Reader Question: Evaporated Milk

One of the items I am considering leaving out of my food storage is evaporated milk. It has such a short shelf life. I don't mind using it up in quiches, but I don't want to eat that much quiche.
It's okay in yogurt, but not great.


The powdered milk is not a problem. We use it for everything except straight up drinking, so we don't buy as much fresh milk when it comes time to rotate.


Do you store evaporated milk? If you do, how do you keep it rotated?


- dogear6

I will be curious to hear everyone's answers to this, because I used to store a lot of evaporated and sweetened condensed milk and ended up throwing them away because they expired before I used them. Now I just keep 3-4 cans of each on hand and most of my milk storage is powdered.

I have a crepe recipe that uses evaporated milk and there are loads of dessert recipes (think fudge) which use sweetened condensed milk. Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

Do you store evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk? How do you rotate it?

Reader Question: Car Kit in Extreme Temperatures

Karen (Canadian Soldier's Wife) writes in:

Question for you about car kits.

We live in an area with a wide range in temperature... -40C (-40 degrees F) in the winter, up to +40C (104 degrees F) in the summer. This makes it a challenge to keep food/water in the car - which became very evident when the bottled water in the trunk froze into solid bricks! And in the summer, the temperature inside the car gets so high that most energy food will turn into melted goo.

Any recommendations for food/water to keep in the car in an area with these rather extreme temperatures? (We moved here from an area where the temperature from January to August only varied by 10-20 degrees, so this has been an adjustment!

My thought is in the winter to just fill up water bottles as you go places and bring them with you. Or maybe putting the bottled water by someones feet instead of in the trunk where it is by the heater.

About the food, I would look for food that doesn't have chocolate in, or is soft. So think nuts, crunchy granola bars, things like that.

What are your suggestions for Karen? Do any of you live in such extreme temperatures?

More car kit questions and information here.

Reader Question: Car Kit...Emergency or Everyday Use?

Hey all, reader Sadie wrote in with a great question:


HI, I have a car kit question... well more I want your opinion. My friend and I were discussing car kits and she thinks you should only use them in emergency. But I think I can use it like I use my food storage... whenever I need it. We are an hour drive from any city and a lot of times my kids get thirsty so I let them get a water bottle from the car kit, etc. Do you think it should be for emergency use only?


Hannah weighs in:
I think that one of the biggest benefits of the car kits is that it's right there for ANY situation! I use my car kit a lot too, and just replace anything I use. It's not only for emergencies, it's to make life easier!


Abs says:
I agree with Hannah in that we use our car kit whenever we need it. Although I try and bring snacks and drinks whenever we go somewhere, if I've forgotten and we're 15 minutes from home I have no problem busting out the water bottles for the kids.


However, if you know that you won't constantly replenish your car kit as needed, then maybe you'd better leave it alone and just rotate the snacks every 6 months as planned. You would hate to not have the things you need in a real emergency, just because you don't go out and refill your car kit whenever you use it.


What do you think? Do you use your car kit for everyday "emergencies" or do you save it for the big time?


We're building car kits one week at a time, check out the list on the right to see where we are in the process. For a printable list of what we suggest go into a car kit click here.