Canning Meals

This past week, we’ve been working on inventorying our food supply.  Vince had thought there was going to be a lot to get rid of . . things that we no longer eat with our healthy eating plan but there wasn’t much of that kind of food in my supply pantry. I mostly save canned meat (chicken, tuna, sardines), canned fruit and veggies and the things I can. We do have a good supply of dried beans, sugar and flour, none of which are we eating now but would eat in a crisis situation. The beans and sugar will last . . the flour will not last long term. I think Vince was expecting to find a lot of junk food — chips, cookies, etc., and there’s not a big of that in the storage pantry.

Vince decided we needed more food stored and we began to look at some of the dried type foods from My Patriot Supply or Food Insurance. We have ordered from them but then Vince said “It’s mostly carbs!” and like a crazy woman, I said “I could can food and it will last many years!” That made him happy.

Last night while at Kroger, we bought 5 roasts and a big pork loin that were on sale and 15 pounds of ground beef that was marked down. It had a “sell by” date of today and it was good looking meat so we got it all and I stayed busy this morning.

All of the ground meat went into spaghetti sauce and chili.

It amounted to 14 pints of spaghetti sauce and 8 pints of chili.

So far, I’ve only cooked one of the roasts and I made it into 8 pints of goulash. There’s some spaghetti sauce in the photo below because I couldn’t fit it all in the first batch.

Since there are just two of us, and we’re not eating as much as we used to, I chose to can everything in pint jars instead quart jars. A pint jar contains plenty for the two of us. In fact, for lunch today, we had the leftovers that didn’t quite fill a final pint jar and it was more than enough for us. I love that with canning, the food requires no refrigeration, can be heated in a matter of minutes and is easily transported. If I chose to carry a variety of jars of food to Chad and Nicole, I could easily do so without having to keep it on ice and hope it didn’t defrost between here and Missouri.

Tomorrow I will come up with some ideas for using more of the roasts and the pork loin.

Every time I use the All American canner, I’m more in love with it and am so happy to be using it. I highly recommend any of the All American canners if you do not plan to use it on a glass top stove. Some folks may use them on the glass tops but I would not. They’re very heavy even when empty. Add jars full of food and water and it just isn’t something I recommend. Through the years, I’ve used a variety of canners with the gaskets and they’ve always required pretty constant monitoring. With the All Americans, I can get them to pressure, find the perfect spot on the burner and the pressure doesn’t waiver at all! In fact, this afternoon, I got the canner going the second, set the timer on my phone for 75 minutes and took a nap, confident the pressure in the canner would stay exactly where it was supposed to be . . and it did.

Not only do I now have 30 meat dishes canned, enough for 30 meals, but they can be used in time of no power to heat up and have a  yummy meal or during the summer when I’m working in the garden or canning, and too tired to cook, I can grab a jar, heat it up, add a side or two and a salad and . . dinner is done! What could be more convenient.