Pantry Cooking cookbooks started a long time ago when I was looking for ways to use my food storage, and only my food storage, in meals. If I was to have food stored for difficult times, food shortages, and economic hardships, then I wanted ways to cook and to feed my family without having to depend on fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh dairy products, fresh meat, or eggs. The only cookbooks available at the time used dehydrated foods (which I couldn’t afford) or a limited number of foods that could be stored long-term (wheat, salt, honey, dry milk). While those were sources for extreme emergency situations, I wanted something I could feed my family every day. Since I couldn’t find a cookbook, I started to create my own by adapting recipes calling for fresh ingredients, searching out ways to bake without eggs, testing shelf stable products, and finding new ways to use shelf stable products. The longer I worked at it, the more my imagination took off. Shelf stable recipes became common on my menus and part of our eating traditions. Others were amazed the food I fed them was made with shelf stable food. As a greater variety of beans, grains, and shelf stable foods became available, my food repertoire expanded. Today, recipes contain quinoa and amaranth as well as wheat. They contain home dried celery as well as commercially dried potatoes. They include 15 bean soup, 12 bean soup, and soup using only 1 kind of bean; potato salads from mashed, canned, home canned, and dehydrated potatoes; cakes and cookies without eggs; and homemade cheeses from dry and shelf stable milk, just to name a few.
(Read “Where Do the Recipes Come From?” for more insight.)
So here is my resume’ if that’s what you are really looking for:
Cheryl Fisher Driggs was raised in a military family and has lived around the world. Her university education was in Food Science and Nutrition at Brigham Young University. She has taught food storage and cooking classes since 1977 and has had a regularly used personal long-term food storage program since 1974. In addition to teaching, she has organized fairs, conferences, socials, and workshops that focus on pantry foods and how to use them. Cheryl has also worked in the cannery and storehouse system of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, helping to supervise both dry and wet pack canning and peanut butter canning. She is the author of Inspirations to a Woman in Need, Simply Prepared: A Guide to Emergency Preparedness and Food Storage, and Pantry Cooking: Unlocking Your Pantry’s Potential. She and her husband, Allan, are the parents of 5 daughters and 21 grandchildren. They live in Klein, Texas.
Future publications include Pantry Cooking II, Pantry Cooking with Home Preserved Foods, and the revised edition of Simply Prepared: A Guide to Emergency Preparedness and Food Storage.