Growing up, many of my friends’ grandparents lived near where we all lived so I knew their grandparents. Almost all of them lived like we did. Grandfather worked. Grandmother may have worked or stayed at home. Several of the grandmothers were teachers. Many of the grandfathers worked at the refineries. All of my friends whose grandparents I knew had bathrooms and running water. My grandparents did not. I never thought of them as poor but maybe they were. My grandma always had fabric and her old treadle sewing machine and she would let me “sew”, even at a young age. She always had white pillowcases and embroidery thread and she taught me to embroidery pretty pillowcases. I don’t remember them ever going out to eat. Maybe they did when I wasn’t there. The main thing that mattered to me til I was a teen was getting to spend as much of the summers as I could with my grandparents and being able to go there as many weekends as we could. They lived two hours north of us. Mom was a teacher and we would leave as soon as mom got off work and drive up there. It seems like it was every weekend but it probably wasn’t.
As I’m canning for hours, I almost never stop thinking of my grandma. I remember her canning in a hot kitchen (no a/c). I remember her going to the well and drawing up water in a bucket, bringing it in and boiling it on the stove. I remember her doing all that in a tiny little kitchen with almost no counterspace and one sink. She canned because she had to do it. They would have likely starved if she hadn’t done it. I can because I love doing it. Same with the garden. I would not admit this to Vince but my gardening probably costs way more than the value of the vegetables I produce, even with today’s grocery costs. Just the greenhouse . . I’ll never grow enough veggies to compensate for the cost of that but it’s a place I’ll have lots of fun. I’ll start seeds and watch them grow. I’ll play with flowers in there in the spring. My grandparents had no choice but to grow lots of food and to sell some of it in order to buy the things they needed. I don’t know if she enjoyed canning or did it because it was necessary. I love it. I would can all day every day if I had enough jars and if my feet cooperated.
I had two small boneless pork butts in the fridge so yesterday I cut those up. I was thinking I would can that meat in pints but it had so much fat, even after trimming it, I’m not sure how much real meat was there so I canned it in quarts.
I cut the pork up, trimmed it , seasoned it, roasted it and had enough to fill four quarts with pork with enchilada sauce.
I didn’t want to run a canner that wasn’t full so I filled eight quarts with black beans, onions, peppers, taco sauce and chicken broth. I had one quart of enchilada sauce left so that was the 13th jar and the canner was full.
This probably sounds crazy but I’m going to open a jar of beans and pork tonight for dinner to see if we like it. I have two larger pork butts in the freezer and if we like this, I’m going to can at least one of them this way. The black beans are called “Taco Beans” and they have taco seasoning in them. I’m not a fan of taco seasoning so I used a heaping teaspoon of seasoning instead of 2 teaspoons, which the recipe called for. I want to see if that’s too much or too little taco seasoning before I do more.
I will shred the meat, then cook the sauce down and make burritos or enchiladas. I want to see how much meat I end up with using the quarts and then I’ll decide whether to can in pints or quarts when I do more. Here’s my thinking . . it takes 12 quarts to can the same amount as it would take 24 pints to can. That’s twice as many jars and twice as many lids. I can get 13 regular mouth jars in my big canner or, 18 or 19 pints. It makes more sense to me to use quarts and plan two meals from each jar vs. using pints. With this pork, I could shred it and serve it on baked potatoes. I could make Pulled Pork Hash. I think it would be great to add to homemade mac & cheese. I could make pulled pork tacos. Yes, I need a lot of this meat in jars.
As far as the black beans, there are several soups we like that have black beans. I love Black Beans & Rice. Vince doesn’t like cilantro so I add it only to my bowl. I’m not sure we’d ever get tired of eating black beans.
Of course, I will report back and let you know what we thought about the pork and the beans.
patti says
2 years ago i switched from using quarts to pints. we don’t eat as much as we used to and 3 meals of the same thing got monotonous. i did begin experimenting with canning hamburger thanx to you, we needed more freezer space and had ground beef sales going on regularly.
i’d lovr to know your enchilada sauce recipe. i’ve tried all of the canned varieties and a couple of recipes that we didn’t care for at all. i now normally use green enchilada sauce instead but really would like a change of pace.
judy.blog@gmail.com says
I’ll make a blog post about it because I’ve had two emails this morning asking.
It depends on what I’m canning. The chunks of pork that I can, I use quarts because there’s so much we can do with that and we will eat it in two meals. Even the meatballs, a pint is enough for one meal. I don’t mind having that twice – once with brown gravy over rice and another time with more of a stroganoff gravy over noodles.