100-Day Pantry: Quick and Easy Gourmet Meals

100-Day Pantry: Quick and Easy Gourmet Meals by Jan Jackson contains 139 recipes for meals that come straight from the pantry without help from fresh or frozen ingredients. A short-term food storage cookbook but not a food storage book, this book is almost entirely recipes with a short introduction and a few tips at the end.

The recipes, except for the three dessert recipes, are for one pot or one pan dinners/suppers. They use canned or bottled ingredients, seasonings, and a few dried ingredients. Most also include a grain (usually rice) or pasta. Some of the dried ingredients can be purchased in a grocery store but others will need to be specially purchased or home dehydrated. This is the biggest drawback to a number of the recipes. Potato flakes, dried onions, and dried green peppers can be purchased in many grocery stores. Dried celery, broccoli, and spinach can be made or purchased but sour cream powder can only be specially purchased. The author does, however, tell you how to use fresh ingredients instead of dried if you have fresh available. Water is not on any ingredient list so that these recipes can be used when water is in short supply.

These recipes are for easy to assemble meals, many of which are just open, dump, and stir. They definitely have their place in food storage and preparedness (low water and low fuel situations or personal time crunches and emergencies), but this is not a cookbook for using basic food storage foods or for cooking from scratch.

Four short chapters at the end of the book offer some extra help and tips. The first lists vacation-ready recipes that require only canned goods and easily obtained fresh substitutes. The second gives tips for organizing and keeping an inventory of your food supplies, plus a sample pantry list for 100 meals. The third gives sources for dried foods. The fourth lists recipes that feed 4 or 6 people so that you can choose appropriately for your size family.

If you are looking for recipes for your 3-month supply or a source of easy-to-fix and easy-to-store recipes, this book may be a helpful addition to your food storage library.