Pantry Meals From a Mom of 8

Hello friends it's Jessica from Three Rivers Homestead and if you're new here I am a homesteading and homeschooling mother of eight in northwest Ohio and in my videos I like to share a lot about how we grow and preserve food as well as cook meals from all of that food we preserved for our family of 10 this week we were able to harvest some of our first produce from the garden we're enjoying snacking on asparagus and some fresh herbs that are available so the nature of our meals are going to start changing here as the garden is able to produce more fresh food for us but you guys know when we're not able to grow fresh food through the winter months we rely very heavily on our pantry and this week my older boys were busy putting together some new shelving for the pantry that's down in our Cellar Adam was able to save this set of shelves from going into the dumpster at work all the shelves needed were some PVC pipes to hold it together and it made the perfect little shelving area for this back corner Nook in our Cellar and so while I was down there helping them put those shelves together I was able to assess everything that we have left in food storage from last year's growing season as you can see there's still quite a bit of canned food that we need to use up to empty jars for this year's preservation season so I made a list of everything that I have down there that I need to be intentionally about using up I also got out my little weather stickers for my planner it's the time of year where I need to start paying attention to the weather to know when we can cook outside in our outdoor kitchen and what needs to be made inside and then I was able to make a meal plan for the week based on all of that information so in my meal videos you guys knew I did a pantry challenge at the beginning of the year and took you through weeks and weeks of meal planning and all of our favorite recipes so it's getting hard to share things that are new and not redundant with you but I was able to put together a breakfast and lunch and dinner that I haven't shared with you yet and so that is what I'm going to cover in this week's video I just needed to unload all of our goodies from The Cellar upstairs in the kitchen so that we can make this week's meals the nature of breakfast here in our house is really changing you guys know through through the winter we rely very heavily on breakfast Meats as well as a lot of baked goods but we are going to be entering the season where we have other things available eggs are in abundance so we're trying to find creative ways to use those up and I thought that the first meal the breakfast that I would share with you this week was one that was going to use up some eggs in a little bit of a different way that I haven't shown you before so what we're going to do for that breakfast is start out by taking some whole oat Groats this is the seed of an oat plant we're running it through our little rolling machine here and we are making some homemade old-fashioned oats now whenever we have oats for breakfast the night before I soaked them in some water with a little bit of lemon juice that acid helps to break down the fates in the oats and then helps them to make a little bit more digestible so that we can absorb the nutrients and the minerals the vitamins that are available in those oats and then after they soak for about 12 hours we just drain out that soaking water and then we have some wonderful freshly rolled oats that we can use for breakfast what we're going to do today is ADD eggs to those oats and that's it just eggs and I typically add one to two eggs per cup of soaked oats and then all we're going to do is blend those two ingredients together and this is going to be the base for our pancakes I've shared many times our typical pancake our wheat based pancake recipe and you know typically that has some kind of leavening agent in it whether it's uh sour dough starter or some kind of baking powder that would make them nice and fluffy what we're making here is a very egg based pancake so it isn't going to rise up and be fluffy it's going to be more like a crepe texture um with just the oats and the eggs so I'm just busy flipping those for the children you know we have eight kids so we have a lot of flipping to do in the meantime on the other burner I had put some frozen blueberries that we preserved last summer that are needing to be used up they're just in a pan with a little bit of water and I let that come to a boil we're going to make a blueberry syrup out of that for these pancakes so they're looking wonderful we're not going to add any sugar to that blueberry syrup it's just the blueberries and this is what our stack of little pancakes was looking like there are our cooked blueberries I do have maple syrup available for some of the children who want to add that on top of the blueberries and this just made a wonderful protein W rich full of vitamins between what's in the freshly rolled soaked oats and the vitamins and the minerals that are in the maple syrup just a great way to start the day for the children so if you're looking for a way to use up eggs during this season but maybe you have children that don't necessarily prefer just to have scrambled eggs soak a little bit of Oats um add those eggs to it whip it together and you have yourself a wonderful little pancake that they will enjoy eating these kids went back for seconds and some of them even thirds they really enjoyed this now we're going to move on to lunch you guys know that through the winter when you saw my meals that I was sharing lunch was typically some kind of soup or stew that's something that's really easy for us to make through the busy homeschool season of the winter when we're really hitting the books but as the weather starts to warm up I don't know about you guys but around here we're kind of over soup um it's not something that we enjoy for lunch so I'm starting to Branch out and we're looking at other ideas and as we have more fresh vegetables and fruits available lunches will definitely change but I thought that today I would show you one of the things that I love to make for the children and that is homemade nachos we're talking from scratch nachos so we're going to go ahead and get started the first thing I need to do is make a nacho sauce now I know I get a lot of criticism from people because we're a dairyfree family people think that I should be buying my children vegan cheese substitutes and I don't prefer to do that and that's simply because first of all they're very expensive but they're really expensive for the very little nutrition that they offer if you look at the ingredients of those vegan cheeses they're basically just oil and starch they don't have any vitamins and minerals in them so when I want to make a cheese sauce I like to use vegetables to do that so what I typically start with is some carrots now if I had canned carrots down in the pantry that is ideal because those canned carrots are already cooked up and softened and they're really easy to blend together to make my sauce but I have used up all of the canned carrots that we had preserved last summer from what we grew in the garden and so I have fresh carrots in the house so we're going to go ahead and cook those down so I'm just starting by cutting them up into little chunks and we're going to get those on the stove but first we need to add our second ingredient and that is some home canned squash so I'm just going to dump that whole pint of home canned squash in with the carrots we're going to add a little bit of extra water and then the liquid the broth from that squash is going to help um cook down those carrots we're going to sprinkle in a little bit of freeze dried onion those will rehydrate in some of the liquid and then I'm just sitting that on the stove to simmer for maybe about 30 minutes just long enough to soften those carrots up so that we can blend them together and that's what that looked like this is why I love canning carrots because it's a whole lot easier when they're already softened it's purely for convenience we're going to sprinkle in nutritional yeast this is what really gives um dairy free cheeses that cheese flavor it's all about the nutritional yeast so we just add some of that with a little bit of salt and pepper to taste and then when we blend that together we have a fake cheese a nacho cheese sauce that isn't just oil and starch it has the nutrition of the carrots and the Squash lots of vitamin A it has that nutritional yeast that adds a little bit of vitamin B12 and you know you do have to lower your expectations it isn't going to taste like a dairy based nacho cheese sauce but it is something with a little bit of that Umami cheese flavor that satisfies you um to dip your corn chip into in replacement of a nacho sauce so I just use my immersion blender and blend it down to get it as smooth as I possibly can now sometimes if I want to make this a little more creamy I will add some soaked cashews to this when I blend it up another thing that works really well is potatoes or sweet potatoes anything like that will give you a really creamy cheese substitute the key to it really is that nutritional yeast to give it that flavor so if you're like me and you find yourself not wanting to waste your money on the vegan cheeses because they really just don't provide any nutrition for your children go Ahad head and experiment with making your own cheese sauces there's lots of recipes out there if you search it on the internet but most of them have a base usually in butternut squash or pumpkin or carrots to give it that um beta carotene that orange color that kind of reminds you of cheese let's go ahead and move on to our next ingredient in our homemade nachos we're going to make a bean dip so I have some home canned black beans here we're just going to drain those and then get those into our pot I don't really have a recipe for things like this I just kind of wing it with what I have available in the house so it's different every time I make it but I'm always starting with those home canned black beans from there since we have freeze-dried onions we're going to go ahead and add some of that in there and then we are going to grab some bacon fat from our grease pot here that is the key to a great bean dip is that bacon flavor from the fat I also added a little bit of the brine from some pickled peppers some salt and pepper PE and then I think later on I didn't show it I did add a little bit of cumin to this um but then just like with the nacho cheese sauce we're going to stir this together we're going to get it on the stove allow those uh freeze-dried onions to be rehydrated by that pepper brine that's in there we just need that Bacon Fat to kind of melt down a little bit and then when we're done we can get this into a bowl and then use that immersion blender again to blend it up into a lovely Bean dis for dipping our chips into so since we can't have dairy in the house because of my son's anaphylactic dairy allergy there is a risk of cross-contamination if we had any dairy in the kitchen it would be unsafe for him let's say I was feeding it to one of the other children and somehow it ended up through the dishes um ending up on Gabriel's plate and in his food he could die from anaphylaxis so that's why none of us have dairy in the house and so when I make something like nachos where we can't have regular cheese or sour cream I really like to have as many dipping options available for the children as possible and I'll show you all of those after we go ahead and make those corn chips so to make our corn chips from scratch we're starting with some masa harina so this is corn flour that is made from corn that has been nixtamalized I probably mispronounce that but bear with me here that is corn that was soaked in lime lime water water and that helps make the corn much more digestible so this is a very different product than just running a whole corn through your Grain Mill this was soaked beforehand so I put about 2 and 1/2 cups of that Masa herina into my Bowl here and then I'm adding water I think in total I ended up adding a little bit under two cups of warm water you do want it to be warm but really it's different how much water I add every time you're just trying to get it to the appropriate texture so you add a little bit of water you wait you let it soak up um you want to be able to form this dough into a ball that doesn't really crack and so it does just take a little bit of practice to learn how much water you need to add to it and um so just stirring it up well giving it a little bit of time set it aside and let that moisture really absorb into the corn flour and then you can test it a little later on and see how that dough forms into a ball for you you don't want it to be so wet that it's sticky and you don't want it to be so dry that it crumbles here is our tortilla press this is a cast iron um tortilla press that I got from Amazon I'll link it in the video description um it sits in storage and we only use this maybe once a month so every time I get it out it needs to have a good cleaning to get any dust off of it so that that dust doesn't end up in the tortillas that we're making so I am definitely not not an expert tortilla maker um I learned everything that I know from watching videos of very talented Mexican chefs do their thing and so if you really want to learn how to make good tortillas you should really check out an authentic Mexican Chef for that but to make sure that our Masa dough doesn't stick to the tortilla press I take a little ziplock bag like this and cut it up the way I showed you and that allows you to press down that dough and have it peel off without sticking into your press and then to make my chips I just cut it into little pie shapes I have some home rendered beef Tallow on the stove in a pot that's bubbling and so we are deep frying these little slices of tortilla in that and that is how we're going to make our corn chips so if you don't have a plastic bag parchment paper works really well for this but you do really need something to prevent that dough from sticking to your tortilla press or you're going to have a huge mess on your hands now I'm going to be honest with you I do not always make my corn chips from scratch we do purchase store bought tortilla chips a lot of the time but I always keep some mosa flour in the house for the times that we run out because we only do our grocery shopping once a month and then if it's a time where I don't have any in the house and I want to make some nachos it gives me an opportunity to work on these skills and make them from scratch and I thought I would share it with you so if you want to learn about how to render your own beef Tallow or lard I will put a video in the description for you that shows how I've done that before but these taste amazing when you've got this homemade chips in the Tallow they have that slight beef hint they're really delicious I just sprinkle a little bit of salt on them while they're still wet from the fat and they're cooling down and here are all of our sides we have our bean dip we have our little nacho cheese sauce and and that's what it looks like I have some home canned salsa from last year's Garden and we're working on using that up that was all homegrown ingredients from our property last year just a little bit of homegrown beef with some taco flavoring some pickled banana peppers and then this is store-bought taco sauce because if you've been around here a while you know that I've had a lot of trouble figuring out how to can a taco sauce that my children like so here is one of the plates of one of my older children and how they preferred to eat their nachos just a really simple lunch I know that in putting this video together it looks like that was a lot of work but it really wasn't all of the side dishes came together in just maybe 20 minutes and then I just sat there chatting with the children at the counter while I was rolling out my tortillas and deep frying them so in all I had maybe a little bit over an hour invested in making this meal for my children and it was a nice break from the tip typical soups and sandwiches and things that we have for lunch now let's move on to a dinner so I have an oxtail that was in the freezer and I have one bag here the last bag of garden tomatoes from 2023 and I don't know how this slipped by me I just haven't turned it into anything else so I decided today was the day I was going to use up both of these items that have been in the freezer being neglected so the first thing I need to do is get both of these things in a baking dish we're going to go ahead and defrost them in the oven I did not plan ahead well I got busy the night before with children's activities and forgot to thaw these items so just a little bit of time in the oven was able to thaw these out and then once those Tomatoes were soft I could pour them into my crock pot here I'm going to go ahead and blend those Tomatoes up with my immersion blender and that is going to be the base for our oxtail soup and I know what you guys are thinking some of you have probably never had an ox tail before and the thought is just disgusting to you but let me tell you the meat that's around the tail is so tender it just Falls right off the bone and then because that tail is full of these bones when you slowly simmer this in the crock pot all day it makes the most delicious and Rich broth so this is a a part of the animal that's often wasted but it makes an amazing soup do not waste this part of your cow and so we're going to sprinkle in a a little more we've been using a lot of these freeze-dried onions I'm going to add two cubes of garlic scape puree that we preserved last year this is the flowering part of the garlic plant that we turn into a little garlic balm and then of course for our soup we're going to add some carrots since that's what we have fresh in the house at this point when I'm making a soup like this I kind of wing it every time and just add whatever um vegetables we have fresh available or what we have preserved that needs to be used up so I added some carrots and then I have a lot of freeze-dried kale from last year's Garden still sitting in jars so I'm going to sprinkle some of that into our soup and then I also have some freeze-dried celery this was both the ribs of the celery and some of the greens that'll give some great flavor to our soup as well and then because we added all of those freeze-dried items it's going to absorb a lot of water and so we need to add a little bit of extra water to um account for that then that extra water will turn into lovely broth from our oxtail I'm just going to stir that around and then I'm sitting there thinking about what else would be a good addition to this soup of course we need to add our salt and pepper and then any other herbs that you would like to have and that's it um that's basically the base of this we're going to get this in the crock pot I'm going to have it on low for the majority of of the day and then you'll see that in a little bit um we are going to add some potato because this is a really busy evening for us we had um dance and karate on that night for the children so I wanted to get this going in the crock poot early in the day and then a little closer to the point we had to leave for our activities I chopped up those potatoes and added them in and then by the time we got home that night the potatoes were cooked but they weren't turned to complete mush had I added them earlier in the day they would have been so softened they would have been like mashed potatoes in our soup so we got home that night a little bit after 6 from our activities and I still need to do one more thing before I can serve this soup I'm going to scoop out those pieces of tail and as I mentioned the meat just sort of falls off the bone in fact a lot of the meat had already fallen off and was in the crock poot already but I'm just taking what was remaining I had to scoop out the bones and we're going to shred the meat off of the rest of the bones and then we can return that meat back to the soup so as I mentioned at the beginning of the video we are still working through a lot of things that are in the pantry and the freezer and this oxtail was one of those items um we had processed two heers the year before and so I had two tails I had used one during the pantry Challenge and so I had this one left we still have a little bit of other organ meat to use up um but we are definitely getting low on beef that isn't canned and we next week will be taking our steer in to be processed so I am really excited about that to have some cuts of meat that we have been missing back in the freezer and so this is what our soup looked like served it with a little bit of bread and the children loved it and even knowing that it's the tail the little ones still ate it and loved it because around here what's the difference between meat that comes from a tail and meat that comes from a leg or rib or whatever we're used to eating it's all the same it all tastes amazing we're not going to let those cuts go to waste so spring is in full bloom around here the apple trees blossomed this is our Wild Plum Tree that's Blossom it has a Beautiful Morning Dove sitting on a nest in there I'm just enjoying how everything around me is coming to life I was able to get into the garden and enjoy the beautiful weather this week I got two beds of cabbage planted and covered up with some row cover I've had terrible um results growing brasas over the last couple years the Cabbage moths have definitely won the war over the last couple of years and so this year I am determined to win it and I think that by covering with some of this row cover um hopefully the Cabbage Ms won't be able to get to my plants so other than that my Spring Garden is basically planted at this point we've done potatoes and onions we did another bed of a asparagus some strawberries we've got broccoli and cabbage planted I've done my first round of lettuce we did carrots spinach radishes and lots of herbs and then at this point I'm just waiting for our last frost date which is typically Mother's Day weekend and then we can start planting out all of the other beautiful plant starts that we have growing in the kitchen we have our tomatoes and peppers to do lots of squash and other fun things I'm very excited as the weather changes and the garden begins to become productive to share with you some of the meals now that we make using the fresh things that are coming out of a garden I heavily Focus typically on using up the things that we've preserved but I haven't done a lot of meal sharing during the growing season using fresh ingredients you'll see a lot of that content coming up as well as the usual food preservation content all throughout the summer and I'm really excited that we have a new growing season started so that I'm able to do that again with you this year and I'm hoping here in a coming video to kind of give you some ideas on how my food preservation goals have changed this year because they definitely have changed and I'm going to be sharing my goals and some ideas and we can sit down and brainstorm together on how to plan for a really successful PR food preservation year until then I hope you guys have a wonderful week we will be back next week with another video and I pray that you are blessed friends bye

Channel: Three Rivers Homestead

Views: 62,093

Keywords: homesteading, homestead, homeschooling, homeschool, unschooling, unschool, large family, mom life, cook with me, pantry Meals, pantry challenge, homemaker, homemaking, frugal, pantry, food preservation, canning

Id: X6VaCeaoWak

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2024