Well I'm recovering, finally, from the swine man swamp flu! I still have a cough hanging on. The canning came to a near screaching halt, John took 4 days off from work but the reality is 1. I'm more organized than he is, which isn't saying much btw, and 2. there was way more that needed canning than one person could do alone! He did get a dozen or so pints of pear butter put up and a dozen or so quarts of tomatoes canned. I'm feeling better but not by much, a simple drive across town and back still wears me out and I need a nap just to recover from the experience. To make matters worse I have a show coming up this weekend and I"m no where near being ready for the event. More later from the kitchen!!!
French Onion Soup
Black Bean Soup - canned
Soaked black beans that have been drained and rinsed. Partially cooked pork butt roast - it's ok to partially cook as it will be pressure canned for 90 plus minutes under 10 +/- pounds of pressure which yeilds a very tender meat.
I love this old jar it unfortunately had a chip in the rip and I didn't catch that so the jar didn't seal. I guess I have no choice but to take it to my studio and store buttons and beads in it now!
Fill the jars half way with black beans. I soaked the beans for two days, draining and rinsing them once a day.
Top off with pork broth, I had broth left over from roasting the meat, or just warm water.
Black Bean Soup ready to be pressure canned.
We had left over pork so we canned it up in quart jars (made two quarts) and canned it along side the Black Bean Soup. In retrospect I should have put the meat into pint jars. Oh well it'll make excellent bbq pork!
Black bean soup with pork - canned at 10 pounds of pressure for 110 minutes (I forgot to shut it off in time). Canned pork (from a pork butt roast) NOTE: It is better to store your jars with the rings off, one removing them ensures that the jars are indeed sealed properly and two the rings cannot rust to the jars which is a common problem esp. in humid areas.
More Chicken
I canned up some more chicken last night - this makes the most excellent chicken salad sandwiches! I'm really getting into canning my own convience foods I haven't been able to really eat any for years now due to food allergies - apparently after dozens of allergy tests I'm allergic to the vitamins that most foods are fortified with, so here's to a tasty sandwich!!!
Bean Soup
Dh and I made Bean Soup tonight, canned up 14 quarts to be exact. I'm anxious for it to be done as I hear something cracking inside of the canner and I'm worried one of the jars has broke, this could be interesting.
One third cup of beans in the bottom of the jars.
One third cup of beans in the bottom of the jars.
Penny Pinching Dinners
Tonights dinner special was ramen noodles with chicken and mixed vegetables, total cost $2.81 for two people! Not bad. Now had we chosen to not add the canned chicken and the veggies and eaten just the noodles total cost would have been $0.36 I used two noodle packets but used only one of the seasoning packs - saved the other for some other day. I rinsed the vegetables three times to get rid of that salty canned flavor they always have the end result was quite tasty.
They Say...
Canned Butter
We finally tried a jar of the home canned butter and it was actually pretty good. It was missing something and I'd have to say that it is the salt since I canned the unsalted butter. It was creamy just like stick butter.
I used a double boiler to melt my butter, I've heard tales of it being gritty but they didn't have a double boiler which leaves me to believe heat is the culprit. Shelf life is about 3 years, I'd say that's stretching it a bit, more like a year and a half to two years. Ours won't last that long so it's not a problem.
New Can Goods Cubbard
One of the down sides to living in a very old victorian home is the lack of storage. John built a cubbard for our canned goods, I should say the food we've been canning ourselves! There are some blank spaces but they should be filled by the end of the week.
I have peach chutney to make tomorrow, more butter that needs to be canned and more pickles than one could ever imagine having - the christmas pickles are the ones I'm most excited about very similar to lime pickles but you add red hots and cinnamon to the pickles just before you process them!
Canned Butter
I used the recipe that was in backwoods home magazine, the one written by Jackie Clay, and the butter turned out wonderful! I used unsalted sweetened butter for my first batch, I will add that it only made 9 half pints and I used three pounds of butter, I should have come up with at least 10 half pints.