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.