Take it to the Next Level!
To be really, truly prepared for anything, you have to get to the point where you and your family would be fine without outside help for a long period of time. That includes food storage, saving money, and having insurance, but there's even more you can do. It's called becoming more self-sufficient, and here are a few ideas on how to do it.
Plant a Garden
Gardens are fun, rewarding, and healthy way to cut your grocery bill and enjoy fresh food during the growing season, and canned food during the winter. If you're new to gardening, start small, till a little plot and plant some squash. They're easy, hardy, fast-growing and productive. When you get the hang of the gardening thing you can plant anything and everything appropriate to your climate (and if you get a greenhouse or have lots of sunny windows, anything at all). Think about planting things that come back with crops year after year so that your investment of work will be rewarded more every year. Some plants that come back with a larger harvest every year are asparagus, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, fruit trees, kiwis, and grape vines. Some of these plants, like blueberries and grapes, are extremely long-lived, and though they take awhile to build up their production, they will continue producing for fifty years if taken care of. Others, like strawberries, need to be replaced every 3-5 years, but produce quite abundantly after the first year. Don't forget the crops that must be planted every year. Tomatoes, corn, squash, zuchinni, lettuce, beets, carrots, radishes, pumpkins, cantaloupe, beans, peas, watermelons, peppers, onions... they're all worth the effort.
Preserve Plentiful Produce
A well-run garden will produce a surplus of fresh food during the summer and fall. Even after sharing out the bounty among friends and neighbors, you may find that you have more than you can use. Rather than waiting for it to spoil in your kitchen, preserve it for use during the winter months. Tomatoes, peppers, and onions can be made into tasty salsas, ketchup, sauces, or stewed tomatoes for canning. Fruits and berries can be put up as jams or jellies or bottled as slices or whole. Canning is not terribly difficult. You'll need clean, empty jars with lids, and some kind of stove-top canner. You can even use a large pot of boiling water as a water bath canner if you don't have one. Find a recipe for whatever it is you intend to preserve (make sure it's approved as safe and intended for use canning) and follow it precisely. When working with tomatoes, preventing bacterial growth is a serious issue, so make sure to use the correct proportions of veggies and vinegar or lemon juice.
Learn New Skills
Some hobbies or interests could benefit your family as well as entertain you. Learn to sew, knit, or crochet and use your skills to patch, mend, and create new clothing to help stretch the family budget. Learn how to do minor repairs around the house and for the car. Learn how to cut hair. Anything you would normally pay someone else to do, consider learning to do it yourself. Not only will you save money, you'll be able to pass those skills on to others and you'll enjoy that sense of pride and capability that come from doing things yourself.
Keep Chickens
No, I'm serious. You like eggs? You like chicken? If you can keep a garden, you should also consider chickens. They require only a small portable coop you could build yourself, a handful of ground corn, water and a little daily forage. If you just want eggs, keep a few hens. Their waste is a great natural fertilizer for the lawn and garden, they eat insects and pests and are quite good-tempered. Plus, range-fed chickens make healthier eggs than the ones from commercial productions where the hens are kept in tiny cages around the clock and fed the cheapest possible slurry. The latest studies show much higher vitamin content, higher omega-3 fatty acids (the good stuff), and much lower levels of cholesterol in the eggs from range-fed hens. Besides, it's much more humane to let the little critters get out and stretch their legs. Each hen tends to lay once a day, and if you don't want them to make chicks, there's no need to keep a rooster (which is nice since roosters tend to annoy people with their crowing.) If you do want chicks, it may be easier to buy them from a local farm where they generally charge around $1 for each baby bird before they can be sexed, and a little more for grown hens. If you do keep a rooster with your hens, make sure he is not closely related to any of them, and also make sure you stay on top of the egg gathering. You don't want to eat a partially developed egg: they're lower in nutrients, and depending on how far along they were, can be rather gross. If you want some chicks to hatch, pick one of the hens and start adding all the eggs to her well-lined nesting box until she has a nice clutch of 8-10 eggs and let her tend them until they hatch. Make sure she's accepted the job by removing her from the nest and seeing if she goes back to it. Keep food and drink close to the nest for her and seperate her from the other hens if they seem inclined to squabble over the nest. You can incubate the eggs yourself if you want the hen to continue producing while you wait for the chicks to hatch, but it's quite difficult to maintain the correct conditions, it's much easier if you can spare a hen to do it. Most suburban and practically all rural areas allow chickens, but you'll have to check your local and city ordinances to make sure.
Keep a Milk Cow
If you live in a rural area and have some acreage to work with, a milk cow can be a smart investment. The cost of milk is already high and is on the rise as the worldwide demand continues to increase and as the cost of grain goes up due to competition from the alternative fuel industry. Cows can be kept through the summer being grazed on pasture, and through the winter on a diet of hay, which you can make yourself if you have a couple of spare acres for growing and threshing hay. Cows will produce milk more abundantly if you feed them grain, but really, a family cow doesn't need to produce near as much as a commercial cow since she supplies the needs of a single household. Milking a cow is really not that bad either. There's no need to get up at such a ridiculous hour as 4 am to milk. There's no rule that says cows have to be milked before dawn. You can milk anytime you like as long as you do it twice a day approximately 12 hours apart and you do it around the same time every day. It doesn't take very long once you get the hang of it. Maybe ten minutes per cow. Milk cows have to be impregnated every year to keep them producing, and this can be done by hiring a breeder to come with a bull, or by using artificial insemination. The calf can be taught to pan feed and raised on skimmed milk. When it's a year old you can sell it, have it butchered for veal, or, if it's a heifer calf, keep it for a second milker. Milk cows can continue to produce over ten years if well cared for, and if you only want to keep one cow at a time, raise one of the heifer calves your cow produces when she's around 8 or 9. All in all, if you have the land, a milk cow is well worth considering.