fortunately you can use many of the same ingredients to make homemade granola.
Another break from oatmeal is a different hot cereal with similar toppings.
Use an online conversion tool to figure ingredient totals.
Be sure to have a breakfast option that doesn’t require cooking for those power-outage mornings.
Use oats and a few baking ingredients to make a loaf of nutritious breakfast bread or muffins for another change.
Experiment with different versions of oatmeal – steel-cut, oat groats, or a multi-grain mix.
Quick oats have their place in food storage, although rolled oats are preferred for their additional fiber and nutrition. Quick oats are handy for days when heating up some water is the only way a hot breakfast is going to happen.
To store oats long-term, use cleaned out 2-liter soda bottles, mylar bags, or buckets, and one or two oxygen absorbers in each. Keep the oats in a cool, dry, and dark location.