Cookin' With Home Storage - Reviewed by Marjorie Burris

      This fascinating cookbook, written for those people who look at all the cans of food on their storage shelves and say, "What do I do with all this stuff?" is more than a cookbook. Layton and Tate, two Mormon women whose experience and expertise has helped them to get rid of all the "bugs" in home storage systems, give reliable information on how to put together a workable food storage program as well as numerous hints and tips on really using your food storage and incorporating it into your everyday diet. Then they add a section on Survival Tips and Foods, a section on Home remedies that "grandma" used, and a section on how to make effective houshold cleaners.

      If that isn't enough to make a survival-oriented cookbook valuable, the authors also tell how to reconstitute and cook dehydrated foods — plus they tell many interesting historical facts about how the early pioneers in Utah lived and flourished with limited foodstuffs.

      With its emphasis on survival, you might get the idea that this is an impractical cookbook, one you would turn to only in the time of disaster. Not so. This is a collection of tasty recipes which can be used every day for nutritious and inexpensive meals. In fact, the authors urge anyone who plans a home storage program to use the food on a regular basis os that the cook can become used to creating meals with the foods at hand, and the family can adjust to a different way of eating. Regular use also helps the family to decide which foods they like best, therefore which foods are practical to store for a self-sufficiency program. Also, regular use of stored foods automatically provides for a good rotation system, keeping foods from becoming stale and outdated.

      All the recipes in the cookbook are simple and use only a few basic ingredients; yet they are not repetitious or monotonous. I particularly like the Prepare Ahead Master Mix recipes which tell how to make a master mix for bread, a master mix for pancakes, and a master mix for corn bread followed by several recipes for variations of bread, pancakes, and corn bread which can be made from the master mixes.