session #2, and the ugliest cake award goes to.......

Session two of the canning attempts found Brad and I defrosting and cutting up raw chicken, and packing it tightly into quart jars. Jars that I'd handwashed in hot bleach water first to sanitize. Toss a 1/2 tsp of salt on top, screw on a warm and gummy (but don't touch) lid, then 7 jars to the pressure canner. 75 minutes later and and overnight cooling off, and we ended up with cooked, canned chicken. Perfect for quick chicken salad, casseroles, soups.....oh and the broth is delish to cook our rice in or use as the base of a soup. Mmm, or chicken and dumplins. We have a lot more to go to ensure at the end of next year I don't have lots of chicken that is freezer burned in my deep freeze.

Now I just have to get over how stinkin' UGLY that cooked chicken is in those jars!! Don't deny that you agree with me here.

Oh, and you should truly get a look at this cake the kids and I made. Eris picked the cake mix from my stash, Golden Yellow I think it was. But we were out of frosting, which is no biggie when you have a lot of powdered sugar on hand....just google a recipe for frosting and whip up a batch. Can't be hard, right? Well, this recipe called for melting a stick of butter and allowing it to brown. Do you know what happens QUICKLY to butter if left to brown just seconds too long?? The frosting tastes DIVINE I have to say! One of a kind! But it looks like GRAVY! We're calling this our 'Biscuits and Gravy Cake', because plated, that's exactly what it looks like! One giant biscuit covered with peppered gravy.

Good grief, my kitchen skills lack! Bon apetit baby! lol

We Can Can

I'm still alive, mommying, wife-ing, selling, traveling, being a taxi, working, etc. Just not blogging. I'm exactly what you expect of me! lol


This week for family home evening, we learned how to can - a 'test run' if you will. Preparing for when our garden is overflowing with produce and it will be necessary. Tonight we bought approx. 10 lbs of green beans at the local farmer's market, borrowed my mother-in-laws pressure canner thingy (I think it's now on permanent loan at my house), and went to work. Ella Grace, Ethan, Brad, and I all snapped beans for an hour as we watched WipeOut. Ehren just snacked on raw beans, and Eris was staying the night at her friend's house. We talked of preparedness, of what the prophets have been teaching for decades, of how our family can work on being more prepared together, of where we will store more food/items in our home, of how we plan to keep it organized and how we hopefully will add to it.

It was a lengthy process, I'm still not sure how you are supposed to have everything hot and boiling at the SAME TIME (according to the little directions book from 1968 that remains in the box of the MIL's canner), but in the end, our green beans were finally released to begin their cooling off period around midnight. I was happily surprised to find that all the seals had set properly come 8am! Yay for test round 1! Now onto canning chicken!!

**Yes, last Sat I did make a 3am run to Corydon, IN with 3 girlfriends from church for cases of frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts at $1.50/lb. My deep freeze is chock full of 120 pounds of poultry - and I plan to can a couple cases worth so it's not freezer burnt in a year! Otherwise I'd be feeding chicken to my family so often they'd complain of feathers growing out of their backsides......just ask Brad! He's complained of that before in our marriage! lol