Canned Potatoes

Through the years, I’ve canned potatoes, mostly in with green beans but occasionally as plain potatoes.

After watching a youtube video about canning potatoes, where the lady added garlic powder, dried basil, parsley and of course, salt, and she went on and on about how good they were so I decided to try it.

When I was canning the potatoes a month or so ago, Vince came in and said “What are you canning?” When I told him potatoes, I don’t think he believed me but he walked over to see and, yes, I was canning potatoes. I realized that when he worked, he never knew what all I canned while he was away. I probably told him “I canned potatoes today” but, you know how much he listens to what I say. 🙂

I knew he was thinking I was wasting time and propane canning potatoes so a day or so ago, I opened a jar of the potatoes. I wanted to make sure we liked them with the herbs and spices before I canned more that way. I saved the liquid with all the seasonings to use as the liquid for bread. We’ll see how that goes. I baked it last night but we haven’t had it yet.

For the canned potatoes, I drained them, simply poured them into a skillet that had sizzling butter, lightly browned them and they were ready in less than 5 minutes.

Friends, blog readers and even Vince often wonder why I can so much. There are several reasons. First and foremost is this is how I grew up. My grandma canned everything and I thought that’s what everyone did. I’m not saying canning is better for everyone but when I can take fresh grown potatoes, skin them, can them and have them last 10 years or more and taste just as good, maybe better than when they were fresh, and basically I’m the only one who has handled them from the time they were planted til we consume them, I’ll take that! Yes, some of my potatoes were purchased from Azure Standard and there were more hands handling them than just mine but many of them were grown right here in the back yard.

Second is the cost and food security. I’ve been to the grocery store twice recently when there were no potatoes at all in the bins. I’m sure somewhere in town there were potatoes but not at the store where I was shopping. We just cannot trust our food supply these days. I’m not saying we’re going to starve but I’m not confident feeding families is going to be easy in the near future – not only due to shortages but to costs. We had not been able to find heavy cream in our stores for about two weeks. Vince uses that in his coffee. I told him there was cream in the fridge that I had skimmed off the milk but he didn’t want to use that. We found cream at Walmart yesterday.

I’ve been looking for chicken livers for Rita’s food and haven’t been able to find those. Walmart in Carthage had that yesterday too. Our local Walmart said they get in a case and they’re gone as soon as they put them out, then they don’t get any more for months!

Third reason to can – being able to heat up a meal quickly when there’s no power (gas stove) or when it’s too hot to cook in the kitchen . . that’s worth the effort of canning. When we go to my uncle’s or even stay in a hotel, we can bring food in jars and have meals ready to eat in no time. It’s hard to cook in a kitchen where you don’t have everything you need but I could bring one case of jars (12 quarts) and have enough food to last us for 12 days. All I’d have to add would be a storebought bag of frozen vegetables, a baked potato, a storebought can of veggies . . easy and we wouldn’t have to go out and I wouldn’t have a big mess to clean up.

Back to the potatoes – I’ll always can my potatoes in the future with the herbs and spices added to the jar. Those were really delicious and Vince was quickly convinced that canned potatoes were worth the effort.