Mistakes, immortalized (follow up)

Last March I put up a quasi-humorous post in which I related how a representative from the National Agricultural Library asked permission to use a photo from one of my most notable canning mistakes as part of an exhibit.

I granted permission and then forgot all about it.

A couple of days ago, a reader reminded me of this post, asking, "Have you ever gotten the link or seen a page where your photo is to know if you made the final cut?"

Nope, totally forgot about it. So I emailed the woman who had asked me permission, and she immediately sent apologies for her oversight in not sending the final links.

The image appeared on an article about the evolution of home canning practices:

The photo is part of the "Canning Techniques" sub-exhibit.

So there ya go. One of my most dramatic canning mistakes, formally immortalized. Ta da!

Mistakes, immortalized

Some of you may remember several years ago when I (foolishly) attempted to can refried beans.

It was, to put it mildly, a catastrophic failure.

I now know refried beans are one of the foods home canners should NOT attempt to can.

Thanks to reader suggestions, I stopped trying to can refried beans, and now I just can cooked pintos, which can be whipped into refried beans in no time flat. (This is a much safer method.)

Anyway, that was several years ago. Then two days ago I received the following emai:

Dear Ms. Lewis:

I am working on an exhibit for the National Agricultural Library on the history of home canning and I would like to use one of the images from your blog post [she referenced the refried beans post]. I would be happy to give you credit and provide a link back to the original post.

Please let me know if this is something you would consider. Thanks in advance, Emily

Emily Marsh, Ph.D., MLS
Librarian | Digital Library Branch
National Agricultural Library
emily.marsh@ars.usda.gov

My reply:

Permission granted. As my husband points out (tongue-in-cheek), one of my major canning errors will thereby become enshrined in a national archive. Wheee!

So there you have it, folks. My biggest and most impressive canning blunder will be immortalized forever.

A picture is worth a thousand tasks

Consider this photo:

This photo was taken about 9 pm and represents the conclusion of a thousand tasks that occupied our day.

First, the dishes are done. Third time today.

Second, those are a bunch of tankards on the counter we're just about to card and pack for a shipment going out tomorrow. Don's been working on these all week long.

Third, that's 18 pints of canned pinto beans on the right. I soaked them overnight, simmered them for a few hours this morning, and canned them this afternoon.

Fourth, those two white upended buckets on top the jars of beans are cleaned milk buckets, because I'm milking Polly again. This is because we butchered three animals on Monday, including Polly's yearling steer calf Chuck. We castrated Chuck when he was a few days old, but apparently we didn't get "everything." He suddenly started acting like a bull. The last thing we need is another bull around the place, so when we called the butchers to dispatch two other animals, we threw Chuck in there as well. However now Polly needs to be milked twice a day, so I'm back at it.

Fifth, the pot on the stove is frying down bacon bits. I had accumulated a lot of el-cheapo bacon ends in the chest freezer. With the meat due back from the butchers in a couple of weeks, plus the fact that we now have a smaller chest freezer, space is at a premium and I need to clean it out as much as possible. I've been meaning to can up bacon bits anyway, but it takes a long time to fry everything down and drain off the fat. That pot on the stove is the third batch I've fried down today.

Bottom line: the photo above represents a LOT of work. Don and I are both wiped. I'm off to bed. Good night.

Friday Roundup

I saw this article on Drudge the other day: DOE warns 'modern life' threatened by terror, climate threats to electric grid.

It kind of surprised me that mainstream news site would address the problems with our national power grid so candidly. "The Department of Energy warns in a new report that the aging electric grid, which provides most electricity to the nation, faces threats from terrorism and storms caused by climate change that could knock out Wall Street, hospitals and the Internet if left unfixed ... In the new report, the Energy Department warns that modern life could be endangered if the grid went down. A congressional report has warned that a solar flare or terrorist attack could darken the grid for a year, during which most of those supplied by the grid would die."

Reading over the article made me want to do something preparedness-related. As such, I decided to look over the canning closet.

My canning closet, if you recall, used to be a superfluous bathroom which Don gutted and installed with shelves. (And yes, we're working on putting in earthquake bars across the shelf fronts.)

Since I'm an avid canner (actually that's an understatement -- I'm a passionate canner), I needed a dedicated space to store all our canned goods. The canning closet's original shelves filled up quickly, so Don installed additional shelving which relieved some of the space issues... although it's still cramped quarters.

But last year for some reason, I didn't do much canning. And, since we're constantly using the stocks in the canning closet, I was showing distinct "holes" in my formerly well-stocked pantry

So -- time to do some canning and fill in those holes.

Our budget is tight this month, but I have some things on standby waiting to be canned. I had this big ol' bag of bulk frozen peas that was taking up room in the freezer, so I decided to start with that.

I heated the peas...

...and started filling jars.

How many jars? I have a hand-written note in my canning book that says ten pounds of frozen peas fills about 17 jars. I washed 18 jars, just to be safe (the maximum my pressure canner holds).

In preparing my Tattler lids, it always amuses me to see a sampling of what we used up.

Pre-heating the lids and gaskets.

First layer in the canner.

Second layer in the canner.

Processed them for 40 minutes at 12.5 lbs. (for our elevation). They came out of the canner just before bedtime.

Uh-oh, now I've been bitten by the canning bug. I decided to soak, simmer, and can some pinto beans for easy refried beans. I was out of canned pinto beans in the pantry, but I had a ten-pound bag of dried beans waiting for me. I can only can five pounds at a time, since five pounds of beans comes out to around 17 or 18 pints, canned.

I soaked them overnight...

...then let them simmer for several hours the next day.

All canned up and ready to store.

I took a quick inventory of the canning closet, and here are some of the things I want to stock up on:

• Bacon bits
• Chicken breasts
• Carrots
• Peaches
• Pizza sauce
• Mustard
• Chicken stock
• Chili
• Mushrooms

As I said, we're on a tight budget this month, so I'll stick with canning up stuff we already have on hand, such as the rest of the pintos. That's the best way to stock a pantry: not with massive one-fell-swoop activities, but little incremental steps.

It occurs to me I haven't posted much lately on the topic of preparedness, so it might be worth putting more emphasis on the subject. The reason this post is called "Friday Roundup" is because I want to start a new Friday habit of posting whatever we've done during the week (big or small) that inches us toward increased self-sufficiency or self-reliance.

And since everyone's circumstances and situations are different (meaning, we can all learn from each other), I invite everyone to pitch in during Friday Roundups to explain to other readers what steps you took during the week -- remember, big or small -- toward preparedness.

This may also encourage people to do something, anything, that may prove helpful if, like the article above suggests, the power grid goes down.

So... what's your Friday Roundup?

Busy busy busy

Man oh man it's been a busy day.

As usual, my morning started around 5:30 am. By 7:30 I was out feeding Samson and two cows (the cows belong to a neighbor, they're getting bred by our bull) who are in the bull pen.

Washed and hung four loads of laundry on the indoor clothes racks.

I also canned thirteen pints of pinto beans (for making refried beans).

I canned these 18 pints of chicken stock yesterday.

Don was in the shop most of the late morning and afternoon, cutting tankard sides for a production run of 150 pieces or so. He brought them in in batches of 50, and the girls taped them up, ready for gluing.

Trust me, these are intimidating piles.

It was also my turn to bring snacks for church tomorrow, so I made a quadruple batch of shortbread cookies.

We're also hosting our neighborhood potluck tomorrow, and I decided to make chicken strips. Here Younger Daughter is crushing saltine crackers into crumbs.

Three cookie sheets of chicken strips, ready to go into the freezer until tomorrow's dinner.

Meanwhile Older Daughter made pizza dough since we were planning pizza for dinner.

She also made a hearty batch of steeped iced tea.

Don glued up one of the piles of tankards.

Later I glued up another pile. We got a bit less than half the tankards glued.

The girls split watering the garden (a two-hour process) since I was so busy in the house).

Here's the risen pizza dough.

From this, we made three pizzas -- two tomato...

...and one pesto. This will provide us with breakfasts and lunches for a couple of days.

Can't forget evening chores: feeding livestock, feeding and watering chickens, topping off all water tanks.

I don't know about you, but I'm pooped. Once this glass is empty, I'm off to bed.

G'night.

Canning refried beans the SMART way

It happened again.

We had a Mexican food night at our neighborhood potluck, but I foolishly neglected to check the number of cans of refried beans I had on hand. Crud. One small can, that was it. No time to buy any more.

For us, we can't just "dash" to the grocery store whenever we're low on something. We have to plan for it. A "dash" takes half an hour, minimum, so I try to "dash" as little as possible.

But the fact remained, I only had one small can of refried beans, and the guests were arriving. So... we did without a lot of refried beans. Something had to change.

Besides, it bugs me to buy refried beans. We eat a fair bit of them in our house and so my natural inclination is to make and can my own. Making refried beans is easy enough to do, but it's time-consuming (in other words, not something you should attempt when guests are arriving on your doorstep). However canning refried beans is not only a challenge, but I also learned that they're one of those things home-canners should not attempt because of their viscosity.

Ahh... but thanks to you, my dear readers, I realized that all I had to do to "can" refried beans was to can up whole pinto beans. Canned pintos are easily mashed into refried beans. Duh, now why didn't I think of that before?

So I raided my pantry and came away with five pounds of beans.

I poured them into a pot...

...and filled it with water.

Then I set the pot back and just let the beans soak for twenty-four hours. The beans will swell, so I made sure to add enough water to keep them covered.

By the next morning the beans had swelled to many times their original volume.

So I poured off the soak water...

...added fresh water...

...and put the pot on the stove to boil.

Once the beans were boiling...

...I put the pot on the woodstove to simmer gently all day long. The house smelled rich and bean-y.

In the evening, I washed some pint jars.

The beans were beautifully soft, and the cookwater was rich. Make a note: Add more water next time to make more cookwater.

My canner holds 18 pints, so I divvied the beans between those 18 pints. My canning book doesn't recommend filling the beans to the absolute top of the jars, so I didn't try to cram the beans in.

I began filling jars.

I ended up draining the beans over a pot (to catch the cookwater) so I wouldn't miss any.

When the beans were divvied up between the eighteen pint jars, it was time to fill them with the cookwater. This is why I'd wished I'd used more water, to get more volume.

The cookwater was so thick it was like a thin sauce.

I portioned it out among the 18 pints and juuuuust managed to get them mostly full. This is why I'd wished I'd added more water. In a pinch I could have topped things off with plain water, but I decided not to since the jars were juuuust full enough. I'll know better next time.

Scalding my lids and gaskets.

Adding rings.

First layer in the canner.

Second layer in the canner.

Dried (but soft) beans need to can (in pint jars) for 65 minutes.

While the beans processed, I cleaned the kitchen and then indulged in a glass of wine.

They came out of the canner just before I went to bed, but the morning sun shone on eighteen pints of freshly-canned pinto beans.

To turn pinto beans into refried beans, just blend with a mixer, add spices, and either eat as is or fry them a bit.

This is the kind of "convenience" food I like having in my pantry -- something I can make myself and not feel the need to dash to the grocery store at the last minute.

Thank you to everyone who suggested this!