3 Emergency Shelf-Stable Recipes You Can Make With a Prepper Pantry

1. Bacon fried rice

I'm going to be making some bacon fried rice, it’s super easy, with very few ingredients.

We always have the bigger size olive oil. I always keep that in the regular pantry. I always keep these bacon pieces on hand so that we will use this whole pack. Then I've got rice, and I'm going to add about half of a can of mixed veggies. Don't forget your seasonings. 

Make sure you have a well-stocked seasoning cabinet or extra in your stockroom. You can get little condiments and keep them in your pantry. Every time we go somewhere, McDonald's or Panda Express, I always ask for extra sauces so that I have them put up.

I've got some soy sauce that I'm going to use. It doesn't have to be refrigerated, and I have some teriyaki sauce. 

I've got garlic powder and a little bit of ginger. These will help give us some flavor and seasoning for our fried rice. 

When you have seasonings and little condiments that you can add, you can enjoy it more. 

If you're not comfortable with having butter out, or if you don't consider that a shelf-stable item, I recommend getting some ghee if you need butter for certain dishes because it's shelf-stable.

I'm going to use olive oil to give it a nice little crisp. I wanted to mention the butter because I will use it in other shelf-stable recipes.

Once the oil was heated through, I added in my Minute Rice. That was so convenient; it cut a lot of cooking time. My only recommendation is to break it up in the bag a little bit before you dump it in your pan because until it got heated through, it wasn't breaking apart. 

If you were in an emergency and didn't have any electricity or running water, you could do this on a Blackstone grill or a camping stove; it's just one skillet. Make sure you have a source of cooking.

If you don't have any electricity, you can get decent size and price camping stoves at Walmart. If you have a grill, you can cook it on a grill. Just make sure that you have the right pans. I recommend using cast iron for the grill or an open fire. So keep that all in mind. 

So I heated the rice through, added my soy sauce, and then added my seasonings. 

Then I'm just dumping that whole bag of bacon in there and I'm going to let that heat through a bit. 

Since the canned veggies are already cooked, they must be warmed. I add those last, just the last couple of minutes, so they don't break down too much.  

Next, I'm going to add one of those teriyaki packets. I ended up using that whole thing for that one, and then I still had some in my pantry, so I pulled another one and drizzled it on top before I ate it.

This would easily feed two people, and I was very happy with the outcome.  

2. Hot dog mac and cheese

For our hot dog portion, we're going to be using Vienna sausages. We're going to use the other half of that canned veggies, and then we'll use one of the ready pastas and one of the packages of Velveeta cheese sauce. 

First, I drain the liquid off the Vienna sausages, then cut those into coins just like you would if it was a regular hot dog. 

I've got butter melting in my pan over on the stove, and we're going to heat the Vienna sausages and give them some color on both sides.  

Now that they've got some color, we will add them to our packet of ready pasta. We'll break that up, heat it through, and add the rest of our ingredients. 

 We added the other half of that can of veggies and then added one packet of the Velveeta cheese sauce and mixed it. 

I added salt, pepper, and garlic powder; then, we will toss and mix it together. I highly recommend you keep all of the ingredients to make this dish on hand.  

Here is my bowl; this would easily feed two people as well.

3. Beef, gravy, and potatoes

We will use a brown gravy mix, shredded beef, Minute mashed potatoes, and a can of corn. I heated the corn in the back and added some butter, salt, and pepper. 

For the beef, I opened the can, dumped it in, broke it up, and slowly heated it through. 

I left the juices. You could see when you open the can that there's a little bit of fat in there, which helps with flavor.

Once it was heated, I added a packet of the brown gravy mix. I left the juices because that's just what's going to help thicken that gravy packet up. Then I just mixed it. It thickened up nicely with the amount of liquid already in the can. 

My corn's heating up, and then on the other side, I had a kettle with some hot water, and I let that come to a boil. 

Now we're going to make our mashed potatoes. This recipe was good. 

This was the biggest meal portion that we had out of all three of these meals. 

Shelf-stable recipes

I hope you enjoyed these super easy and delicious shelf-stable meals. I enjoyed coming up with these recipes and trying out what we could create based on our shelf-stable ingredients.

Do you keep a stock of shelf-stable items? Share your favorites in the comments below.