Our Last Week of the Pantry Challenge | What We Ate

we have not gone grocery shopping in 3 months this is the final week of the pantry Challenge and I want to show you guys what meals we are making this last week along with some of the takeaways that I've had from the pantry Challenge and some of the first things that we ran out of which actually really surprised me we are making a sausage and potato kiche and this is actually going to be for dinner not for breakfast out of our pantry I grabbed po potatoes and freeze-dried peppers and mushrooms and then I had some onions in Cold Storage that I grabbed as well we were Loosely following a recipe for this but of course the recipe didn't call for freeze dried anything so we wanted to make sure that the vegetables had plenty of time to rehydrate so I boiled some water I always turn it off before I put the veggies in and then put them in there and I just let them sit while I went ahead and did some of the other things like chopping up the onions and chopping up the potatoes over the last 10 years or so we have been working on going to the grocery store less and less and has been a continual process sort of an evolution where we need less of one certain food group or certain items and so coming into the pantry challenge I was feeling pretty good about it just because we already have a couple of food groups knocked out like I know I got the vegetables covered and we got all of the meat covered like those are two things we are 100% self-sufficient on meaning we do not buy those things at the grocery store anymore and we are able to produce them on our Homestead that being said there are several things that we do not have 100% covered and we don't grow at all so some of those things are dairy products for one I am lactose intolerant and some of my kids show signs of also being lactose intolerant so we do not have a dairy animal on our Homestead at this point it doesn't make sense for us just because we do not consume a ton of dairy and the dairy that we do consume a good portion of it is cheese which is pretty timeconsuming to make so that is one thing that I have not buckled down and try to figure out how to do myself yet just because I feel like the need that we have for that is quite a bit smaller compared to other things that I want to tackle first like fruits fruits are the next big food group that I would really love to tackle just because we eat so much of it they are very expensive at the store it's very difficult to find organic options for fruits and things that are are grown in a way that is similar to what the way I grow my vegetables in my garden I'm striving to get them to be very nutritionally dense and just get my soil to the point where the vegetables have a lot of nutrition just because the soil is very healthy that is the end goal so we're working on that for the fruit and at this point we still buy grains and we do buy some oils as well and then a few other things that we just can't grow here I kind of went off on a little tangent there but the reason I'm telling you all that is because eventually we did start to run out of things and one of the first things that we ran out of was yogurt my kids really like yogurt and I had bought uh what I thought was a good amount of yogurt but that was the first thing to go we also ran out of cocoa powder we ran out of mozzarella cheese cheddar cheese uh another thing that kind of surprised me was we ran out of popcorn that's a a go-to snack especially during the pentry challenge that we have uh we were really close to running out of butter at this point I ran out of allpurpose flour and we also ran out of mustard for the most part we did not really run out of anything until about 3 weeks until the end of the challenge and and that's when we started to run out of certain food items so that's really when it started to become a challenge so you'll see throughout this that I am substituting quite a bit of things for uh what we would normally have I will say also that outside of the pantry Challenge on a regular basis we do eat quite a bit differently than your average American family just because we are already growing a fair amount of our own food and with being lactose intolerant I do not have just regular milk to put into things so I've come up with my own substitutions for example in this we needed milk for the egg mixture and so I use sour cream that I mix with water and that is just easier on my stomach so I mix that up and I use that as a milk substitute I was very very very Loosely following a recipe for this and I ran out of the egg mixture so I actually put one of the kishes in the oven because my kids were getting ready to go to their youth night for church and so I needed to make sure we at least had one of these done before they left so I stuck one of them in and then I mixed up some more of egg mixture and I also felt like some of the other kishes needed more vegetables so I ended up rehydrating some dried tomatoes that I had that I really needed to use because they are several years old the recipe called for cheddar cheese which we were out of so I added some freeze-dried onion powder and the freeze-dried garlic scape powder and I was actually really surprised at how much flavor that added and we didn't even really need the cheese because it added so much flavor to it making our own homemade spices has become one of my favorite ways to use our freeze dryer it just preserves so much of the flavor in those herbs in a way that no other preservation method can do I actually ended up making a lot more kiche than I had planned on I was just kind of winging a lot of it and it ended up making four pans worth I thought I would be able to freeze some of it but my family surprised me and they ate every single one of those pans by the next afternoon noon I am making some bread and as I mentioned we ran out of all-purpose flour and we are also out of bread flour so I needed to make a whole wheat loaf but I wanted to make it a little bit lighter so I have these little sifting pans where you can um sift a percentage of the brand out of the wheat and then you get a lighter loaf without compromising the nutrition found in the germ we went through this process many times so I'm showing you a different day when we were making some hamburger buns here but you can kind of see what's going on with the sifters a little bit better it's kind of amazing how much brand is actually in there so I had a jar where I was collecting that because I'm going to reuse that in my granola I'll just mix it in with the oats so that we still eat that I have to say that sifting the flow it did take a little while it was kind of tedious but the end result was good because I was making a spelt flour Loaf and if you're just making it 100% spelt flour it is pretty heavy stuff so being able to take out some of that brand did make it a little bit lighter in the end back in the fall we had one of our best sweet potato harvests ever our sweet potatoes were extra extra extra large so I finally pulled out one of our very large sweet potatoes this was the biggest of all I think it was almost 9 lb and as it has set over the winter it actually kind of shrunk a little bit it loses a little bit of the water when sweet potatoes are big like this they are very hard to peel as you can see it took me a while to peel this potato and I didn't even get it all and then the other difficulty is a kitchen knife cannot fit through a sweet potato that is that large around I need an extra large knife but I managed it I got it done it wasn't the safest thing but I got through it and sweet potatoes are just a little bit more difficult to cut anyway so it was kind of a chore but we got it done the larger sweet potatoes like this have a little bit more starch in them they are not quite as sweet as some of the smaller ones so this was a really good place to make sweet potato fries and at this point it was actually quite a bit easier to cut the sweet potato fries because I had these nice big slabs of sweet potato to cut through we had a very very unexpected thing happened from going through the pantry Challenge and that was one of my children Dax he discovered that he has a real love of filming and creating meals and dishes to eat and so he started his own YouTube channel and he made a couple of videos and then he decided he really likes creating YouTube shorts that is his favorite and he films it all himself he edits it himself and he makes everything himself so it has been really cool to see him find an interest and be able to pursue that I definitely did not see that coming but it is a very exciting result of doing the pantry challenge so nowadays when I am making food I am over on one side of the counter and he is usually making something else on the other side of the counter so luckily we have enough counter space that we can both kind of do our thing at the same time and for this night of dinner we decided to do uh cornmeal crust Ed chicken tenders the sweet potato fries and I just decided to add a frozen veggie with this just to use them up that is something that I have quite a bit of still is those frozen vegetables the pantry challenge is hosted by my friend Jessica over at Three Rivers Homestead with the Three Rivers challenge you don't necessarily have to go entirely without grocery shopping you're able to set up your own rules and just do whatever makes it a challenge for you one of the rules that we set up for ourselves is that we would be allowed to buy fruit if we needed it we did have some fruit in our pantry and we had some preserved I had apples and then we had Frozen cherries and frozen blueberries and then we had a whole bunch of different freeze-dried fruits so my goal was to go through all of those things before I gave myself permission to go to the store to get them them so as we went throughout the challenge we were about 2 and 1/2 months in and we still hadn't gone through everything so I decided just to do like the last final little push without going to the store to buy fruit after all even though I told myself we could we didn't need to go and get that we had a few reasons why we wanted to do the pantry Challenge and push ourselves to go 3 months without grocery shopping to to be honest I was not going into this as a moneys saving thing and I knew that that could be a benefit of it but that was not my main driver and motivation our main motivation was to learn and to just kind of see where we stood as far as if we were to have to go without shopping for 3 months could we actually do that we are driving to be more prepared for whatever happens and I'm not just talking about like the end of the world that's not really what I'm talking about I'm more thinking of more realistic situations like what if Cam were to lose his job would we be able to survive for 3 months without going shopping for food so that we could save money another big piece of self-sufficiency for us and wanting to be able to go without the grocer grocery store is because I went through so many Health struggles and so many of them were related to what I was eating that I just have in my head that a lot of the things coming out of the grocery store are not good for me and are not good for our family so the more I can push away from that and be able to grow more of our own food the better that we all feel and already I have seen a hug huge difference in my health because we are able to grow more food and because I am striving to grow it in such a way that it is more nutritionally dense than what you can get out of the grocery store realistically I know that we are not going to be able to grow 100% of what we eat so for everything else we are trying to purchase food from local farmers where possible and also other Growers who use practices that build soil Health which in turn results in healthy crops another big takeaway from the pantry challenge was seeing how much we have been able to shift away from eating solely preserved vegetables to eating a substantial amount from coal storage and fresh from the garden all winter so we are in zone 6B which means on average we are reaching -5° fah as the lowest temperature of the winter but we have been able to keep some cold hearty vegetables alive under the protection of tunnels and row cover more time Dad one of the things I noticed throughout the pantry challenge was that we didn't consume nearly as much preserved food as we did last year so coming into this next Garden season I will probably make some adjustments I may not need to grow as much and we definitely don't need to preserve as much to make it through the winter so taking some of that off our plate will definitely lighten our load which is a huge blessing because we can focus our time on other projects that need to be finished for dinner tonight we're making a fresh salad and then we're going to make some spaghetti noodles add on uh the veggie loaded marinara sauce that I pulled out from the freezer in the morning we're going to add some pork and some beef to that and we're going to make some garlic bread to go with it so overall the pantry challenge was definitely one of the best things that we have done in a long time we learned so much and we are definitely going to do it again next [Music] year [Music] yeah [Music] [Music] cool good M he liked it like round two rigs

Channel: The Seasonal Homestead

Views: 205,207

Keywords: Pantry Challenge

Id: VVp1PHGwRmk

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024