Using Your Canner Off Season

  Wintertime is a great time to dust off your neglected pressure canner and put it to good use. While there is much work for a canner to do at harvest time, often the canner spends it's winter sitting in the pantry with the extra empty canning jars and lids. But it is possible to keep the canner gainfully employed all year round. During the summer months and into the fall the canner is usually filled with green beans, tomatoes and other produce from the garden, the winter months offer a completely different fare, vegetable soup, chili, chicken pot pie filling, venison canned from a hunting trip, taco filling, assorted dried beans... The variety is endless and the time spent in the kitchen canning will give you a convenient assortment of home cooked foods at your finger tips for busy days.

One of my favorite off season canning projects is to put up dried beans. I am a real fan of black turtle beans, and use them frequently, but pinto, garbanzo, and cannellini beans also regularly have a place on our table. Having jars of home made beans on the shelf ready for use is a big help in meal preparation, since I don't have to remember to soak and cook beans before I can prepare a meal.

 Canning beans is really very simple and the end result is far superior to what you can purchase from the store. To can dried beans first soak the beans overnight, I usually do about 10 pounds of beans at one time, but you can do whatever amount you want. Usually 1 pound of dried beans makes 4 pints of beans. So determine how many pints or quarts you want and soak the corresponding number of pounds of beans. I use a 22 quart stock kettle to soak my beans, but a dishpan would work too. Once the beans have soaked overnight cook them for 1/2 hour. If you don't have a large kettle and used the dishpan for soaking, then you will have to cook the beans in your pot in batches.

While the beans are cooking, sterilize your jars. You can steam sterilize the jars in the pressure canner, boil them, or put them in the oven at 250 degrees for 15 minutes. The flat part of the two part canning lid also needs to be boiled and then kept hot until used.

Fill the hot, sterilized jars with the beans, settling the beans as much as possible, then add 1/2 tsp. of sea salt to each pint jar or 1 level tsp. to a quart sized jar. Ladle cooking liquid into the jars. There should be about one inch of head room from the liquid and beans to the top of the jar.

With a clean damp cloth, wipe the rim of the jars thoroughly. then put the flat part of the lid on the jar and screw the band on until snug but not tight.

With the jar tongs arrange jars in the canner so that they are evenly spaced and not touching each other.  Some canners have enough room for two layers of pint jars, other canners are only tall enough for one layer of jars.

Add water to the canner until it is two inches up the side of the jars. Do Not Fill  The Canner With Water!! Put the lid on so that it locks tight and turn the heat to medium high. Leave the weight off of the canner spout and wait for the steam to start pouring out of the spout. It must spew a solid stream of steam for 10 minutes, to evacuate all the air from the canner, then put the weight on the spout and watch carefully as the psi climbs.

When the pressure approaches 10 psi, lower the heat. Adjust the heat until the canner stays consistently at 10 psi. Set a timer for 1 hour and 15 minutes for pints and 1hour 30 minutes for quarts, and watch to make sure that the canner does not go above 10 psi or drop below it. Be careful to not let the temp. go below 10 psi, if it does no matter where you are in the process, you will have to set the timer to 1 hour and 15 minutes again. This is crucial so please watch your psi gauge carefully. Once the time is up turn the heat off under the canner and let it cool completely. Do not take the weight off the spout until the gauge reads zero and the pressure stopper drops, if you do the steam may give you a serious burn and all the liquid will be siphoned out of your jars.  Do not try to cool the canner by running water over it or putting cold rags on it, just let the temperature come down on its own.

 Once the pressure stopper has dropped and the pressure gauge reads zero, it is safe to open the canner. Please be cautious, there will still be steam in the canner. Lift the jars out of the canner using the jar tongs. Do not tip the jars, pull them straight up and out, any water on the lid will run down through the lid band and down the side of the jar so put a towel on the surface where you will be placing the jars. The contents will be boiling inside the jar for awhile, so don't disturb them until the jars are cool. You will know the jars have sealed when you hear a metallic pop, and the center of the jars are pulled down tight. If you press in the center of the lid and it can be pressed down and pops back up then the lid did not seal. Test all the lids and if any of them didn't seal refrigerate them and use them within a few days. If the lids are sealed, remove the bands, then wipe the jars with a soapy cloth, dry them and write the contents of the jars and the date on the lids.

  That is all that there is to it! With just a few hours of intermittent attention, you can have a shelf full of tasty ready to eat beans, waiting for you to use in your kitchen creations!  As always I would love to hear from you, so please feel free to leave me a comment!

This post is linked to:

Clever Chick Blog Hop 129

Are You Prepared?

We are having an ice storm today. In this area, that could mean downed trees, no power, (or water for those who are on wells), and it could be days before electricity is restored. North Carolinian's are also notoriously bad drivers in inclement weather, so we will be staying off the roads... Actually there will be little reason for us to be on the roads. After Hurricane Hugo destroyed our cottage and we lived in the shell of the house for 6 months, (starting in Sept. so we spent the winter in it), I decided to never, never, never, be unprepared for an emergency again.

Hugo blew into Waxhaw, (180 miles inland), with 110 mile an hour winds, it sat over our area for hours. The winds from the hurricane were bad enough, but the storm also spawned tornadoes, at least one of which tore across our property, twisting the tops of the trees off 18 feet up the trunk and ripping our roof and siding to pieces, throwing most of it into the woods. Fortunately, we were staying with my brother that night, or we may have lost more than our house.

Extensive damage done to the power lines all over North Carolina left us with no power,(and no water), for 3 weeks. Then the day they restored power to our area, there was an accident while clearing pieces of our destroyed roof, which caused our power service to fall to the ground. An electrical crew working down the road came to help and ended up cutting the power at the pole. We were unable to get our power back until after our electrical inspection 6 months later. This meant that most of the reconstruction was done without on site power. We borrowed a generator from a neighbor when he wasn't using it, another neighbor put an extension cord over the fence for us to use, and we worked by propane lantern, using hand tools when it was necessary. With just the two of us working, (and an infant and 7 yr old that needed tending), it took us a long time to get finished enough to get inspections.

 During all this time we were living in the only room in the house that wasn't exposed to the outdoors. We all slept there, my husband, our 7 year old son and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor. The baby, who was 4 months old when the hurricane hit, slept in his crib, swaddled in snow suit, and covered in a goose down comforter. We had an old Franklin Stove that we could use to warm our hands by during the day, and I used it for cooking, but it had draw problems due to damage done to the chimney, so it smoked terribly, and wasn't safe to burn while we were sleeping. It was a long winter and an uncommonly cold one, but we managed, and I'll just say to make a long story shorter, that we all survived. We got the house closed in and had power by late April. But it still took more than 5 years before we could really say we were finished.

After that experience, it became one of my missions in life to research and procure all the things we would need to live comfortably and safely through whatever life threw at us. We now have multiple ways to heat, heat pump, propane wall units, and a wood stove. We have enough water in 55 gallon drums, treated, sealed and sheltered from the elements, to last 3 people for a month. We also have a hand-held water purifier, that will purify water from a mud puddle if necessary. A "bug out bag" is packed and ready at all times. Our camping gear is kept close at hand with lanterns, propane cook stove, sub zero sleeping bags, light weight tents, backpacks and everything we would need to set up housekeeping away from home if need be. We have a "working" pantry for daily use, a 3 month pantry, which has enough food to feed four people for 3 months, and a long term storage pantry that contains enough to feed 6 people for a year. We keep these pantries up to date and rotated and we use what we store and store what we use.

In the near future I will be doing a weekly post on Pantry Keeping and Preparedness. I will start from the beginning and outline how to get started and what to do first, from there I will have tutorials on canning, dehydrating, emergency nutrition, natural medicine, first aid, wilderness survival, foraging, non electric cooking,  packing your own food for long term storage and more.

Part of our 3 month pantry which includes freezer, canned, bottled and dehydrated foods as well as bulk medicinal herbs, staples like pasta, rice and dried beans and comfort foods like tea and organic sugar.

The world as we know it doesn't have to come to and end or manure hit the fan, for an emergency preparation plan to make good sense. Natural disasters, economic hiccups, personal financial problems, loss of a job or illness can all be very difficult to deal with if you aren't prepared both practically and financially. But if you are like the ants who put away all summer to see themselves through the winter, you can find yourself well equipped to face difficult times, without worrying about how to shelter and feed your family. Are you prepared?

Blog Hops that this post is linked to: http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/ , http://frugallysustainable.com/,