Dry pack soup

So, my friend Deruchette is in charge of the extra Relief Society meetings in her ward and recently they did an activity where they used Food Savers to dry pack dehydrated food into glass jars. They made two different soups so that they could have a fast and shelf-stable meal. Before returning the last Food Saver, we decided to do a few more.

We had a lot of the items already but had to get some dehydrated corn, peppers and celery. Luckily our Wal-Mart carries some food storage items like these.


We measured our ingredients...

Hooked the jars up to the Food Saver...

And ended up with a bunch of soup. We even dry packed the extra dehydrated foods.

I had a dream after this that brown sugar was on sale and I bought a ton so I could dry pack it and store it forever. Too bad it was only a dream.

Sometimes I'm domestic...

I love to can, as most of you know. I also love getting a good deal on groceries. I have used Bountiful Baskets a few times and I really like it. Recently, I bought 12 pounds of strawberries from them for $8. Screaming deal. I have lots of freezer jam from last year, so I decided to can some. We already opened one of the half pints and it is yummy!


This is a glorious meal we made a few weeks ago. Sweet Pork (Costa Vida copy cat-Thanks, Tina) with black beans, rice, homemade mango salsa with cheese and sour cream. Yum! We also made a yummy fruit salad (Thanks again, Tina) made with jello and cool whip with strawberries, grapes, pineapple and mandarin oranges.

Canning Butter...yes, canning butter!

This is AWESOME! I didn't even imagine being this was possible until Christmas when Silas bought be this great cookbook: The Essential Food Storage Cookbook by Tami Girsberger and Carool Peterson.

So my BFF Chette and I had a fun afternoon canning butter a few weeks ago...and here's how it went.

First you need BUTTER. I got mine on sale for $1.24 a pound which is a GREAT deal. A Wal-Mart it is normally over $2 a pound.

Next, you need canning JARS. A little less than one pound fits in a pint jar, but we also used half-pints.

HEAT jars in the oven at 200 degrees.

Boil jar lids and rings.

Melt butter on MEDIUM heat.

Here is some all melted...

Use a hot pad to remove warm jar from oven. Using a funnel, pour the melted butter into warm jar. Place boiled lid and ring on jar. Set aside.

This is the best part. Jars will seal BY THEMSELVES within a few minutes. Leave them alone until they reach room temperature.

Once your jar is at room temperature, place in the refridgerator. Every 20 mintues for one hour, shake the jar. This will prevent the butter from seperating. Once the hour is up, your canned butter should be solidified or close to that. Remove from fridge and place in a cool, dry place. Shelf life: 2 years.

(My cookbook says that they have some that's 6 years old and it's still good.)

This is our load. We canned 12 pounds of butter and we got 9 pints 10 half-pints total.

Chicken, chicken everywhere!

You can't see how many there are, but I canned 29 pints of chicken yesterday. There was a sale on chicken at Lin's, a local grocery store and so I bought 40 lbs of chicken, frozen some and canned about 30 lbs. Isn't it beautiful! (Cleod took the photo by the way.)