There’s plenty of room here to keep my canned foods organized but they are not organized. When we packed everything in Texas, it didn’t get packed in an organized fashion but . . it got packed and for the most part, Vince did it by himself so I’m not complaining. As I unpacked, I had a plan but quickly realized it wasn’t easy to keep things organized. At that point, I decided just to get the jars on the shelves and then, with the new jars, I’d keep them organized and keep a list of what we had on hand. My grandma had a couple of sheets of notebook paper tacked up on the wall in her canning pantry. She would add marks as she added jars and cross through the marks as she removed jars.
I did a fair job of keeping a list of what I was adding but I was storing jars in the downstairs garage and then Vince decided those needed to go somewhere else. Some went into the sewing room. Some went into the room with the freeze dryer. Some went into a downstairs closet. At that point, I decided . . who cares? I gave up with what we have on hand so looking for specific food isn’t easy with it in three spots and not knowing what we have. On Sundays, I’ll look at the jars, see what I see that interests me, bring that up and incorporate it into my meal plan for the week. That works fine til I really want something specific and can’t find it.
One day this week I wanted sausage sandwiches. I make a big pot of marinara, pack pint jars full of roasted sausage, add peppers and onions, the pour marinara sauce over everything. It ends up being more sausage and a bit of marinara so when I make the sandwiches, I heat up the contents of the jar, toast the buns, I put only sausage, onions and peppers on my bun, then I add pickles and cheese. Vince gets all the marinara. I could not find any jars of sausage, onions and peppers and I continued to want that all week.
Yesterday was the day to can more. I was hoping one jar wouldn’t seal so we could eat it today but, they all sealed.
Remember I can in the garage and there’s lots of Vince’s stuff in there. That’s fine but it’s not a very pretty picture. I didn’t even remember how many pints the big canner holds but it was full and the answer is 17 pints. I think there were 8 on the bottom level and 9 on the top level.
My canning plans for the coming week: First, I have a bunch of mangoes so today I will make mango salsa. Aldi had them on sale this past week so I bought enough to make two batches of salsa. I’m hoping for at least 14 half pints. I would also like to make meatballs in marinara and that can be used for spaghetti and meatballs or it can be used for meatball subs. I need to make beef bone broth. I have a couple of bags of bones in the freezer and could use the freezer space. Because the bones roast so long in the oven, I should save that til it’s cooler. OK . . talked myself out of doing that. 🙂