Canning and other such things.

So we have been doing a little canning over the last few weeks. Two types of meat, and some free apples that turned into delicious applesauce. It's not mushy. No body likes mushy applesauce!

First off, BACON!
This was an experiment with a friend of ours that had gotten some precooked ready to eat bacon. By some, we'll just go with a whole metric ton. By gotten, it worked out to be $.65 a package.

Now, we know what you are thinking, "Precooked, ready to eat bacon?" Yes, exactly. Turns out, this is not actually blasphemous to real bacon. It was pretty tasty and not slimy like we had expected. We packed our pressure canner, into the truck and headed off to the "city" to our friends house, where the bacony goodness began.

The packages had I think 12 oz or bacon in them separated by sheets of wax paper. Made the jar packing job much easier since we didn't have to mess with cutting paper and layering bacon on them. We pulled the bacon out of the packages and stacked them into a pan. We decided that 5 sheets of bacon was the magic number that would roll into the shape of a quart size jar. We rolled them up and stuffed them into the jar, then added another 5 sheets rolled up and stuffed on top. For the mathematically challenged, that is 10 sheets of bacon, with 4 pieces per sheet, so 40 pieces of bacon per jar. In total we canned 14 quarts of bacon, it was one of the most delicious smelling experiments we have done. In case you are wondering, they are only upside down because we were playing with the grease.

We also came home with a tire to make a tire swing for the kids. Plus a "quiet" pellet gun for Kal to take hunting to encourage squirrels to be quiet, for good.

The bacon was canned 1 week ago today, so we had to test it out. We decided that if it would keep for a week, it would keep for a month or longer. Lilly has been counting down the days until B-Day (Bacon-Day) where Lilly and the rest of the Kalina family would storm the beaches of Porkandy and deliver a crushing blow to the ranks of the Piggy Army. Kal actually had to tell Lilly. "If you say bacon and cheese quesadilla's one more time, you get a peanut butter sandwich while we all eat the bacon." She complied.

Step 1: Grab jar of bacon and open it with Lilly at your heels.

Step 2: Chop it into pieces, with Lilly hovering.

Step 3: Add it onto a tortilla with some cheese and spices with Lilly drooling close by.

Step 4: Throw on griddle with some butter and smack Lilly's hand with a flipper thingy.

Step 5: Make them disappear.
(Insert picture of empty plates here)



Second off, APPLESAUCE!
We were given a mess of apples so we had to turn them into delicious "not mushy" applesauce. Pretty standard stuff here really. Peel apple. Chop apples. Place in pot, add a bit of water, some sugar, and a few cinnamon sticks and cook them down. During this process of cooking down the apples, you can pass the time by having a discussion with your teenage daughter about boys. FUN!!! This diversion, was not much of a diversion at all.

Step 1: Peel and feed them to woodland creatures that you are trying to put in your freezer, more on that later.

Step 3: Yes I know I skipped one, but you get the idea. Cook them down for hours while talking about purity and that boys should treat girls as princesses of The King. It doesn't make the apples cook down any quicker.

Step 4: Fill jars with delicious applesauce, not mushy.
Step 5: Water bath time. Run a nice hot bath in a canner. Put on some relaxing jazz music, grab a glass of your favorite brew, and just kick back and relax. Or, just put the jars in boiling water for about 20 minutes.

Third off, VENISON!
So Friday morning Kal got his first deer of the year. Wootity woot woot! (so says Becca)

He was a good size buck that earned us quite a bit of meat. Tonight we underwent the chore of turning legs, rib cage, assorted other hunks of flesh into delicious MEAT! We turned the back strap and tenderloin into steaks. Thirty six steaks went into the freezer, 9 went into the pan for supper and 6 were carved off yesterday for lunch during the mid day hunting break. Gabe was waiting all evening, not patiently at all, to run the grinder and "burgerize" the meat into hamburger. Being that with this deer we wanted to try our hand at canning some we only put up 8.5lbs of hamburger, guess Kal better get some more! We canned 8 quarts and 8 pints of cubed meat as well. Also have three full packages of ribs, for Sadie's birthday meal.

It's pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the full process right now of how to turn a deer into dinner, but I can later if ya'll want. Pretty much just cut the meat into chunks and stuff into a jar. We used quart jars so we added a tsp of canning salt on top of the meat and put a lid on it and pressure can for 90 minutes at 15 lbs of pressure.. You can add some onion flakes too, that Grandpa doesn't know are in there. LOL

A little before and after action for ya. The bubbles are only there because they were just out of the canner and it was still boiling.

Well, that covers this post for the night. Later Kal will be doing a write up on his "bear crack" that he attempted to lure a black bear in with.