The Bulk Box

We travel with everything except the kitchen sink.  Sometimes we even think of bringing the kitchen sink along.  Most of the time when we prepare to migrate south or north, we purposely "over pack" and take more stuff than we need.

Our total food inventory is actually pretty extensive and complex.  We divided it into sections much like small town grocery stores are in sections or departments or whatever.

One of our staples (so to speak) is our Bulk Box.  It hold dry primary ingredients that must be cooked.  There's nary a single thing in that box that can be eaten "as is."  Most of the Bulk Box contents actually need to be pressure cooked.  Of course, we carry a pressure cooker...but you knew that already, right? Right!

Today, I roto-rooted the Bulk Box and focused on the items we eat most often.  All other extraneous items were removed.  Until today, we've always carried breakfast items such as oats and pancake mix in the bulk box.  Only quick cooking grits remain.  The oaks and 10-grain pancake mix are moving to a more convenient location elsewhere in our traveling grocery store.

Obviously lentils, brown jasmine rice and Navy Beans are very popular menu items for us--hence five one cup bags of each.  Lately we've found ourselves becoming quite fond of pressure cooked pearled barley so that one got upped to four one cup bags.

We're only carrying two cups of pinto beans just in case we need to make a "company pot" of beans.  Otherwise, we will stick with small red beans as they are slightly more versatile and go really, really well with rice.

It generally takes about a month to rig for one of our migrations.  We try to devote a lot of time to each task.  We don't want to wait until the last minute and then have to rush through everything.  It was a pleasure today to spend almost four hours on the Bulk Box.  It will serve us well through most of the upcoming Arizona Season.