I’ve shared with you how I buy several vegetables, like potatoes, yams, and carrots in bulk once a month.  And for many months, I’ve been happy with my storage system.  Last month was the first time that I found some foods started to get soft spots before we could eat them, and required a lot of last minute effort to quickly use everything up before they spoiled from the heat.

I was anticipating the need to be careful about that this month, because of the heat.  But I didn’t think I’d have to worry about it so soon!  It’s been only two weeks since I bought the yams and sweet potatoes, and ten days since buying carrots.  Well, the carrots were a disaster – I think all you need is one carrot in the middle to start to rot and it gets the snowball rolling.

I probably still had 30 of the original 50 pounds left, and had to throw away several, and peel every single one that was left.  The yams weren’t quite as bad, but I saw that I was going to need to take action faster than I expected to prevent losing a lot more.

So today ended up a canning day, after pear picking.  I’m so glad that I’ve learned how to can this summer, and have the equipment to do it.  It saved the day – otherwise I would end up throwing a way a lot of produce in the next few days because it’s much more than I can use for our family’s immediate needs.

I canned two quarts of yams (I could have canned a lot more but didn’t know how much I needed to fill all the jars, and didn’t prepare enough), then didn’t have enough left to fill a quart so I stuck in some carrots to fill it up.  My canner can accomodate 7 quarts at a time, and it doesn’t take more or less time to run a large or small load, so I wanted to fill up another 4 quarts with something.  I had all of those freshly peeled carrots around, so that’s what I decided to use.

After filling one quart, though, I thought I should do something more interesting than plain carrots.  So the next quart had carrots and onions, then the next two were carrots, onions, and some chicken thrown in (I had a package that was accidentally defrosted and since I’m not planning to use it this week, this was the perfect use for it). It will make a good base for a stew or soup one busy day.

Then I pulled some meaty lamb bones out of the freezer to make a stock with.  This ended up being a good thing to do, since a short while later my husband came home with a bunch of turkey bones, and there was room in the freezer for them!  Since the potatoes are starting to sprout from the heat, I decided to can potatoes and carrots in the lamb broth, adding the pieces of lamb that came off the bones to each jar – I did 7 quarts of that.

Tomorrow’s activity will be canning all of the turkey meat from the turkey bones, and then canning it with more potatoes and the remaining carrots in the turkey stock.  It’s not exciting but it will be tasty and filling when we want to use it, and shelf stable until then.

My 7 year old daughter was hoping to help me tonight with the lamb stock, but it was too late and she had to go to bed, so she was happy to know that she could do it tomorrow.  And my 15 year old asked if he could can a batch, too.  I can only do two batches of meat or vegetables a day (fruits/pickles/jams go much faster because they require significantly less processing time), so they will be the helpers for tomorrow.  (Helpers is really understating what they do – I’ll mostly supervise and they’ll do the bulk of the work.)

For my next shopping trip, I’m not going to buy vegetables in such large amounts unless I have a plan to can or dehydrate them right away.  Especially for the carrots, I ended up not paying any less than I would have paid for a smaller amount, once I factor in those that had to be thrown away.  One thing that I look forward to about the winter is the ease of keeping vegetables fresh outside of the fridge – but there are so many wonderful things about the summer that I’m not wishing for it to be over!

Avivah

I think I’m becoming a canning maniac!  Gosh, I had fun today.  I’m getting the hang of how to can foods efficiently.

Here’s what I did today:

– cherries, 7 quarts, 2 pints

– plum jam, 4- 1/2 pints

– cherry jelly, 7 pints, 2- 1/2 pints

– ground meat, 4 pints

– spaghetti meat sauce, 6 quarts

The cherries were on sale for $1.99 lb, and true to my motto, I buy a lot of something when it’s on sale.  The kids de-stemmed them, and then puctured each one with sterilized needles, to prevent them from bursting.  My 7 year old daughter did most of the actual canning work, I just took the hot sterilized jars out for her to fill, and then put them back in the canner when they were full. 

When we prepared the cherries for canning, we had to bring them to a boil with some water in the pot.  The water became cherry juice, and rather than throw it away, I thought I could make jelly from it.  So I googled for cherry jelly recipes, and then googled again more specifically for one that used liquid pectin.  (Pectin is the ingredient that helps it gel, and I bought four boxes of it for .50 each about 18 months ago, thinking it would be a good thing to have.  It just took me longer to get around to it than I expected.  :))  For the cost of the sugar and pectin (under $3), we now have 18 pints of jelly. 

The plums were on the reduced rack for .49 lb.  I don’t usually buy soft fruit, because I won’t eat it.  But I thought it would be just right for jam, so that’s what I used it for.  I was going to make this with my 6 year old son, but he was moving very slowly and I saw that he was more motivated to do something else right then.  So he mixed the jam while it was cooking, but was around to only fill one of the four jars. The kids told me on Sunday that they don’t want me to buy store jams or jellies anymore (not that I buy them frequently anyway), since the homemade mulberry jam was so good that it’s the only thing they want to eat.  Now they’ll have a couple more homemade flavors to enjoy.  🙂

The ground meat was on sale for 3.49 lb.  Yes, I know that’s not incredibly cheap, but I don’t expect that kosher meat is going to go lower than that anymore, so I bought 8 family packs of it yesterday, each about 3 pounds.  I had my 9 year old son seperate three of the packs into smaller chunks, so that there are 12 individually wrapped packages now in the freezer.  This way I can use the amount I want without having to defrost a big package.  Three of the packages (9 lb) I cooked as crumbles.  This is how I use most of my ground meat, since it enhances a lot of dishes without having to use a lot of it.  I used chicken broth that was in the fridge as the liquid to cover it with, since it will hold the flavor well and doesn’t change the look of it, like tomato sauce would.  (Water, broth, and tomato juice are the three things recommended to use.)  That was the last thing I canned so I only had room for 4 pints in the canner, but tomorrow I’ll can up the rest.  Now it’s shelf stable and ready to be used, my own fast food!

The other 6 lb of meat I cooked up with onions, garlic, tomato sauce and paste, and seasonings, including some freshly picked oregano from the garden, to make a hearty spaghetti sauce.  Served heated over some rice (I rarely serve pasta) or spaghetti squash it will make a tasty dinner.  After canning 6 quarts, I have an additional container in the fridge to use for dinner tomorrow night.

My kitchen counter is filled with all of these jars, since they have to cool for about twelve hours before they are moved.  So far it looks like everything sealed properly except for one quart of cherries, which I popped into the fridge and will use sometime soon.  (That’s the chance you take when you let a 7 year old be responsible for it- the lid wasn’t initially screwed on securely before it was placed into the canner – but if you don’t give kids a chance to learn, which includes making mistakes, then they’ll never know how to do any more in the future than they do today.)

I looked up the state fair guidelines for entries a couple of nights ago, and we’ll be able to enter any and all of these that we want in the food preservation section of the fair.  I told my kids that anything they help with can be entered under their name (the only difference it makes is that they get the prize money if it wins a ribbon instead of me). 

My older girls were active in 4H for several years and our summers used to be very busy with them getting ready for the county and then state fair, but we haven’t been involved for a couple of years.  I think this will be nice for the 9, 7, and 6 year olds, and it won’t be nearly as busy as it used to be (the girls then entered sheep and chicken shows, sewing, baked goods of all varieties….).  We’re also going to start baking some things for the fair during our time in the kitchen, and since I’ve learned from the past, we’ll just freeze what they bake now instead of baking everything fresh for three days solid in the heat of August. 🙂

Avivah

I was up late, late, late last night.  Until 3 am.  Because I had so much food to put in the fridge, and not enough room for all of it, I had to take out the two roasted turkeys I cooked the day before. I had deboned them and put the pieces in 9 x 13 pans with the intent to can them as my first canning project the following day.  But I had to accelerate my plans so that the food I had didn’t spoil for lack of refrigeration.

I’ve been very interested in the idea of canning for quite some time.  This year, I decided I’m going to stop being interested in the idea and learn how to do it!  Four weeks ago, I bought a large number of jars from someone who was downsizing her canning since her sons were in college.  Then two different people from Craig’s List gave me some smaller canning jars.  Two weeks later, the canner I bought on Amazon arrived (Presto 23 quart size).  Several days ago, my mom picked up the canning tools kit that I was still needing.  I checked out canning books from the library and read several to get an idea of what was involved.  Plus I did bunches of online reading. 

So I was finally ready, and just in time to rescue my food from ruin.  🙂  I had a good bit of trepidation about using a pressure canner – what little I had ever heard about pressure cookers scared me and intimidated me.  But vegetables and meats have to be pressure canned for them to be safely preserved, so there was no way around it.

Since it was my first time, it was a long process.  First I had to prepare the jars, lids, heat up the turkey until it was hot, prepare stock to pour on top of the turkey – and that was before I started canning anything.  Then I filled each of the jars with turkey pieces, poured stock on top to fill the space, closed them up and when the canner was full, I closed the lid and began exhausting the steam from inside the pot.  That meant boiling it until the steam came out the top, then letting it boil another ten minutes with the steam coming through the vent hole – I think the purpose is to get rid of all the air inside.  But I might be mixed up about the whys of it. 

Anyway, after that, I put the pressure regulator on top of the vent hole, and watched the dial gauge register the pressure.  It took a few minutes for the pressure to start to build enough for the gauge to register, but it started rising steadily.  Once it hit 11 pounds of pressure, I turned the heat down and kept an eye on it to be sure it didn’t drop below that or go above that.  It took 90 minutes to process once the pressure reached the desired number.  And then when I finally could turn it off, I had to wait for the pressure to totally come down before I could open it.

So it took a long time.  It wasn’t a lot of hands on time, most of it was in preparing in the beginning, and then needing to be close by to keep an eye on it.  If this was in the middle of the day, it wouldn’t have been such a pain.  But the hour got later and later and I was exhausted before I even started – I started a little before midnight.  While I was waiting for it finish processing, my 13 year old daughter started making mulberry jam.  (I didn’t mention that after a long day of shopping, we came home, unpacked for a half hour and then took my son to his little league baseball game.  Or that right after that, we picked mulberries near the field for a half hour.  And then we finally got home and had a late dinner and eventually put most of the kids to bed before I started all of this.)

Fruit jams don’t require pressure cooking, they just need a water bath processing.  So since I had to be awake and in the kitchen anyway, after she prepared the jam and filled the jars, I sent her to sleep and put that on the stove to cook as well. 

When it was finally all done, I had seven quarts of turkey lined up on my counter, along with eight jars of jam.  It was a very satisfying sight.  And especially nice to know that this is food that will stay good indefinitely, regardless of power outtages, and ready for me to use on a busy day.  Not only that, I was able to take advantage of the turkey being on sale, when usually I would be forced to pass it by or buy less because I wouldn’t have had room for it.  So there’s a financial savings in it, too. 

Tonight I made 5 quarts of dilled carrots, using dill from our garden and baby carrots that I picked up on sale yesterday (5 lb for $2).  Remember the issue I have with insufficient fridge space?  So 8 pounds of baby carrots were transformed into a tasty side dish that won’t need refrigerating until each jar is opened.  It’s very liberating!  I have a 16 quart pot on the stove simmering with stock as I write.  Tomorrow I plan to can large jars of stock.  That way I’ll have smaller amounts whenever I need it to cook with.  I enjoy having an ever present pot of soup or stock simmering on the stove in the winter, but I welcome it less in the summer!

I’m also planning to can bean soups, beans, and chilis, and if our garden gives us enough produce, then I’ll use the extra to preserve the taste of summer vegetables for the winter.  🙂  Now I need to get lots more jars – I thought when I got 6.5 dozen large, 6.5 dozen medium, and about 5 dozen small that I would have plenty.  But they get filled up very quickly!

Avivah