After 20 years of waiting, I have finally gotten a pressure canner! I am so excited I can hardly think straight. This was my Christmas present from my husband (in addition to loving me, I think it was mostly to get me to stop bugging him about it). It’s a Presto 16 quart.
The third day, I was re-canning some of my #10 cans of food. I never wanted to open the cans because I did not want to freeze the leftovers. I processed all foods for the recommended times/pressure settings and they all turned out really nice! All except my beets. They look bleached out but one thing I noticed as I was opening up the can of pickled beets. They use high fructose corn syrup! I’ll be making my own from now on.
My first big canning project is going to be chicken. Yeah, I know. Meat first? Yup. See, we buy a lot of whole chickens and load up the freezer. Canning most of the chicken will free up that freezer space for something else.
The majority of the time, we only use whole chickens for my husband’s tacos and enchiladas. Those recipes require us to boil, then de-bone the chicken so why not cut those steps out?
So I went searching around and found this great blog:
http://lovehugsandgiggles.blogspot.com/2008/11/canning-chicken.html
Then I’ll use the bones for chicken soup. Can you tell I’m excited?
