Any time I’m doing things that I love to do, I feel like everyone else should do the same things and love doing them. These days, I fully understand that not everyone loves canning but, on the other hand, I don’t understand it because it makes meals so easy when I use canned foods.
This seems backwards to me but during the summer when I’m working so much in the garden, I seem to do more cooking from scratch. Now, when there’s not so much to do outside . . really all I have to do is water in the greenhouse every day and that takes less than 10 minutes, but I want to sit and stitch or knit and it’s so easy to open a jar and heat something up vs. standing in the kitchen for an hour or more and cook something from scratch.
When I made soup to can a few weeks ago, one I made was Chipotle Beef Soup. It smelled so good while it was canning and I was excited to try it. This entire week I have quick meals planned so yesterday was soup and canned chicken wraps.
This is what I started with. By the way, that’s an older can of chicken. The “best by” date was 2016. It was perfectly fine but it’s a 13 oz. can vs. today’s 12.5 oz can. I wish I had weighed the contents because I think it had quite a bit more chicken in it than do today’s cans. Remember the weight includes all contents – chicken and liquid in this case.
I did can this soup in quarts but when I opened it, there seemed to be very little corn and there were no other veggies. I was going to add more corn but then I remembered that last year I had made hominy from dried corn and I still had a jar of it left so I grabbed that, grabbed a jar of potatoes and added those.
My crackers soaked up most of my liquid, which is how I like it but this soup was delicious. I definitely need to get more hominy made.
The wraps are so simple to make. Obviously I use mayo on mine, then Caesar salad from a bag mix, then canned chicken that has been rinsed and drained, then top with fresh basil and any seasoning you wish to add.
It looks like I’m going to have fresh basil in the greenhouse at least as long as we have “normal” temps. If the lows get down into the -20’s, I won’t be able to keep the greenhouse warm enough and we don’t have room to bring EVERYTHING inside so . . I guess that’s when we’ll see which plants are my favorites. 🙂
There was plenty of meat in the cans for Vince to have two of these, me to have one and with the can yesterday, there was extra chicken that I stuck in the fridge for later.