January pantry challenge - a week of meals without the grocery store! GroundedHavenHomestead

Hi everyone, welcome back to Grounded Haven Homestead. This month I have been challenging myself to cook with as many of the items from our pantry and freezer as possible. We spent a good part of last year growing and preserving a bunch of our food and now it's the time to just enjoy all of that hard work and to be able to cook with our own ingredients. And both our pantry and our freezer are pretty well stocked now and we have plenty of things to choose from. And we also have a bunch of bulk foods that we've been stocking up on from Azure Standard as well. So in this video, I'm going to take you along and show you how I'm going to be prepping some of the ingredients from our pantry and some meals that we're having. And I'm going to try and use as much of our own homegrown or home preserved stuff as possible and not have to go to the store for any of it. So first I'll show you what I picked out from pantry to eat this week. Here's a look at what I pulled out so we can see what we're working with. I grabbed a few things from the freezers. So I have a container of basil pesto here. And then I have some frozen cherry tomatoes. I have two bags of frozen green beans. We've got a whole mix of colors in there. Then a couple of canned items. I have a jar of our green tomato relish. This one was already open so it was in the fridge. And then I have a jar of dill pickles. These are from 2020 so they really need to be used up. Then I have some dry goods. I have pinto beans and black beans, both of which are dry. And I'm going to be cooking these up in the Instant Pot. I also have three onions. These are not homegrown onions. I buy these in the really huge bags at Costco but I find that they go soft a little bit more quickly. So they need to be used up a little bit more quickly than homegrown onions. These sweet potatoes are homegrown and I have a few of those. And we're gonna prep all of these up and then as I do that I'll kind of explain what kind of meals we're going to be making out of all of these ingredients. The ingredients that I'm showing you right here are the ones that I'm going to be building my meals around. It's definitely not everything I'm going to use because I'm going to have to pick other stuff from my pantry as I'm cooking throughout the week. But I do want to prep a lot of these ingredients so that my week is a lot easier and it makes our meals throughout the week come together a lot quicker. And the goal for this week is to not buy anything from the store and just to create all of our meals based on what we already have in our pantry. Either from stuff that we've grown and preserved throughout the season or stuff that we just have in our bulk goods like the beans that I have here and also flour, rice, just the usual stuff that we always have around in bulk. So I'm going to get started prepping these ingredients so that I have a good base of ingredients for the week and then afterwards I'll show you how I put these ingredients to use in some actual meals. The first thing I'm going to do is start off cooking some of my dried beans because those are going to take a while. I'm cooking them in my instant pot which is my new favorite way to cook dry beans because I don't need to soak them ahead of time and it goes super fast. So I'm starting off with two cups of dried pinto beans and I also put in some pork broth and some diced ham both of which I already had in my freezer. I'm also adding in some diced white onion and I thought I'd added some of our canned cowboy candy as well just to give it a little bit more of a kick and some sweetness. I'm making kind of like southern style pinto beans here which is why I added the ham and the pork because usually you'll have something like a ham hock or something like that in there but this is what I have so it's what I'm using. I'm going to season with salt and pepper. Some people don't like cooking their dry beans with salt because they think that it's going to prevent them from getting soft but I always do and then I also added in some cumin and some minced fresh garlic. And then I have one of these arroz con pollo peppers that I grew two years ago. We had two plants that produced so many peppers and you only need one to put in a pot of beans and it will flavor the entire pot. I don't really know how to explain the flavor but it's not like a spicy pepper it's more just like a flavorful seasoning pepper and I have a bunch of these still in the freezer from two years ago so I'm gonna pop one of those in there and here's what everything looks like when it's dried and then I'm going to cook this in the instant pot for 25 minutes. It probably could have gone closer to like 28 or 30 minutes that's just a little note for you or for me next time. But around 30 minutes to cook these dry beans is amazing because I used to spend all day cooking my beans in a slow cooker and this method is just so much faster and it's awesome. While that's going in the instant pot I'm going to get started on some bread dough. I am making hamburger buns because we're going to have burgers this week using some deer meat that our neighbors shared with us from a deer that was hunted on their property and the recipe I'm using is a potato hamburger bun. I'll leave a link for the recipe that I use down below. In addition to flour, milk, butter, and yeast this recipe also uses either freshly mashed potato or what I'm using here is dehydrated potato flakes and the potato in the recipe just gives the buns a really nice fluffy texture but it's also dense at the same time. It's really good for burgers because it kind of is able to soak up some of those juices and that way it doesn't get completely soggy and we really like potato buns. So I'm just going to combine all of the ingredients into my stand mixing bowl and then I'm going to let the mixer do most of the work until a nice smooth dough is formed. This is going to have to rise for about an hour and I'm going to transfer this to another bowl. I usually let it rise in the same bowl but I'm actually going to be switching over and making another dough since I already have my flour and all of those ingredients out and my stand mixer bowl is already dirty. I'm just going to use the same one and I don't have to wash it out since I'm just making another dough and now I'm going to be making a pizza dough and this is going to be for the next day. I like this dough recipe because after we make it today it can sit in the fridge for anywhere between one to three days so it's a nice thing to make ahead and then later on during the week it's going to make for a really quick and easy dinner and this is not going to be like a New York style pizza. It's more of like a deep dish pan pizza. It doesn't hold a flame to like New York style pizza but this one is way easier to make for during the week and it's still really delicious because honestly any pizza is good pizza and this dough is really easy. You basically just need flour, water, and salt so it's a great thing to be able to make with pantry ingredients. I'll leave a link to this recipe in the description box as well and the only thing I did a little differently from the recipe was I used half all-purpose flour and half whole wheat bread flour both of which I bought from azure standard which I will also link down below and then again I'm just going to use the mixer to kind of combine this and for this dough the recipe says to do a series of stretching and folding five minutes apart so I'm going to be doing that and then let it rest for 40 minutes and then it's going to go in the fridge until we're ready to use it. So now we already got three different things that are going at the same time but a lot of it is hands off so while I'm waiting for all that I'm going to move on to the next thing which is caramelizing some onions and I'm just slicing two of the onions that I pulled out and I'm going to be cooking these low and slow in a cast iron pan. Caramelizing onions takes a really long time between like 30 and 40 minutes so it's a really good thing to do while you're already in the kitchen and you can kind of just like be around and stir it every so often but while that's going it doesn't need a lot of looking after so you can do a lot of other stuff at the same time so I like to do this when I'm doing a big kind of cooking day like this and caramelized onions can go in anything throughout the week. I'm going to be mostly using them for those burgers we're going to have and I can also throw them in pasta dishes. I can top our pizza with them. It's just an amazing secret ingredient that immediately elevates any dish you put it in. For my third onion I'm simply just going to dice that and put that in a container to keep in my fridge. Onions are something that I start most recipes with but I also really hate dicing onions and I find it really convenient to just dice one or two onions in the beginning of week and have them ready to throw in when I need to just saute some vegetables or make a quick stir fry. It's a really handy thing to have because I find that if I don't have pre-diced onions a lot of times I'll just omit them from the recipe and then our onions don't get used but if I have them pre-diced I'm much more likely to use them whenever I'm cooking. Next I'm going to prepare these sweet potatoes. I am piercing them with my knife you can also do this with a fork which is probably less dangerous and I am cutting one of them in half just because it's a lot larger than the other one so I want them to cook kind of at the same rate and I'm placing them in some aluminum foil and I'm going to be baking these in the oven. When I'm baking my hamburger buns I figure if I have the oven going I might as well pop these in at the same time and everything can cook together in there. Next I'm going to crack open that jar of dill pickles and man this jar is almost two years old but that suction was very strong. This jar is definitely still sealed very well and I have two ideas for how to use the pickles this week. First we're going to be making a condiment. This is going to be a burger sauce, probably one of my favorite condiments and it is super easy to make. It's just one part diced dill pickles, one part yellow mustard, one part ketchup, and two parts mayo. I also threw in some of my diced onions just because I had them but you don't need this and I don't always include this. And you just mix it up and it becomes the most beautiful orange color and it is such a great condiment for burgers and also french fries. This is very similar to a lot of like special sauces you would normally get at like fast food restaurants and it's super easy to make at home. A little check in on the caramelized onions. They're softening nicely but haven't developed any color yet and at this point the pinto beans are done and the pressure has released from the instant pot and here's a look at them. They look so nice and soft and creamy even though I didn't soak them beforehand. This instant pot is like my new favorite kitchen gadget and I'm so glad I got one. And the beans are full of flavor from all of those extra ingredients that we put in there and that's just a full meal for the week ready to go. All the flavorings are already there and it's already fully cooked. And now that the instant pot insert is emptied out I can move on to the next kind of bean I'm going to be making in here which is black beans. And again I'm not washing this out because I'm just making another recipe of beans anyway. So I have four cups of dried black beans in here. I'm adding some salt and then I'm also putting in those peels from the onions from when I was cutting those up because those will add nice flavor and they'll be easy to fish out at the end. I'm also adding two of those seasoning peppers and some diced onion. And this is going to be a little bit more of a simple recipe. These are going to be lightly seasoned beans that I can include in dishes whereas the pinto beans are more of like a standalone dish so this one is a little bit more simple and this is usually how I cook my dry beans. So those are going to cook in the instant pot for 25 minutes as well. And another check-in on the onions here. They are starting to get some color so I'm making sure to lower the heat and keep it really low because you don't really want those onions to brown. You want them to really slowly and naturally develop that flavor. Next it's time to shape our hamburger buns. I'm punching down that potato hamburger dough that we made earlier and I'm separating this into eight pieces and then each of those pieces I'm going to shape into a bun and put it on my baking sheet for it to proof one more time. For these buns after I shape them, I like to flatten them quite a bit because as they rise they're going to puff up and then after they bake they're going to puff up vertically again and if you don't flatten them now they can get really tall and not very wide so I like to flatten them as much as possible and then I'll just cover this with a dish towel and that's going to rise for another one to two hours. Continuing on with the condiments, I'm going to be making a ranch dip out of some homemade sour cream but while I have my sour cream out, I realized I needed to make another batch so I just mixed in some heavy whipping cream along with a spoonful of my existing sour cream. I'm going to mix that together and later on once my oven is a little cooled down from the stuff that I baked in there, I'm going to pop this in the oven with the oven light on but the oven off and leave it overnight and this is going to turn into some homemade sour cream. With my remaining sour cream straight in the jar, I'm going to add some ranch seasoning. This is not homemade ranch seasoning but it's what I had and I figured this would make a really nice dip because later on with the rest of that dill pickle jar, I'm going to be making fried pickles and I think that this would be a really good dip to be able to dip those fried pickles in. The caramelized onions are looking really good now. You can see that they've taken on a nice golden color and they've reduced in volume a lot. This is a really good way to use onions if you have a lot of them because you can see that I started out with a really full pan and once they're caramelized, they reduce down to like a quarter of their original volume and again they just taste really good. They're like a sweet savory umami bomb that you can throw in anything and it's something that I always love to have in the fridge. When the buns are nice and risen and puffy, I'm going to stick those in the oven and those are going to bake for 20 to 25 minutes. I also have my sweet potatoes already in there and I just put them in there while my oven was preheating and after the buns are done, I can keep the oven on and leave the sweet potatoes going for another 30 minutes or so and the buns look perfect and golden and I took a little break and at this point, the black beans were also done so I can pull them out. You can see how many beans I ended up with. This is going to be more than we need for the week but I did that on purpose so that I can fill up a container and label it and stick it in the freezer so that next time I want to quickly make a meal with black beans, I can pull it out of the freezer instead of having to pull my pressure cooker out and having to cook a giant pot of beans and once these beans are put away, that's pretty much everything that I pulled out to prep for the week. You can see that I don't really prep whole meals when I'm meal planning for the week and that's just what works for me. I find it easier to prep these ingredients that take a really long time to cook because really that's the bulk of the work during the week and once these things are prepped, the cooking of the meals throughout the week goes really quickly and that way I can also make sure that I'm utilizing these things in our pantry that I otherwise may have neglected. So anyway, let's move on to the actual meals for the week and the first one is super easy because the whole thing is pretty much already cooked. I have the pinto beans that I cooked up first in this video and everything's already in there. It's all seasoned up and perfectly cooked so all we had to do was throw some of our green tomato relish on top of there and serve it with some sourdough bread and that was a finished meal. The next meal is going to be our burgers and we're going to be making some fried pickles to go with this. I have drained the rest of that jar that I opened the other day and I have a bowl of cornmeal mixed with some salt and pepper and I'm just going to bread these pickles in the cornmeal and we're going to be frying them and spoiler alert, they turned out really good. I'm really happy with how this came out and we have a few more jars of dill pickles down in the basement so I'm definitely going to be making this again using up more of those pickles. Pickles are one of those things that I think everyone starts learning how to make when they're getting into homesteading and that's what we did. It was the very first thing we canned but then we quickly realized we don't actually like to eat pickles that much especially when they've been canned because they can get kind of soft and also the longer they sit in that vinegar brine it gets way too vinegary for us to eat but frying them takes away a little bit of that vinegary edge and of course if you deep fry anything it's going to be delicious so this is just a perfect way to use up those pickles. I really liked these because they were super easy to bread. It's just a one-step process in that cornmeal because usually when you bread and fry things you have to do the three-step process with the flour, the egg, and milk and then with breadcrumbs. With this one it was just the cornmeal and it stuck to the pickles perfectly with just that excess brine that was already on the surface and they fried up really nicely too. There was not a lot of like splattering or anything like that and it was just a really clean and easy frying process which is always good because frying stuff is not always like the most pleasant thing in the kitchen but these turned out really good and in order to keep these warm and crispy while I cooked up the burgers I had a rack that was waiting and after I drained these on some paper towels I put them on a wire rack on a baking sheet and stuck them in a low oven like 200 to 250 degrees and I just kept those warm in the oven while I cooked up the burgers. Here's the inside of those potato buns and you can see how nice that texture looks. It's a perfect texture for burgers. I'm going to add some of that special sauce that I made that goes perfectly. It's a little bit sweet, a little bit tangy and then I am adding that deer burger patty on top. Then we're going to add a little bit of arugula that we picked fresh from the garden. The arugula is doing so well this time of year. It really enjoys the cold weather and then to finish this off we have some of those caramelized onions as well which add another nice layer of umami and nice savory sweetness. Honestly this was probably one of the best meals from the whole week right in the beginning here. It was really good and we had enough ingredients to make like two more meals. We were both really happy about that and everything turned out really good. The next day we had our cheesy pan pizza. So I have my pizza dough that I already mixed up but I just pulled it out a few hours ahead of time and spread it out in a cast iron pan and let it rise for a couple hours and since this is like a deep dish style pizza you don't put the sauce on this one first. You do cheese first and cover the entire area of dough with mozzarella cheese from side to side and then you're going to dollop your sauce and your toppings on top. I'm going to be using my pesto instead of tomato sauce just because I have a lot to use up and I'm also going to be using this pesto in another recipe later on. So I'm just using this since it's just one of those things that I pulled out of my pantry to use this week. So I'm going to dollop that on top and then initially I was going to use some of my frozen cherry tomatoes but I decided instead to use dehydrated cherry tomatoes that I let sit in some water to rehydrate for an hour or so. This is just to eliminate some of that excess water that frozen tomatoes usually have because you don't want any like really wet ingredients on top of here. And then I'm going to sprinkle on some of my diced onions and this is going to bake in the oven until the cheese gets really nice and bubbly and because that cheese goes all the way to the edge of the crust it kind of like caramelizes in the pan and gets really crispy all up to the edge and it is so good. This is definitely like a little bit of a heavier meal so I made sure to serve that with a nice leafy salad. Again we have more of that arugula and we also have some watermelon radishes that we picked back in December that are holding really well in the fridge and they just look really beautiful as well. So that was our third meal for the week. Next up we had our weekly tacos and for this I just cooked up some of those black beans that were already cooked but I usually like to kind of like make them like a refried bean style so I'll cook them up with some taco seasoning and some onions and then I made some fresh flour tortillas and then we just have all the fixings for tacos usually so we have cheese, we have our homemade sour cream, I also have some of our home canned salsa and I opened up a fresh jar of that for this meal. We also have some pickled onions and radishes which give a nice tart balance to the beans and then we also have some lettuce that we picked from in the greenhouse. So besides making the tortillas this meal isn't too much work and it's one that we have a lot because it's a really good way to use things that you already have. We're able to use some canned salsa, we also use our bulk beans and our bulk flour making the tortillas so it's a really nice kind of like pantry meal that's also one of our favorites and you get to mix it up with whatever kind of toppings you have. Sometimes we'll have pickled veggies, in the summer we'll have fresh tomatoes of course which is always so good and in the fall sometimes we'll have like a slaw with cabbage or kohlrabi so it's just a really nice like base that you can mix around with the different kinds of toppings and you can pretty much stick anything in a tortilla and it'll taste good. The day after taco night I'll usually make quesadillas or enchiladas and this week it's going to be enchiladas. I like to do these meals the day after taco night because it's a really good way to use those same ingredients that are already prepped and we just get to have them in a new and fresh way. So today I'm going to using those refried black beans that I made and I'm also going to throw in some of those cooked sweet potatoes and make black bean and sweet potato enchiladas. I made up an enchilada sauce using taco seasoning and tomato paste and some chicken broth. It's super easy to do and then I just have to roll up all of the ingredients in this sauce and we're going to top this with some cheese and bake it in the oven until everything is nice and bubbly on top. I'm really glad I had those precooked sweet potatoes because otherwise I would have just left them out and made black bean enchiladas, but this way we get to throw in a little bit more nutrition and an extra vegetable in there. To go along with this I'm going to be making some Mexican style rice and for this I pulled out some frozen salsa from the freezer. In the summer I make huge batches of fresh salsa, so much that we can't eat it all and whenever I have a little bit too much I'll just stick it in a container and throw it in the freezer. This is actually the first time I did it this past year and I'm so glad I did because it makes the best Mexican rice and it already has all of those flavors mixed in there in that salsa and it's just so perfect. There's nothing better than pulling out a huge pan of something with delicious golden cheese on top. By the way this is also a really good make-ahead meal if you want to just like roll up the enchiladas and then bake it at a later date. Here's what the finished meal looks like with the finished rice and the enchiladas all golden and bubbly and I served it with some sour cream and some more pickled veggies. And now we're on the last meal for the week. For this night I made sweet potato gnocchi. I grated up some of those cooked sweet potatoes. You could also use a potato ricer if you have one of those but I don't. And then I cracked in a couple of our homegrown eggs in there and mixed that up with some salt and pepper. And then after all those ingredients are mixed up all you have to do is add flour until a nice dough comes together. You don't want to have too much flour in there but just enough that it's not like a sticky mess and you're able to roll them up into these little dumpling shapes. I'll usually start by adding some of the flour into the bowl but then after you get some of that combined it's easier just to just turn it all out onto a cutting board or work surface and then work in the rest of the flour that way. Gnocchi is typically made with starchy white potatoes but we only had sweet potatoes and a lot of times I will just switch out that part of the recipe. I rarely make potato gnocchi actually but a lot of times I'll do sweet potato gnocchi and also pumpkin or like butternut squash puree gnocchi and those all end up really good. The dough is a little bit more crumbly and tender than if you use white potato because these ingredients don't have as much starch but it still binds really nicely and puffs up really nicely as a dumpling when we go to boil these later on. This is one of those things that seems almost like a specialty meal but it's pretty easy to make at home. Once you've made it a few times it goes pretty quickly. I split my dough off into a few sections and then taking each section at a time I'm rolling it out into a log maybe about three quarters to an inch thick and then from there I'm going to break off little pieces into bite-sized dumpling shapes and then I like to make a little dimple in there with my thumb. You can also roll this over the edge of a fork and the goal is just to make some nice little grooves and dimples so that whatever sauce you toss this in has a nice place to cling on to later on. So I'm just going to continue and shape all of these dumplings. They don't have to be perfect. They're still going to be delicious even if they are a little bit misshapen and once they puff up in the water as well those shapes will kind of round out so don't worry if they look a little craggy. So next we're just going to boil this in a pot of water in a couple of batches and gnocchi are really easy to cook because they basically tell you when they're done. In the beginning they're going to sink to the bottom of the pot so you just give it a few stirs to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom but after a while they're going to float to the top and you just let them float there for a minute or so to continue cooking and then you can just take them out and they are ready. You can see how they've puffed up really nicely and they have a nice like orangey color from those sweet potatoes which is really pretty as well. So I'm going to continue cooking these in batches and just removing them into a bowl on the side once they're done cooking. Once I'm done cooking my gnocchi I took some of those frozen cherry tomatoes and I'm just going to warm those up really briefly in this pot of hot water. They don't really need to be cooked they basically just need to be defrosted in this water and then I can just ladle them out into this same bowl and other than that nothing really needs to be cooked for this meal which is really awesome. This is why I love prepping a lot of these ingredients in the beginning because then I can concentrate on making something like homemade tortillas or homemade gnocchi something that requires a little bit of extra time but I wouldn't want to make everything in this meal from scratch that night. So for here I have my pre-made caramelized onions and I'm throwing the rest of that in here and I also have the rest of that pesto that I pulled out earlier this week and after tossing these couple of pre-prepped ingredients this meal comes together really quickly so just toss that all in and you end up with a really delicious gnocchi pasta dish. I know it may not look the best because pesto is not always the most photogenic thing but I promise you it is really delicious, really satisfying, and comforting. Those caramelized onions add a really nice depth of flavor and the gnocchi is nice and soft and pillowy. And that is our full week of meals from our pantry. We didn't have to buy a single thing from the grocery store. One thing I didn't actually show was our green beans. That's something I usually just throw together for lunch. We'll have whatever we ate for dinner left over and I will saute up some vegetables so that's what happened to those. And we had a full week of homemade meals with ingredients we either grew or didn't have to go out to the store to buy which is amazing. I hope you guys enjoyed this video of meal prep and this pantry challenge. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you again in the next video!