What Else?

I’m not going to say today was a bad day but a whole lot of things have gone wrong. It could always be worse.

I’m not trying to be an alarmist but the prepper in me tells me to stock up on anything we need. Of course, there’s not much we need but I have hardly any meat in the freezer – just what I brought in one cooler and a few things I’ve bought here, but I’ve also cooked some of what I bought. So, I planned to go to Aldi. I was going to leave here about 9 a.m. and go. Then the guy who’s going to work on the deck called and asked if he could come by about 10. He lives a good ways from here and he was going to be near here for something else so I said sure . . any time is fine.

By the time he left, I was hungry so I fixed myself some lunch, then I went to Adli. When I came out of the store, it was raining so hard, I had use use a paper towel to dry my hair in the car because it was dripping into my face.

Got home, carrying the groceries in, dropped a jar of sour cherries and, of course, it broke. Thank goodness it was in the garage and not in the house.

Got that mess cleaned up and got the groceries put away and was going to start canning the chicken. I wanted to can beef stew and chicken so I started with the chicken.

But . . wait . . where’s the weighted pressure gauge for the All American 915 canner? All the All American canners take the same weighted gauge and I have four canners so, in theory, I should have at least our weighted gauges. I don’t remember unpacking one so I was forced to go through those two boxes of “drawers” that contained all that STUFF from the kitchen. No gauge.

I went downstairs, looked at the mountain of boxes. It would take a miracle to find something as small as a weighted gauge anytime between now and Christmas to I gave up and ordered two new ones but that isn’t going to solve the problem of wanting to can chicken today.

I decided to use the old small All American 910, which will only hold four quarts but that’s ok because I’ll can eight quarts of chicken total. The 915 only holds 7 quarts so I’d have to make two runs with it anyway, so what’s two runs in the 910 canner.

Then, I start to use it and realize . . it has a petcock and I’ve never used that for pressure canning. Should it be up or down? Called Red Hill and they said they don’t recommend using those. I should change out the petcock for a weighted gauge setup. I said “But, CAN I use it just today?” She said “People do but we don’t recommend it.”

I either have to freeze that chicken or use this one so I’m using it. As I was reading on their website, I saw this:

Let’s just hope I get through this without any more disasters and soon I’ll have a gas stove (maybe sooner than we thought if this canning job doesn’t go as planned).