Why I Can Everything

Yesterday in a comment, someone asked for the benefit of canning rice. There are many reasons why I can things. I do NOT like freezing food. Yes, our freezers are full but that is definitely not my favorite method for preserving anything that can be canned. Reasons for my dislike of the freezer are power outages and even with a whole house generator, unless you have an uninterrupted source of fuel, I would not count on having that generator going long term. We all have different thoughts but I figure any time I’m dependent on something beyond my control, there’s some risk of loss. Whether it’s moving and having to empty out the freezers for a week or two until we were set up at a new location, a power outage, a machine malfunction, etc. Once food is safely canned in jars, it’s pretty much there for the duration. We’ve moved many jars from Kentucky to Missouri to Texas and back to Missouri and we’ve never had even one broken jar as far as I can remember.

• Seasonal items – Things like green beans, peas, asparagus, beets, and especially fruits, that we grow, I will can as much of those as possible just to have them when they’re not in season.
• Sales – Back in the distant past, I would find meat on sale, buy it and can it. I don’t have a problem at all eating canned foods that are 3 – 5 years old. In fact, within the past year I found a jar of taco soup from 2013. Don’t ask me how that got buried but we ate it and it tasted fine and we didn’t get sick.
• Length of time food stays good – We usually buy a whole cow every two to three years. I don’t like leaving anything in the freezer more than a year so I can as much of that meat as I can. With the beef, I will can or freeze ground beef just as ground beef, I will can roasts and sirloin steaks in beef broth. I will make meals, such as this, that are ready to open, heat and eat.
• Time Savings – there are days – too many of them, when I get busy and don’t even notice that it’s almost time to eat and then it’s either come up with something quickly or go out and since we would much rather eat at home than go out, all I have to do is grab a few jars and dinner can be served in minutes.
• Traveling – If we’re going somewhere, whether it’s to my uncle’s in Louisiana or renting a cabin on a lake for a few days, I can pack up two cases of home canned foods and we can pretty much eat for week without having to go out. If there’s some place we WANT to go (like the fish truck is in town! <G>), we would do it but my uncle is kind of a picky eater and his lake house is pretty far from good restaurants, if we’re renting a cabin somewhere, we don’t like leaving the dogs in a strange place and eating places can be far away so taking home canned food is perfect.
• Power Outage – It’s so quick to open a jar, heat it up and serve it. Sometimes it really only takes a few minutes.

Take the black rice for example – It takes less than an hour – probably 45 minutes max, to rinse the rice, fill the jars, can it and get it on the counter to cool before putting it in the pantry. I’ll just say one hour – in that hour, I canned 15 pints of rice. If I were to cook rice from scratch for dinner, by the time I rinsed the rise, cooked it on the stove, it would take close to 45 minutes, then have a rice pot to wash. Now, I open a jar, dump it in a small skillet with a little broth or water, heat it for about 5 minutes, cover it with a lid for a few minutes while everything else finishes up. I can rinse the jar and stick it in the dishwasher, rinse the skillet, wipe it out and it’s clean.

If we were going on a trip and wanting to take foods in jars, here’s an example of what I might take:

Breakfast:

• Freeze Dried in vacuum sealed jars: Eggs, ham, Buckboard bacon, diced potatoes, grated cheese
• Canned: Breakfast Sausage, jams or jellies
• Vacuum Sealed Jars: Pancake mix, biscuit mix

For breakfasts, we could have pancakes, scrambled eggs, omelettes, Dutch baby, egg bites, biscuits with sausage gravy. About the only thing we cannot have with freeze dried eggs would be fried eggs because the eggs are beat up before pouring into the freeze dryer trays.

Dinner: There are so many choices for dinners. Depending on how many days we would be eating in, I would bring a jar of meat for each day and a couple of veggies for each day.

Another good thing is that whatever we don’t use, we just pack it up, bring it home and add it back to the pantry.

I hope that gives those of you wondering why I do the canning an idea of how things work in my head.