Once a Month Canning, Version 2.0

Last year I made an attempt at OAMC. Here’s my kick-off post for that journey. In review, I made a few different recipes that have made life easier over the past several months. The canned soups have been wonderful for lunches and quick meals when I just don’t feel like slaving in the kitchen!

I’m happy to report that the stock of soups I made last year have lasted this long! I still have a few jars each of chicken soup, beef stew and bean soup in the pantry. But they are dwindling fast! There’s nothing better on a cold Alaska work day to have a cup of hot soup & a sandwich!

Admittedly I did not actually make it canning something every month but I’m not going to let that keep me from trying it again!

I also learned that I prefer to can in “spurts”. It takes a lot of work to get prepped and drag out all of our equipment to do this task. So I tried to set aside the last and first week of a pair of months to do a larger batch of canning. Then I’m only doing all the prep work 6 or so times a year. *note to self, design new kitchen around ease of moose butchering and pressure canning.

Our family started this new year off with the gift of a salvage moose. We are extremely grateful ❤️! One of my favorite foods is canned moose meat. My Dad, of blessed memory, used to send me jars of it! The flavor is so rich and delicious and it’s so tender. Plus there’s nothing better than shelf stable, ready to eat meats. So I set aside about 14# of stew meat to process into canned meat and moose stew, & we have a wonderful assortment of healthy, hot lunch choices for the next year.

I also took some of the shorter leg bones (I need a bone saw) and made bone broth that I pressure canned. I ended up with 4 quarts and a case of pints. We use a lot of broth for soups and noodle bowls so these won’t last long! I have two leg bones reserved in the freezer for making an additional 2 gallons of broth.

Jars cleaned, labeled and ready for the pantry shelves.

During the winter months it is not unusual to have some downtime from construction work. That’s when I can dedicate more time to food preparation. I got the kiddos in on the action too. Teaching the oldest boy child how to bring the canner up to temp and maintain it. The youngest girl helped me fill jars, clean and seal them. And the Lil Guy did a lot of grinding to get that meat processed for canning recipes. They all helped prep the carrots, potatoes, celery and onions for the stews.

We used it as a learning opportunity, weighing in ounces and pounds. Measuring volume in pints and quarts. Converting recipes to maintain safe percentages of ingredients. Food preserving uses a lot of math and science skills ya know.

Since I had some time to wait for stew meat to thaw, Lil Bit and I started on the pumpkins we had to can. She cut and prepped the squash while I parboiled it and loaded the jars. I ended up with 24 pints of canned pumpkin. That will last long s a while.

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