Sunday, March 24, 2013

Canning

When I was in college I canned. It was a weird hobby for my age group, but I loved it! I had a decently sized garden and put up food for the winter. I love the taste of home canned foods, they seem to have a lot more flavor than commercially canned fruits and vegetables, and they're much cheaper. When I moved half way across the country after college I gifted all of my canning supplies to a friend since they wouldn't fit in my car, huge mistake. As a result, I haven't canned in years, until now. We decided to invest in a pressure canner for our family, hooray! We ordered a All American canner and I am so excited for it to get here on Tuesday. We decided to go with the All American canner because it doesn't have a gasket and will therefore be cheaper in the long run. The problem with an $80 pressure canner with a gasket is that it needs to have that gasket replaced every 3-5 years to the tune of $15/gasket so in the end you wind up paying more for a less durable canner. Don't get me wrong, my first canner was from a feed store and cost $65 and it worked perfectly well, but if you can afford to invest more initially in your canner I really recommend it.

The first thing I plan on canning is dried beans. We eat a lot of beans because I love them and they're cheap. Ideally I buy dried beans and soak them and cook them, but with a little one running around I sometimes don't get around to starting dinner when I intend, so it's always nice to have some canned beans on hand. Where we live a can of plain beans costs you about $.80 for the store brand, while a bag of beans costs about $3 for 5lbs.  3.5 lbs of dried beans will make about 9 pints, and a pint of beans is equal to about 2 cans of store bought beans, so doing a little math tells me that each pint will cost be about $.23, so that's quite a good savings. Even paying about $.10/lid that only brings my cost up to $.33/jar. We usually buy about 8-10 cans of beans a month, so this should save a small sum for us each month that we can put towards other things. 


Friday, March 1, 2013

Tomorrow Baby and I are going to the Southern Readiness Conference to see what there is to see. Papa won't be in attendance because of an ARNG commitment but that's okay, we'll have fun without him. I'm hoping to learn a little bit more about food rotation since I don't have the best system down right now. Currently our system works for us since we don't have a large family, but once we get into longer term storage at greater volume I'm going to need some help. Right now our food storage is a 3 month supply of foods we currently eat and I rotate through the meals bi-weekly. That sentence makes it sound like a much better system than it is, I'll post about it sometime.

I think Baby is going to be able to handle an entire day away from the house, she naps well in her stroller and if we need to scoot out for a little while we can. The only thing I worry about is having enough diapers. I've been debating on which diapers I'm going to take and I think I settled on the easier of our two options even though it's a bit bulkier to pack. We use cloth diapers with Baby and have a combination of flat, prefold, and pocket diapers and I think I'm going to take the pockets so there's no wrestling a squirmy baby while trying to pin a diaper in place. Usually Papa uses the pockets and I use the prefolds or flats with covers, but I think pockets are best for an all day outing. I'm probably way overthinking it but hey, I get to do that.

We didn't do anything to prep today really, we had a pretty relaxed day around the house and I'm about to head off to bed, goodnight everyone!