Rebekah Harmon

I got birds this weekend! Two pheasants and three ducks. They were shot with a 12 gage shotgun. Y'all, I've never bird hunted before, so I asked Alfonso to mentors me. I was able to borrow his gun, ammo and know-how. He and his buddy, Scott, came out to Wendell, Idaho, near the Snake River. With their directions, I was able to bring home 5 birds for this BB. I'm glad it only took one day! I know its possible to get skunked, so I planned for a couple different days. Nope, just one! I'm SO physched!
I dressed the birds out, keeping the breasts and legs from all the birds, making stock with the pheasant carcasses. Ducks are harder to pluck/skin, so the rest of their bodies became cat food. All the edible guts were enjoyed by the kitties.

I learned that, like Turkeys, pheasants have pin bones throughout their leg muscles. They need to be cooked "low and slow." I baked them in a crock in the oven in some tallow, flavored with veg and herbs. I made a reduction sauce with pheasant broth and red wine vinegar and cream. So GOOD!

Their breasts were pan fried on a high temperature with my homeade bee balm seasoning salt rubbed in. Also the best game meat I've ever had!!

Alfonso recommend I make the game duck into jerky or smoke it. Its likely more games than my home-raised duck. So I sliced and turned it into jerky. I liked how tender it turned out, since duck is a bit more greasy.

Ok, so I got 30,285 from these crops, all told. Anybody wanna check my math? 🫣 I'm not great at crunching numbers.

They boys also ate goosefoot and amaranth greens and a mushroom from their garden! That all amounts to about 44 calories. Its on their video footage but I didnt catch any photos. Its sometimes hard to snap pictures before they excitedly munch their produce! Ita a "good problem".

Some of their beans were eaten fresh as green beans. 56 cal for this pan.

Another fun re-plant was amaranth. Two plants grew, and they got big! Still, teeny weeny grains only made it up to 527 cal.

The Spud Bros grew Scarlett runner beans and black beans. The calorie totals totals them was 1,292cal.

The spuds brothers planned on planting sweet corn, but didn't have enough seedlings. They also grew red dent corn, the landrace dessert variety so many permies recommended to me!
34 ears of sweet corn, eaten fresh: 2,992 cal.
6.1 oz. Of dried sweet corn seed they saved: 610cal.

The dent corn grew well! But because of the autumn being our family's busiest season, the harvested cos didnt get processed before molding. Google and I did some guessing based on the weight in this picture, that in the cob still, it was about 1,806calories. (I didnt want to process it further, due to aflatoxin spore danger)

Thankfully, two ears of this dent corn were overlooked during harvest and we found them still on the plants later, perfectly healthy! Their calories was about 458.

Altogether, thats 5,866 calories for corn!

As part of their 4 sisters garden, the boys planted sun flower seeds. The got some tiny, medium and mutated flowers 😆. Totaling 1 pound, 4.9oz, and 3,658 calories.

They planted two yellow squashes in spots where other things didn't grow. They became quite productive! Yielding 11 pounds and 14oz. Over the season in total (which are in our videos). That is about 970calories.

Walking onions were a fun part of their garden! "Medusa onions" as they have come to be known in our family. 6 pounds, 5.3 Oz. Of them were weighed. Google says this many regular onions is about 1200 cal, but walking onions, as you can see, are a bit more slender. But probably have more calories than green onions, which is about 800calories for this batch. The average of the two is 1,034calories, so thats what I'm going with.