The Prepper’s Cookbook

I just received this book and sat down for several hours checking the entire book. The beginning has a concise description of water bath and pressure canning. Even if you'd never done it before, you could learn it from this section. I can say this with confidence because I've been canning for more than 30 years and know what a beginner would need.This book is aimed at people who already have an interest in stocking up so it uses items commonly found in a prepper's stash. It's a well-known truism that you should rotate your food storage. So, if you've been afraid to try it, this book should motivate you to actually make soups, stews, meat dishes from your stores. I especially liked the section on making your own dried soup mixes! I have food allergies and most commercial dried soups contain things I can't have. This book solves that problem and expands my possibilities. The recipes for dehydrated beef jerky and fruit leathers look good. I would have liked some information on what to do about dehydrating without power, just as she included information on canning outside on an open fire.But this is a small complaint compared to all that this book does contain.There is also a section on substitutes that would help a cook any time there's something missing in the pantry. Don't have butter? Recipe calls for buttermilk and you don't have it? Don't have whipped cream for a dessert topping? There are instructions on how to make your own substitutes. I tried the whipped topping already. Not bad! Actually, pretty good. It's made from dried milk, something most preppers store. There is a wonderful section on creating your own herbal mixtures for different recipes. What if you couldn't get your favorite McCormick Spice blend? Check this section.The book is arranged logically, with sections for breakfast, lunch, dinner, beverages and snacks. There are recipes for homemade saltines, homemade vanilla wafers, and directions on how to turn quinoa into a really tasty sounding breakfast cereal. There's a recipe for homemade corn flakes! There are directions for pressure canning meats. Only one recipe concerns me. The meat loaf recipe has bread crumbs in it and the USDA has stated that putting wheat products in pressure canned recipes increases the chance for botulism. I would like to know if this recipe the author included really is safe because based on what I know, canning a solid chunk of meat loaf like this may not be. Still, I could be wrong. There are also instructions for canning hot dogs.I am an experienced cook, canner, and prepper and this book had plenty of new ideas for me. Finally, I am impressed with the author's credentials. She worked with the American Red Cross specializing in the Armed Forces Emergency Services center and was trained in disaster management. With personal experience in helping manage aid for families after 9/11, the author says that and seeing families struggle during hard economic times has convinced her of the need to share her expertise in helping others prepare for emergencies. If I hadn't been convinced of the need already, this book would have convinced me.This book is common sense. It's not screaming doomsday. It's teaching survival, but it also teaches frugality, how to stretch your food to feed more people, what to do if you run out of certain things. This book is hope, but more than that, it's a tool useful to anyone who wants to do more with their food storage. After all, we aren't creating a food museum in our pantries. Also, who says you have to eat boring or bland food during a crisis? With this book in hand, you can practice now what might save your family later. (I've been through a fourteen day power outage after a horrible ice storm here and have personally used many of the ideas in this book--but I still wish I had this book sooner! It would have saved me some trial and error.) So five stars for this comprehensive, jam-packed little powerhouse of a cookbook. In these difficult times, learning how to do more with less is a good thing.

This book is awesome. I've got a lot of prepping books and while they talk about water storage and how you can "lightly chlorinate" your water for storage, they fail to tell you what that means. This book covered everything about food and water storage in about 30 pages. A quick flip through can tell you how to can your own food and tell if home canned products have gone bad. The amount of bleach needed for water treatment and the appropriate size oxygen absorbers to use for different foods in gallon and 5 gallon buckets were also great reference items. It's a space saver for sure. I'll be putting a copy in my BOB.I loved the fact that it had recipes for items like ketchup, saltines and plum sauce so you can make them yourself and not waste extra storage space on them when you can make them yourself from the other items you're already storing.There's also 20 recipes on rice and beans, food storage staples. This is really nice for me because I want to start using more beans and less meat as the beans are so easy to store. Keeping meals fresh and interesting when SHTF is not something that should be overlooked.The second half of the book are a bunch of recipes to help you start using and rotating your food storage items in case you haven't already. I love quinoa and the breakfast recipe in here is amazing. The only thing I didn't like about the recipes was the use of processed foods like Velveeta and boxed rice mixes. But these items could easily be substituted with freeze dried cheddar cheese and your own rice mixes.That being said, the book is well worth the money for just the first 30 pages alone.

I'm actually fairly impressed with this book. While it says it's 300 recipes, it's actually a LOT more. There's really good lessons on canning and preserving. My mom used to preserve the cherries from a tree in our yard when I was a kid. I don't do it now because she had no idea why she did it the way she did, and the very real worry of botulism scared me off. But the tutorial (it's not just info, it's a complete education on the subject) is quite complete and concise and makes me wish I had a cherry tree in my own back yard. It comes with charts on a huge selection of fruits & veggies and how to can/preserve them. (It also goes into meats, but I have no interest in that).I was also pleased to see it didn't obsess over beans - so many nutrition or survival or prepper things focus on beans cuz they last forever, but I hate almost all beans. I might have to eat them if things do go south, but the major flaw in that thinking, imo, is that food may very well be catch as you can, so to speak, and you'll need to know and understand a lot more than beans. This book, happily, goes way beyond just beans.The only flaw (hence the 4 stars), to my thinking, in this book is that it pretty much assumes you're going to be at home when disaster strikes. While grocery lists and pantry stocking are useful and important, it's not the only possible scenario. Since I already have my at-home setup as complete as possible, I was looking for more info on survival while not at home base, when you won't likely have normal staples like baking soda, flour, etc.Having said that, I still find the recipes in this book very useful because it still gives tons of useful at-home info and guides and those charts are fantastic. And there's still stuff you could learn - for example, I'm very into freeze dried or powdered things, like meats and butter and such, but even I didn't know that powdered shortening was available.So even tho it focuses mostly on at-home perspective, there's still plenty that could be useful if you weren't at home, and lots of info even if you're already setup at home. I think it's well worth the buy.