Wait a minute …Doesn’t canning happen with harvest? Like fall time? Yup. But it also happens whenever a surplus of empty jars coincides with a big sale on frozen chicken breasts. Jess had me pick up some meat on Monday, and when I got home on Wednesday there were 25 quarts of canned chicken (and beans; she likes to pre-cook beans for her recipes) ready to go down into the root cellar.

Of course sometimes we will go through that many jars of canned food in a single week. (Remarkable, isn’t it? Almost as if we had seven children.) At that rate the pantry can fill up pretty fast with washed and empty jars. We tranfer the empty jars back down to the root cellar, but with hundreds of jars to store, that fills up too. So Jess likes to keep the jars circulating. And canned chicken and canned beans are a great first step for a hot supper, too.

Since beans start out hard and chicken starts out raw, you have to pressure can them for a certain amount of time to make sure they’re safe. Jess has the Ball canning book that imparts all those secrets. I know that if you don’t can meat correctly you can get salmonella or other nasties; but as far as I can tell none of us has died yet from eating home-canned meat.

You’ll note the jars of chicken appear about half full. They start out full; when she’s canning, she slices the chicken breasts into strips the long way and packs ‘em in. But they cook down to the quantity shown here. And since we don’t eat a ton of meat, one jar half-full of cooked chicken is plenty for a big supper for all of us, plus the portion I’ll tote to work next day for lunch.