One of my dear friends on Instagram (ThreeRiversHomestead) is hosting a pantry challenge. The object of the challenge is to use only what is preserved in your freezer or pantry to feed your family for 3 months. Families can participate in any capacity that they choose and can join in and follow along with the hashtag #threeriverschallenge. We have decided this would be a great opportunity to free up some freezer and pantry space while saving some money in January. We are still going to grocery shop, especially for fruit and dairy, and won’t take it to the extreme of surviving purely off of our pantry, but we are going to cut our budget in half (or more) and meal plan from our supply first.

Our first step is to take inventory of what we have, especially in the freezer. We lost 21 meat birds to a mink and did not get a deer this year, so we are actually fairly low on meat at the moment. Over the last few years, my parents have given us some beef as our Christmas gift, so that will be coming just in time. We still have the 5 chickens we butchered and quite a bit of venison from last year. I am always looking for good venison recipes, so if you have any please send them my way!

We have 2 chest freezers. We freeze a lot of our veggies, broth, jams, and meat. I also have quite a bit of pumped milk left for Ezra that we can use up now that he is also drinking coconut milk. I would love to get condensed down to just 1 freezer with this challenge. We will shop from the chest freezer downstairs at the beginning of each week and put anything we need for our meal plan in our kitchen fridge/freezer.

This challenge will also be a big help in planning our garden for next year. I hope it will really show what we need to plant more of, and what we have more than enough of. We have an overwhelming amount of pickles, zucchini, and green beans right now, but we don’t have any dried beans, which I would love for soups. We’ve used up our onions already as well. We will see how fast we run out of crushed and diced tomatoes, because I think they will go fast.

We plan to grow meat chickens, turkeys, and maybe even pigs along with our laying flock next summer. I would also like to put a plan into place to buy bulk foods, such as flour, because we currently buy it as we need it. All of these things will become important as we make more homemade and homegrown food. We really feel the desire to do this anyways, so what a great way to start. If you would like to join in or follow along, make sure you are following both ThreeRiversHomestead and ScottFamilyHomestead on Instagram. It will be an adventure for sure!