I Dare You To Eat It

18 years of serving in the Young Women’s organization, twice as ward president, helping all four of my older girls achieve their goals, and I never HAD TIME to complete my own Personal Progress. D*U*M*B, D*U*M*B, DUMB DUMB DUMB! (Card family cheer)

But I’m working on it now, with my 13 year old, and it’s a great experience. My 10 hour project for Knowledge has been to learn how to pressure can meat.  

!!!

Last Saturday I bought about 30 pounds of boneless pork spare ribs, from Costco. (Side note: DO NOT GO TO COSTCO THE SATURDAY BEFORE MOTHER’S DAY. EVER.)

My plan is to have all the lovely bottles of precooked pork ready and waiting on the shelf when it’s time to serve my version of Cafe Rio sweet pork to the masses.

I also bought seven roasted chickens because they seemed to be even cheaper than than the fresh whole chickens, and needed much less cooking.

(So many things to do with canned chicken.)

The next step was to boil the pork. This took about an hour and a half because there was a ton meat.

I also decided to speed boil the roasted chickens. A dip in the bubbly made the meat fall off the bones, plus I needed the chicken broth. My dear friend, Linda taught me that it’s a super good idea to purchase a fresh pair of rubber gloves so that I could handle all this meat while it was still steaming hot. Linda also suggested that the meat be prepared ahead of time so that it could chill in the fridge, at least overnight, making it much easier to skim off the extra fat from the broth.

On Monday I went to Linda’s house for the actual processing. She’s such a great mentor and always a riot. After quickly reheating the meat and broth we added 1 teaspoon of salt to each jar and packed the meat into the bottles. Linda was amazed, even shocked, at how well I could pack in the food. Years of practise.

Then we slid a…skinny…spatula thing down the sides of each bottle setting free hidden air bubbles, topped it off with hot broth, added the lids, screwed on the rims, and loaded the pressure canner. Each batch of 7 quarts took about 90 minutes to process.

So now I finally know how to do what I’ve always considered to be an awesome trick! And believe me, I’m going to feel pretty dang tricky about 6 weeks from now when I’m hosting 50 friends and family for dinner prior to Rosie leaving on her mission to Arizona. It’s GREAT to know that all that shredded pork (oh my) for the Cafe Rio salads is ready to go and only needs to be heated with salsa and brown sugar added. I love having it preserved in bottles because the meat is not taking up all the space in my freezer. It means I still have room to store the 35 cups of black beans, and piles of cilantro rice, and whatever else I need to buy.

Work is work. But for me, and my crazy schedule, it just works better to do as much as I can ahead of time. Hey, can anyone direct me to some great instructions on pressure canning dried beans? With pictures? Please?

 Thanks friends!