Shortly after Thanksgiving, we had a thaw! The snow that had been on the ground, making chores hard, melted! But, the melt also gave me a problem.
I had purchased 80 pounds of chicken at $1.50ish a pound, and had only been able to fit TWENTY of those pounds in the freezer. So the other 60 were in my “outdoor cache” on the front deck.
In the winter, we are sort of an island unto ourselves. No one comes up here. So I spread out, and utilize the great outdoors, as off-grid people do. It’s sort of like a giant freezer! LOL! I just have to secure it from the animals. (mainly racoons and bear)
With the thaw, I had a massive problem. My frozen chicken started to thaw too. I was expecting it to be fine until February, but, no, now I needed a way to get it preserved so it would stay good, WITHOUT freezer space.
It took a couple of days for me to figure out what to do about this problem. Then it finally hit me: I should CAN the chicken.
This is my first year using a pressure canner. Before this, I had only used the hot water bath method, which doesn’t work for meat. BUT, now that my mother-in-love had passed her pressure canner on to me, I could attempt such a thing.
This was one of the most successful things I have ever canned. 60 pounds of boneless chicken fills 24 quart jars. 🙂 It took 4 rounds in the pressure canner, at 1 1/2 hours each round! So it took 2 days to complete all 60 pounds. But at the end of it I had not only saved my chicken, but filled my canning shelves! 😀
The battle against not wasting food is, unfortunately, a common one around here, and we don’t always win. Just before Thanksgiving, Emily asked me to buy broccoli so she could make beef and broccoli. Well, that broccoli didn’t fit in the fridge until all of the Thanksgiving leftovers were eaten, and by then the broccoli had aged a bit.
When she went to make it, she was not happy with the way the broccoli looked. Something about tiny bits of mold was disturbing to her.
But, true to form, she bounced back from this dilemma with the statement, “I guess we’ll just have beef and broccoli STEMS for dinner tonight!” And then that’s what she made.
It was very good. :)n
In other news, the black-eyed susan vine I planted back in February has been blooming! Its a beautiful splash of continuously blooming flowers to remind us that spring will come!
These guys were from a few plants I had grown to transplant outside, but before I got them transplanted, they started wrapping around things, and I let them go. I’m happy I did! 🙂
My final mentionable accomplishment was I completed baby afghan #2 for my Etsy site! I also decided afghan #1 will go to the pregnancy center, to encourage a mama with something beautiful for her coming baby, so #2 is the first actual stocked afghan in my shop. 🙂