One Year's Worth of Food Pantry Tour - 3 Months In | How Much Have We Used?

hey everyone my name is Chelsea welcome to Little Mountain Ranch and welcome to my pantry I'm really happy to have you here with me today Dan and I were just about to load all of the groceries that we bought at Costco the other day into our pantry but we decided we wanted to go through the pantry and get a really good idea of how much food we have used since we did our last stock up on our pantry about three months ago we shared a pantry tour with you towards the end of October was like the beginning of November 5th yeah and that was right at the end of our pantry being fully stocked from the harvest season I am a seasonal counter I can usually from around I don't know June all the way until around the end of October and then I don't can again until the following season so all the food that you see in this Pantry here this is our canning Pantry this is what we hope will last us a full 12 months until we're able to have this stocked up again with all of our new canned goods from the following year like I mentioned in our pantry tour video generally we do a big bulk order Costco shop stock up about every six months but we decided due to Rising food prices that was a good idea for us to do one now so we actually just went to Costco and I did share that on a video which I'll link for you down in the show notes if you're interested in seeing in detail what it is we bought what we needed to stock up on in this Pantry but we haven't filled the pantry up with all of those store-bought goods yet so we thought it might be interesting to share with you where we're at with our pantry right now and how much food we actually consumed in the three months since we filmed our last video a couple of things to keep in mind we do grow a lot of our own food so most of the food that you see in this pantry is food that we grew ourselves and then preserved ourselves over the summer the other thing is that we have a larger than average sized family so the amount of food that you're going to see here might not accurately reflect what a year supply of food might be for your family but it is for us when we did our Tour on November 5th we had a thousand and five jars of canned goods and now we are down to 659 jars which means that we've used about a third of our canning which is just about perfect because it is a fruit fly because we don't actually used a lot use a lot of canned food during the summer months we eat fresh during the summer months so we really only need the um enough canned food to last us through the fall and the winter and then the early spring one of the things that I noticed when Dan and I were going through and we were taking stock of where we're at with our food is that there are some things that I can't more of than we needed and some things that I can't less of I'm pretty happy overall with how things turned out I've been counting for a long time so I've kind of dialed it in but there are some things that I think we could do better on this coming up canning season so I just wanted to share that with you and then we'll do the same thing when we go over into the store-bought Pantry that's behind us here one of the things that we noticed when we were going through all of our our food here and just kind of looking at what we use the most of is that the convenience Foods were definitely top of the list of things that we enjoyed the most this year this is the first year or last year I guess 2022 was the first year that I did things like canned do pie fillings meals that we can just open up the jar and dump it into a pot and heat it up we're really really convenient and we loved it yesterday for lunch we had this Curry this is green tomato Curry I added some chickpeas to it and a can of or a couple of cans of coconut milk and it was really good the kids aren't crazy about the green tomatoes because they find them a little bit sour I personally think it's delicious [Laughter] there are a couple of fruit flies flying around from some onions that I had that were turning hanging on the wall in that pantry and Dan just thought he had one in his beard so he was doing these really weird facial expressions and it was distracting me behind the camera anyways the kids weren't crazy about the green tomatoes because they found them really sour I really liked them but I have some ideas for making a prepared Curry um this coming up Summer that doesn't use green tomatoes so we'll see how that goes when we get there um the long and short of it though is that we really do want to can some more prepared foods prepared meals that we can just open up for those busy days and be able to dump them in and maybe make a pot of rice or something like that to go with them so that was something that was new for us that I hadn't done before that was definitely a big success we still have quite a few cans of canned turkey and canned chicken breasts left this is one of our favorite ways to preserve chicken actually I just love it it's very convenient to just open up a jar and use it for whatever I make a really good chicken melt with these I throw it into soups all kinds of stuff and it's fantastic and this year I did almost all of our chickens I actually parted them all out and canned all the chicken breasts rather than freezing them and that worked out really well for us so that's something I'll do again next year rather than freezing whole chickens one thing I definitely will not be canning again is green tomato chutney I talked about this in my last video and I think when I made it to what is that I um you can see how large the chunks are in there I definitely made them way too chunky but for the most part everything that I canned with green tomatoes we weren't crazy about so I'm not going to be using green tomatoes again for canning I know lots of people love them and making salsa verde with green tomatoes a lot of people really enjoy but my kids especially just don't like the sourness of those so that's not and I mean I have I don't even know how many jars how many jars do I have here 5 10 15 probably close to 20 jars of this left so definitely don't need to count anymore of that um what else oh the other thing that we noticed is that we still have lots and lots of pickles left so this whole area here for the most part is pickled food so like relishes um pickled jalapenos over here red pepper jellies over here and over on this side we have actual pickles so pickled carrots pickled asparagus beets we have standard sandwich pickles down here and one of our favorites are mixed pickles and this one is onions cauliflower and cucumbers I did a really nice one which we've eaten all of and I want to make way more next year which had all kinds of different vegetables in it red peppers and what else do you remember what it had that wasn't just kind of the standard ones I usually make it had red peppers carrots what else it was really really good though it was so good I think it's called gardenia or something like that is the official name for it but anyway that was delicious so we're gonna make more of those but we actually haven't chewed through as many of these pickles as we normally do and I didn't make dill pickles this year because my whole family much prefers the sweet pickles over dill pickles so um I think we probably did enough of these we'll see where we're at at the end of the spring but I don't think we need to do too many more we definitely have to can way more applesauce as you can see here this is all we have left of applesauce I knew that I didn't can quite as many as I should have because I didn't get any really good deals on bulk apples this year these were all apples that we grew from our own little Orchard but our Orchard is only four years old so it's not producing as much as it will in upcoming years one of the other things that we canned a lot of were pickled beets and these actually are in a light syrup so there's a bit of sugar in them they're really really good and we have definitely more than enough to last us the year I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't end up needing two can um too many of these for next year just because we have so many jars of them we also have some coleslaw here so we have the white coleslaw and then the red or purple coleslaw up here and we have quite a bit left but I did Count a ton of it so we've we've used two full rows which is 12 jars of this so I think I actually canned enough of that to last us um what else okay so we have our tomato products up at the top I always can a ridiculous amount of tomato sauces stewed tomatoes pizza sauce and things like that but we have almost run out of pizza sauce already one of the reasons for that is because canning pizza sauce takes a long time you really have to cook it down quite a bit just to get it really thick so I just didn't do that much because I didn't have that much time but definitely need to do more of that one of the things I did not can enough of for the same reason that I didn't count enough pizza sauce is salsa because of the amount of chopping involved with salsa I just tend to can less fewer jars of salsa than I do of just canned tomatoes but I still have quite a few jars left and I think it will be enough we actually use quite a quite a bit of salsa I think it will be enough to get us through and I still have some jars of salsa verde left that I did these are actually from last year or the year before last so 2021 so I think we'll have enough to get us through one thing that I did go overboard on and I'm not entirely sure how or why this happened is jams and syrup so this entire shelf here are all different kinds of jams so we have blueberry and syrups as well like pancake and yogurt syrups but we have raspberry strawberry strawberry rhubarb Peach apricot all kinds here and we definitely have way more than we're probably going to use if I end up having some extra jars of jam to carry over until the following the winter of 2023 2024 that's okay because Jam tends to last quite well in jars um and that just means I'm not going to have to can as much this coming up here as far as jams go and that's fine oh actually and also down here is also this one is plum um apricot and then I also made some stewed rhubarb for ice cream topping it's really really good so yes we have more than enough jams and syrups that is for sure one thing that we definitely could use more of that we could always use more of every year are canned peaches and the peach pie filling that I made this is these are delicious and it just makes such an easy snack to open up a couple jars of peaches and have it with a little bit of whipping cream really delicious that's one of Dan's favorite little snacks that he has but the challenge for us is that we can't grow peaches where we are and peaches tend to be a more expensive fruit so because of the fact that we have to buy our peaches we can't buy them locally we have to get them shipped in and all of that I basically just can as many as we can afford to can and if there's a good deal then I'll buy them in bulk but this is all we have left are these two rows to last us so that's obviously not going to last us all the way the other thing that we used a ton of are the canned potatoes to be fair I didn't can that many potatoes I was just planning on canning them as they needed to be canned out of The Root Cellar because that's where I store all my potatoes that will be something that I might can over the winter as the potatoes start softening down in The Root Cellar I might bring those up and throw them into jars but having canned potatoes is such an awesome convenience food I have used these for roasted potatoes we tried them as mashed potatoes which I wasn't a huge fan of but the kids loved what else did we use them for soup stews all that kind of stuff super convenient one of the things that I do if I'm having a really busy day is I'll come down and I'll grab a couple of jars of canned potatoes some canned beans a whole bunch of broth and then I'll grab some canned chicken and throw all that together with some frozen veggies as well and make a really quick soup and that's I love the whole convenience thing for busy days it's so nice we have quite a bit of the canned stew left what did you think of the cans do I remember you said it was just too acidic oh okay so that's that's a flaw in my recipe though not not a flaw yeah that wouldn't be a flaw in the actual can stew itself I'll just have to find a better recipe the texture of the meat and the potatoes the vegetables that were in it were great but yeah a little bit too acidic so I just need to find a better recipe but that'll be something we'll can for sure and then we have canned beans definitely enough of those I keep a pretty good stalk of dried beans so as I run out of these if I want to I can just can some more of them but I definitely have enough to make it till spring anyway this is all of my canned beef turkey and chicken broth we go through a ton of this stuff we have gone through how many jars would you say at least 50. jars of this because this was layered too high right this this is one thing that we want to try to improve upon a little bit is to actually keep track of how much of each thing we have at the beginning of the year and then how many we used of each individual item that's not something we did a great job of this year but we have a pretty good idea and it does help to make YouTube videos because we can go back and reference our own videos which is great but we could never have too much broth so this will likely I think this will probably get us through until May or so but probably not through the summer we have a few jars left of the famous ugly chicken you guys were so great at giving us tons of suggestions of what to do with this so just for those of you that missed my pantry tour video These are thighs and legs that I pressure can last year yes last year but no one in our family really enjoyed kind of the stringy texture of canned dark meat the chicken breast is absolutely fine but the dark meat wasn't so great but we did try many any of the recipes that you guys suggested on the pantry tour video and some of them we enjoyed so the white bean chili we liked one of the things that I did find is if you take it out and cut it so it's in kind of smaller pieces before heating it up and then just throwing it in the recipe towards the end of the recipe rather than cooking it because it does just completely disintegrate and kind of go into long stringy pieces if you do that did actually help quite a bit with that so we only have how many jars so we only have nine jars of that left and then down at the bottom here we have all of our dried Goods the dried goods are something that we definitely keep a solid 12 months of and we aren't going to have to replenish these until next October for things that I use periodically I keep underneath here so all my bulk beans and rice and things like that for things that we are constantly refilling our containers up in our kitchen from I keep those things over here so I have whole wheat flour bread flour all-purpose flour brown sugar and white sugar there should also be a bit of white rice here which I don't currently have but and that way it's really easy we're not dragging the bins in and out from underneath here all the time and we can just twist these Lids off and fill up our containers for the kitchen really easily my onions did not store super great in here and this is all I have left from all of the onions that we stored from the garden so I definitely need to do way more onions now that I have a freeze dryer my plan is actually to freeze dry a ton of onions in the fall and that way I don't have to worry about storing them this way um one of the things that we didn't have last time we did a tour in here was all of our bulk flowers so this is all white flower here this whole entire stack and we ordered this in bulk from True Grain in British Columbia it is organic BC grown wheat and I love being able to support this company because they're absolutely fantastic because this is such an ideal environment for storing Dry Goods it's really dry in this room and it stays really cold we're able to store flour in here for up to a year without any issues we did receive a couple questions that I did want to address in this video just because I'm sure they're going to come up again and that is around rodents whether we deal with rodents in our pantry we definitely have the occasional fruit fly or whether we have bugs in things like our flour and our grains and fortunately because of the kind of climate we live in where it gets really cold in the winter time and also where it's really dry we don't have any issues with bugs because we live in such a dry climate and because we get really cold in the winter time it tends to kill off any bugs that might be an issue so we I've never had say weevils or anything like that in any of my flower as far as mice go we do occasionally get a mouse through our pantry but we have lots of traps set up everywhere so we put traps up in the corners up over there we have trout traps over there and we might catch maybe one or two mice over the winter time but it's not such a huge issue and I think we've only ever lost maybe two things like maybe a bag of chips or something like that to mice so it's really not a huge issue here thank goodness if it were an issue then obviously we would have things like the bags of chips that you can see up here in sealed containers so the mice couldn't get to them as far as the amount of food that we've used in this Pantry I'm not going to go through every single thing that we have in here if you want the comprehensive tour of this Pantry with all details on everything you can go check out the pantry tour but I will just reference a couple of things ketchup we definitely use the amount of ketchup that we thought we would use we've used six of these large tubs of ketchup which actually for me that's too much ketchup so I think I'm gonna have to cut down on the amount of ketchup that we're consuming that is a lot of ketchup to eat in three months we used three jugs of mayonnaise um I don't do you remember how many there were of these originally I don't think I think we only used probably three or four though not that many of these little ones we use olive oil in a lot of things so we've used five of these large things of olive oil tomato paste we've only used one of all of the tomato paste we have here so we don't need to stock this up this will be a year supply for us there are six of these big ones there we haven't been going through as much peanut butter as we usually do because I have been baking a ton over the last couple of months I've been doing a ton of recipe testing for a cookbook that I'm working on and so we've had way more baked snacky things and oftentimes my kids will eat apples with peanut butter it's one of their favorite snacks so we could easily go through a jar of peanut butter like this a week and the other thing is is during the summer we tend to eat peanut butter and jam sandwiches more at lunch time than we do during the winter time because in the winter I make lots of soups and stews and things like that and we'll have leftovers for the following lunch so we just haven't been chewing through as much peanut butter I think we've only used around four jars of peanut butter so not a ton we used four of the Nutella this was something I bought As a treat and I honestly thought it would all be gone within a month but we still have one left we've used two of our coconut oils here so we're not going to have to replenish that we definitely have enough um coconut oil what else did I want to mention oh one more thing over here we've used six Maple syrups over the last three months and we have waffles and pancakes every week we also use this to flavor like granola homemade granola and on plain yogurt so we use quite a bit of maple syrup and when we went to Costco it was on sale for almost six dollars cheaper than it normally is so we ended up buying 12 more and that will do us for the rest of the year so that feels good and then with honey we used six of these big jugs of honey so we ended up buying six more to stock it back up again is there anything else and we used one bag of organic cane sugar pasta is one of those things that we use quite a bit of so a lot of these are open and probably about half full so this one this one and this one are all about half full we buy our pasta from the Wholesale Club here in British Columbia and I think they're all the way across Canada I think it's also called The Real Canadian Superstore in other places but that's where we get our pasta and next time we go we'll have to get a few more boxes like I said I've been doing a lot of baking so we have gone through a lot of the chocolate chips that we had we had I think six bags of chocolate chips and we're down to one so we've used a lot of those a lot of the Raisins We had three bags of raisins we're down to one not as many of the Craisins actually which is kind of surprising we must have bought some because I know we've used more Craisins than this than what it looks like we've used here because I think this is what we started out with uh the we used all of the granola bars and the snack foods that we had up in this area we've used two boxes of our Earl Gray tea lots of the nuts we've used and cocoa powder we've also used quite a bit of the cocoa powder nuts yeah lots of this stuff but we do have this all this will this will all be stocked up again once we move in all the groceries that we got from Costco I think that about does it for the pantry so let's head out to The Root Cellar and I'll show you what we have going on down there I hope the Sparkles show up on the camera because it's so sparkly and beautiful out here hey it's beautiful let's go winter wonderland yeah it's just beautiful so I haven't actually been down to The Root Cellar in a week so I am not sure a little Kitty's been down here though little kitty tracks yeah those headlamps are awesome the headlamp Dan's using is one of the ones that we got from Costco and they're great in September when we did our Harvest I think it was September we had twice as many potatoes as this so generally our potatoes will store really well in here until around march-ish and then they'll really start sprouting so I think we actually did pretty good we'll have enough potatoes to get us through the year and then anything that does start to go soft like I mentioned down in the pantry will can up but they are nice and firm and not sprouting at all they look fantastic the carrots on the other hand our carrots are still looking okay they're just starting to sprout a little bit so I likely will do something with these I'll either can them or freeze them we also have these two bins of carrots here and a little bit left over there this is something that I have not had happen before this has been such a strange year as far as my root cellar goes but I have an entire bin of rutabagas here that are completely rotten oh no these are okay we have two bins of rutabagas that are ruined so I just want to see the beads over here I'm really hoping they're okay these look okay it looks to me like it's mostly just the turnips and the rutabagas that went bad because those are white beets and I actually think this one let's just look yeah that's just drips down on it but the actual beets are fine you know what let's bring this box of beets up to the house and I'll just get those processed because that's the last of the beads I know for some people a root cellar like this is a little bit creepy but I actually find it really calming and I just said that to Dan and he said it's because it's very still and very quiet but I am going to take the beets there's a couple of Beats one box all together beets so I'm going to bring those up to the house and get those processed right away the rutabagas and the turnips are actually going to go down to the pigs not these really rotten ones they'll go into the compost but the ones that are just starting to turn and then I'll also have to get some of those carrots processed as well this is why it's very important to always check your food storage because things can turn really quickly I was down here a week ago didn't notice any issues and now we have rotting vegetables so but really happy with the potatoes they're fantastic they look great this is the perfect climate for potatoes and carrots all right everyone that is it for today's video I hope that you enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing you next time bye

Channel: Little Mountain Ranch

Views: 49,133

Keywords: littlemountainranch, canadian youtube channel, homesteading, farm vlogs, large family, cooking, northern living, farm life, pantry tour, huge pantry tour, large family pantry tour

Id: IgJ9VYxo080

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023