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
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