Yay, Me!

For years, I have been afraid to pressure can. I have visions of exploding metal canisters, shards of glass flying around like little shrapnel bombs, and third degree steam burns all around. Not to mention food stuck to the ceiling and imbedded in the walls.

But when you don't pressure can, it means that you can't preserve things like canned beans or canned corn, or canned chicken or beef, or homemade soups. While you can freeze all those things, sometimes you might just, you know, forget to defrost them and then, you have no dinner. Or you forget that they are in the freezer, until one day something shifts and you can't cram the ice cream back in & still shut the door, and you are swearing and muttering and hauling mystery packages out, all bearing a heiroglyphic label and a date sometime in the last century. Given that I am the kind of girl who is prone to not defrosting things, and subsisting on cheese and crackers and booze when dinner plans go south, it would help me have variety (and healthiness) in my average daily diet to, oh, I don't know...actually CAN things that I can pour into a pot, heat up, and eat. Tin-can cooking, homestyle.

Earlier this summer, I bought a canner. It was too complicated, too intimidating, too many strange instructions to do essential things like "time the rocking". What rocking? Time it with what?? Nobody said I needed a damn stopwatch to pressure can. So, I chickened out, never took the thing out of the box, and turned it in for a slightly smaller model with a clearly readable pressure gauge. No rocking. No timing. Just "watch the gauge and adjust heat to maintain XX pounds of pressure for XX minutes". Hey, I can handle those kind of instructions!

The new-and-improved canner lived on the porch, in its box, for a month. I kept moving it around, to make room for various other things.

Yesterday, I decided "that's it." I was going to conquer this fear, dammit. So, I took myself to the farmers market and bought 5 pounds of fresh green beans from a lovely Hmong family. (Yes, I planted beans, too, but I think the rain has caused the blossoms to fall off & no beans to form.) I spent time yesterday evening cleaning and popping the ends off and breaking them into inch-or-so long pieces. This morning, after hauling chickens for processing, I heated jars & boiled water & packed 10 pints full of little beans. I admit, I was feeling the fear when the pot heated up and began making all these mysterious hissing noises....but after reading (and rereading) the instructions about 10 times, it appears that hissing and spitting and strange buzz-humm-grumbly noises are actually normal. Normal. Well then. No need to fear, no imminent explosions are going to happen.

So after reaching the needed 11 pounds of pressure and maintaining it for the required 20 minutes, and then letting the whole sheebang cool down for an hour or so, I now have canned beans, that look correct and are making the "happy pingy" noise that all canners find secretly delightful.

Next up, watch the Amazing Cris create canned chicken in the blink of an eye....bwah hah hah hah hah!