Have you ever sat down at the keyboard of a grand piano that you have no clue how to play? A pile of storage food that you don’t know how to cook is as useless as that piano.

When it comes to being ready for hard times, skills trump stuff. A holistic approach to storing food begins with your cooking skills, and ends with a trove of ingredients that you know will sing beautifully in tried-and-true recipes.

A sack of beans isn’t worth a hill of beans if you don’t know how to cook with them. Stashing away food for a rainy day is only half the battle. You must also have a plan – and the skills – to turn the dry ingredients in your pantry into something hot and appetizing on your table.

As you wake up to the fragility of the modern food delivery system – the just-in-time inventory system that means your grocery store has, at best, about 3 days’ worth of food on the shelf at any one time – it’s easy to get caught up in a sense of urgency and end up spending hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on a big pile of pre-packaged storage food.

But have you ever actually cracked open those cans? With a sack of rice and only a vague idea of what to do with it beyond boiling, you’re only half-prepared to take responsibility for your family’s food requirements in a crisis.

You may be able to throw something together in a way that makes it possible to gag down the calories, and in the worst of times, this may be better than nothing. Or it may turn out to be worse than nothing, another source of stress on an already bad day. But up until the time your eight-year-old experiences actual hunger pangs – and learns the true meaning of “I’m starving” – he will probably have to be bribed with video games and candy to get him to eat a tasteless gruel that you’ve thrown together in desperation with water in a saucepan.

The best preps are ones that will serve you well even if nothing goes wrong. And this is where skills really trump stuff. The ability to make delicious food out of basic ingredients is a skill that will enrich every single day of the rest of your life, in good times and bad.

Food Storage Feast is designed as the keystone of your carefully-chosen stockpile of storable ingredients, and will teach you to prepare delicious, attractive meals that belie their simplicity and ease of preparation. Chef Keith Snow has fine-tuned each recipe in this course to provide you with maximum value and enjoyment.

Don’t get stuck holding the bag… of dry beans, without the skills to go with it. Instead, you can enjoy the Food Storage Feast.