Preserve 1 million calories at the Harmon house

110,913calories left to preserve!

In my efforts to count calories, I've forgotten about the low-calorie foods I preserve: herbs!
Here are some of the herbs I've grown or foraged and dried recently. (Note that some are in reused jars from previous seasons which have the same label)
Greens: mostly mints like lavender, thyme, sage, and lemon balm. This is 3 lbs. Of dried greens, which google says is 1270caloroes per pound. 3,810calories

Next are flowers. Chamomile, linden, bee balm and gumweed are my family's favorites. Only 200-300caloroes per pound. So 3 pounds would be something like 800calories.

Finally, dried roots. Here are yellow dock, dandelion and marshmallow. Although I've put most of my roots into tinctures already, (teasel and mullein and burdock) this is about 11 cups of chopped, dried roots, or about 2,365, based on about 215calories per cup.
6,975 calories this post.

5 lbs. And 5oz more jerky. Hickory seasonings this time.
2,635 calories.

Well, like most permies, my autumn larder is stuffed.

The frost has come, and the trees are bare. The gardens have been chopped and dropped and tucked in for winter sleep.

Most of the produce and animals have been processed. (Still some beans left to go!)

On a normal year, I would rest from garden labors for the year. Not even plan next year's crops til after January.

But. I still have about 100,000 calories left to go. So I'm scrounging for local calories. Im exhausted from hours on my feet in the kitchen. I'll push through another hundred grand. Then find somewhere to put it!!

Putting away jars of food today, I paused to acknowledge the bounty of my overflowing pantry. It brings more peace and security than nearly anything else. Gratitude spreads from satisfying season sunsets to plump, perfect peaches, standing tall in rows on my shelves, to crackling fires keeping my tired toes toasty.

Guys! Im so excited!! I've been waiting for these beans to be ready from an awesome, local homestead in my area. Called Agrarian Harvest, they are a better-than-organic farm, a bike ride away. I usually order beans from Azure Standard each fall. But this year! Ill try all the varieties they've got.
Red bean, 5lb. 7500cal
Pinto beans 30lbs. 45,000cal.
Black beans 25lbs. 37,500cal.

They came in these paper bags. Hooray for no plastic!! But those won't keep well. I transferred them into mice-bug-proof glass jars and sucked all the air out of them like I do with my freezer dried goods.
60lbs. Of beans is 90,000calories.

That makes 11,303 calories left.

Rebekah Harmon wrote:And what a way to go! May his soul find the next honey hole.

WOW, what a way to go! That was certainly an unexpected SKIP ripple effect. Shocking!  

Only ~11k left to go!! Well done!

16 c. Of pumpkin
11c. Corn 1320cal
1c. Pumpkin seeds 280cal.

I processed another few pumpkins.
2,880

The last of our pumpkins! We made some pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and freeze dried the rest. (Also drying the pumpkin seeds)

16c. Of pumpkin, 784 calories
4c. Seeds 1200 calories.
1984 total

My family loves homade noodles! I make them more seldom than they would like. Its a great big amount of work! But also a great way to store calories. Here I made a triple batch of my normal 1-gallon soup amount. Hopefully, that will make three meals easier, going into mad-basketball season here!!
1 dozen eggs 750calories
12 cups flour 5,460cal
6,210 calories total.

And now, my friends, I have passed 1 million calories by 1,771!

YAHOO!! I'VE OFFICIALLY PRESERVED ONE MILLION CALORIES!🕺🤸‍♀️🏋‍♀️

Rebekah Harmon wrote:And now, my friends, I have passed 1 million calories by 1,771!

YAHOO!! I'VE OFFICIALLY PRESERVED ONE MILLION CALORIES!🕺🤸‍♀️🏋‍♀️

Wow!! You have documented an incredible amount of food preserved and sourced! I remember one time you even cycled to a local food pickup; that was so cool!!

Congratulations on this accomplishment! I wonder, in hindsight, what do you wish you had known at the onset?

Doing an analysis of the types of foods I preserved:

Canned goods

Including Syrups, Juice, Sauces, Salsa, Pasta Sauce, Jams, Jellies, and Pie Fillings of many, many species of fruits and veggies, for 405,594 calories, a big chunk of the 1 million (40.5%)

Dehydrated

Including Berries, Pears, Herbs, Beans, Noodles, and Jerky 74,375 calories, only 7.4%.

Freeze Dried

I freeze dried apricots, apples, tomatoes, corn, pumpkin, yogurt, and pie filling for 43,649 calories. (4.3 %) I have freeze dried many more calories and saved them in mylar bags which didn't count (dang!)

Pickled

Including krauts, cucumber pickles, and eggs! 2660 calories. A tiny amount!! But pickles are low-calorie foods. (.2%)

Live Storage

Including potatoes, parsnips, sunchokes all stored in a root cellar, two different seasons. 136,821 calories (13%)

Seeds

Including sunflower, pumpkin and primrose seeds: 25,120 calories. (2.5%)

Freezer

including chicken and deer to make up the 100,000 calorie limit! (10%)

Outside the BB, I preserved many more animals in the freezer than the 100,000 calorie limit. Just because I've been asked about how much of our preservation efforts are hunted/foraged foods, in the 2 seasons I've been working on this BB, there were probably about another 233,500 calories of hunted/raised meats that were frozen. This included another deer, four turkeys, about 8 ducks, 20 rabbits, and another 100lbs. of elk meat that didn't turn into jerky--yet. These two years, I did process more animals than I have in the past, but I think this will continue, due to my butchering and hunting skills improving!

Hey Alex! I wish I had avoided mylar bags at the start of this project. I kept freeze dried foods, totaling a good 50,000 calories in them!! Those calories had to be redacted.

I do have a strange regret. This challenge eventually led me to look at a pile of local produce, like a box of pears for instance, and think "whats the highest-calorie way I can preserve these?"

My go-to method before these past two years was to freeze or dry or freeze dry foods in their plain state. But thats the lowest-calorie form possible.

I know my family will eat ALL the jelly and fruit leather I made. It might take us a few years to go through all the syrups.

I don't eat fried foods or sugar regularly, so I won't personally enjoy the jams/jellies, or several of the meals I made in the 800 plates BB. In fact, my family has been getting a little chubbier, since working on these BBs, because I'm often serving really dense foods, or working on preserving food, and they kids have boring old spaghetti or other junk, just because mommy had been in the kitchen all day and is too tired for making a nice dinner.

We are shifting gears now, to more slender meals. Sometimes that means local options. Sometimes not. Hopefully we can reverse some of the damage done by my long-standing attention to high-caloroe food production.

To post calculations differently, since this BB requires poundage, I've summed up all the types of food thus:

390 pounds of live food, including potatoes, sunchokes and parsnips, stored in a root cellar, which has proven successful for 4 years now.

210 pounds of meat in the freezer, including 168 pounds of chicken and 42 pounds of venison.

Of the dehydrated foods, 49 pounds and 3 Oz. Of meat were dried into jerky.
43.7 pounds of fruits were dried,
7.7 pounds of saved dried herbs were accounted for,
61 pounds and 14.3 Oz. Of beans were saved,
1.85 pounds of dried noodles were stored,
129 sheets of fruit leather, totaling 95lbs, 13oz.
8.15lbs. Of seeds were saved (pumpkin/primrose/su flower, etc)
16.9 pounds of grains were stored.

Freeze dried foods, after drying are very light, but had to be saved in jars anyways. This just includes the food weight:
11.8lbs of pumpkin,
11.25 lbs. Of corn
9 lbs. Of yogurt
14 lbs. Of tomatoes and fruit.

4.51lbs of tallow was saved
And 10.5 lbs of honey from my own bees

The rest was canned, and I think its odd to calculate canned food by weight. Never-the-less, here's poundage of canned goods, minus the bottles' weights. (Being over 350 canning bottles, that calls for seriously sturdy shelves!)
22.8 pounds of soup/broth
118.25 pounds of juice/syrup
31.1 pounds of firecider,
186.3 lbs. Of sauces,
68 lbs. Of pie filling,
12.7 lbs. Of fish that was canned,
31.2 lbs. Of whole/sliced fruits in syrup,
506 pounds of jams or jellies,
40 lbs, 10oz of pickled foods.

Whew! Thats as much number crunching as tax season!! Don't make me do more, I already feel like Dumbledore, drinking Voldermort's potion 🤮 😆.