My plan yesterday was to can chicken breasts. On the menu was a skillet dish made with chicken, brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes with a sauce. I thought it sounded really good and since I had chicken in the fridge to can, I’d use some of that for dinner instead of canning it.
I went out to the fridge to get the chicken to get started canning and . . there was no chicken in the fridge. It was all frozen solid. I had pork butt and pork loin in the fridge to be canned. I could have taken a package of chicken out to defrost but by the time it defrosted, it would be too late to start canning. If I had taken it out to defrost and used two breasts from a package of six breasts, I would had to have had chicken the rest of the week.
I decided to can the pork butt and come up with another plan for dinner. I remembered seeing containers of “Stuffed Kale” in the downstairs freezer so I grabbed one of those and stuck the container in a bowl of cold water to let it defrost while I was canning the pork butt.
When I first made these, I wrote about how I made them in this post. Basically it’s a meatball rolled up in a big kale leaf. I used a bit of cornstarch to thicken the tomato sauce – almost like a marinara, that was in the container, then added a bit of cream so it wouldn’t be so much like marinara.
These are really good. I used a mixture of ground beef and ground lamb but I think when I make them again, I’ll use ground beef and Italian sausage. I want to can some of these and see how they turn out. It would be so much easier to open a jar and heat them up than to have to defrost them and then heat them up and hope they are defrosted and warm in the middle.
We had baked potatoes and salad with it. Not a bad dinner considering there was no chicken in the fridge!