And what I wanted to do was reassure readers that there is nothing you can’t do with a kitchen stove that you cannot do with a grill, gas or charcoal. Now, the DH really made me work for this; I wanted him to put the grill in the entry to the garage so that frankly I’d be out of the wind and the snow (it’s in the mid-20s here and windy today), but he said I had to play it straight so that people would know that even under brutal conditions, this could be done. Well, I don’t know how brutal the conditions were (I kept getting smoke in my eyes, which is why I look sooooo happy there in the videos – I’ll bet Martha Stewart doesn’t have anyone telling HER she has to do demos the hard way), but I picked two things to illustrate just how easy doing this can actually BE: baking bread and making a fritata with potatoes, veggies, eggs and cheese.

A couple of notes and tricks here:
1) Again, don’t bring any grill into your house to cook on under emergency conditions. Period. It’s nice if you can do this on the deck and out of the wind but I did this under wind with a bit of snow. Can be done.
2) Don’t use pots and pans with bakelite(tm) or wooden handles – even if you do not have open flames, you are working with extremely hot coals and those two substances will burn and melt. My bread pan is made of Pyrex(tm) – I covered the outside with aluminum foil and greased the inside. The frying pan is an extremely long-in-the-tooth cast aluminum pan whose handle bit the dust many years ago. Again, I greased it heavily on the inside and also mixed a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in with the chopped up veggies that went into the fritata.
3) Don’t forget the hotpads and oven mitts.
4) If your grill has a temperature gauge, this is great. We started cooking the fritata ingredients when the gauge read 275 degrees, but again, the temperature at the ‘business end’ of the grill (that is, inside the pan) is not necessarily going to be the same; I’m sure it was much higher than 300 given how fast everything cooked. The breadpan was on the upper ‘indirect’ cooking area, both raising and cooking at the same time. After the fritate was done, I moved it to the center, where it would be warmer for the final cooking and browning. The bread was only there for 15 minutes before it was completely baked and brown on the top.
5) If your grill does not have a temperature gauge, use a probe if you have one. If not, use the ‘count to three’ test. If you can hold your hand about 6″ over the grill and it’s hot enough that you can only hold it there for a count of three, the fire is hot enough to cook with. Bank the coals down to a bed.
6) Some other ideas for cooking on the grill if you have:
A heavy cast iron or cast aluminum Dutch Oven with a metal or Pyrex(tm) lid: soup, stew or chili. And once it’s done, you can move the pot over to the side to keep it warm for hours.
A heavy cast iron or cast aluminum griddle: eggs, English muffins from scratch, pancakes, Mexican foods, stir fry.
A heavy aluminum saucepan with either a Pyrec(tm) or a metal lid – you can use this for anything that requires cooking in or heating up liquid: water for coffee or tea, soup, pasta and rice.

There are people out there who take every opportunity to do what is euphemistically called “camp cooking”, and have whole armories of cast iron and heavy enamel cookware that can be used to bake bread, rolls, muffins, cornbread (and cornbread sticks), fry anything, make coffee, you name it. For more information, go GSI
Camping Cookware
Outdoor Cooking
For recipes and all sorts of tips, search on ‘campfire cooking’ and ‘cast iron cooking’.

For the rest of the cooking adventure:

Bon Appetit!

The business end of these tales usually involve the fact that it’s someone’s grandmother – who was canning in 1925, using the dial canner technology of the time…was not watching the damn canner (and did not ‘leave for a moment’ – but actually went outside to yell at one of the other kids – and had to chase the dog out of the garden and then decided to pick some corn for supper and so on)…and Cousin CindyLou got burned – because she opened the top or took the weight off the vent tube before things were cold inside. As for the windows blowing out – well, Aunt Toby suspects that there is a little bit of dramatic license being taken there to justify the fact that they never used the pressure canner again.

I think there is also this tremendous number of people out there who would like to can but who are terrified that they will blow up the house. Folks – it ain’t 1925.

Here we have a photograph (courtesy of my on-the-spot camera guy) where I am showing two of the three major safety systems in modern (post 1980) pressure canners. The handy fork is pointing toward the vent. That’s what you put the weight on and the steam coming out of that causes the weight to jiggle. My finger is pointing to the overpressure valve. If somehow the vent got plugged and too much pressure built up inside the canner, there is a button that would pop up, like one of those temperature gauges that’s installed in some turkeys – only on the pressure canner, it would release the extra steam. The third part of the safety system, which you can’t see in this photograph is a spring-loaded safety pin that is under one of the handles – this pushes on the rubber gasket that goes inside the lid and prevents the canner from becoming pressurized unless the top is completely sealed and locked down.

Here are a couple of hard facts that just might help you over some of your fear –
1) Pressure canner design and technology went through a complete change in the 1970s and 1980s. Any pressure canner made since that time is safe as long as it is operated according to instructions. And if you remember a couple of things, you should have no safety issues whatsoever:
a. First – don’t over fill the thing. In general, whatever capacity the canner says it has in terms of numbers of quart jars or pint jars, that is all you can get in there. As a matter of fact, in terms of pint jars because you’d be putting them on top of one another, I’d put in one jar less.

b. Secondly – do a safety check before you put anything into it. Hold the lid up to a light( your kitchen window, a lamp) and look out through the vent from underneath the lid. You should see clear through. If you can’t, then wash the lid and put a pipe cleaner or a piece of wire up through the vent and run it back and forth until it is completely clean. Plugged vents are a major contributor to pressure issues with pressure canners. pressure canner safety systems

c. Third – Do you know how old your pressure canner is? Is this a legacy from YOUR grandmother? Is it something you picked up at a garage or estate sale? Do you know if it was ever dropped (aluminum can sustain hidden damage and that could end up with catastrophic results). Although I am sure that someplace on this earth, there is someone who collects old pressure canners or even pressure canner dials, It is definitely NOT worth the safety issues if you do not know when the thing was made. On the other hand, even if it was built after 1980 and was used with tender loving care, it still might need to have the gasket or other safety parts replaced. If it’s too much of a bargain to resist, look on the bottom or elsewhere on the canner, find the manufacturer and model number and call/email/write the manufacturer to find out how old it is and how safe it is to use. If the manufacturer no longer exists – well, you can always plant flowers in it. Here is a great resource to identify Mirro pressure canners. Identifying a canner

d. Once you put the jars into the canner and close it…hang around for a while. Listen while the canner vents the air (it makes a real ’shhhhhh’ shound) and arrange to do things in the kitchen. Don’t figure you can wander around the house, clean the bathroom, check on this or that. You are canning. You don’t have to watch the canner every second, but stay in the room.

More resources on canning and canners:
Used Canners

Uni. GA, using pressure canners
Canning 101

Creative Blog on Canning – this story is about the exploding pressure canner
Another Canning Blog

Now, Aunt Toby was wracking her brains after she posted about canning because for the life of me, I could not recall why exactly we chose the model of canner that we did. We did not get one of those with a dial. And then I read this, courtesy of Miss Vickie: “Most problems with pressure canners is a gauge that is not working properly or needs to be calibrated. If the gauge is out of calibration, it will need to be replaced, or in some cases it may be sent back to the manufacturer for re-calibration. Check with your manufacturer to see if they offer this service and the cost. Even newer canners should be tested to ensure the safety of the food being processed. Dial gauges should be tested annually or more often if used frequently.
Your local Cooperative Extension may perform this test for you or provide information on how to get this done. In some cases the manufacturer may be able to test their various models, or even cookers made be other manufacturers. Contact manufacturers directly and inquire if testing services are available and be prepared to pay a modest fee for this service, as well as shipping costs both ways. Often, especially in the case of large, old-fashioned canners, the costs of shipping out weigh the actual value of the vessel.” Testing Dial Canners

THAT’S WHY – I figured that anything that required that sort of maintenance, testing, calibration, and whoopdeedoo was not worth having if I could get something that just jiggled, never needed to be tested and could be maintained by checking the vent and replacing the gasket on a regular basis.
The other thing is this – let’s say for the sake of argument that you don’t know beans about canning. Nothing. At all. Even with what I’m saying here (and I am trying my best to be as encouraging as I possibly can be because I think canning stuff is a great way to have great food available to you especially during emergencies), I am going to recommend something: Call your county Cooperative Extension and ask if they have classes in canning. If they don’t – ask them to consider putting one together, even if it means that you have to gather up your friends, coworkers and your mother in law to fill up the class. This is a life skill that really pays off. You never know – your extension might even have a commercial type kitchen with really big time canning equipment so that you don’t have to go out and buy your own (though it’s great to have your own canner – trust me on that). Here is a link that will get you to a place where you can find any extension office anywhere in the US of A. How to Find Your Closest Cooperative Extension Office

OK..everyone feeling a little bit better about the whole pressure canning business now? Remember, your grandmother’s story about the exploding pressure canner … was just a story..that’s right…just a story…..

(Photo at the top courtesy of bookgrl)

So, what can you put into a jar and process vs. what doesn’t work really well processed in a jar?

Well, anything you can find in your grocery store that comes already in a can will work well for you. Think about what you pick up from the shelves at your supermarket – whatever it is – YOU can do that, too, whether it is your own ‘bread and butter pickles’ or spaghetti sauce or beans or zucchini with mushrooms and onions in tomato sauce or apple pie filling or blueberries or whatever you want. The DH and I once, early in our married life found a terrific deal on chickens and we cut them up into pieces, put them in jars with broth and made canned chickens – the meat was rather soft, I admit – it was really only good for things like chicken salad sandwiches or chicken and biscuits later on, but it was there.

Canning, however, does not work for everything. Think of the things that you can’t find in cans in the store and only find in the freezer case: broccoli is one. On the other hand, many many things can be frozen – but they really don’t taste as good as canned – green beans is one of them. Frozen fruits are great…but not as good as canned (the only exception Aunt Toby has found is strawberries; the only way I can preserve strawberries in the jar is to make…strawberry preserves; plain old sliced up strawberries really work better as a frozen product. And frankly, I’d rather just eat them fresh).

As exotic as sticking stuff into jars and processing them sounds, remember something: This is one of the methods that people used to ‘put things by’ before there was such a thing as home freezers. And it really is pretty fail-safe. If a jar loses its seal – you can pretty much tell as soon as you pick it up off the shelf – remember that ‘push the button’ on the center of the lid? If that happens, throw that product away. It is no good. On the other side after you’ve processed the jar and put it on the shelf, if the lid is bulging at all, that’s another key that there are bacteria growing in the jar and generating gas – that jar is not safe to eat – open it up, throw the contents down the toilet. You can wash out the jar and use that again, but not the lid.

The key to canning safely is three things: clean good quality food, clean jars, clean lids and the whole thing processed properly. Trust me – the DH and I did not come from families that canned – we learned everything from out of a book and no one at Chez Siberia has gotten sick yet. In this photograph, you see the beginnings of the process: The person doing this has washed the jars really well and is draining them before putting them into the oven to heat them up. What we’re also not seeing is a pot of water on the stove with the lids and bands in it heating up, nor are we seeing the bowls of fruit, or veggies or chili or soup, or stew that is ready for putting into the jars, to be sealed up, put into the canner and processed. But let that picture remind you of THE most important thing in terms of food safety: clean, good quality food, clean (and hot) jars, lids and bands, and following the processing instructions(which will run something like “process for xx minutes at yy pounds of pressure”).

A short piece of ‘extreme bias’ here — Pressure canner vs. ‘water bath canner’. Water bath canning is a huge pot of water on your stove that you put the jars in, cover the pot and just keep the water at a certain temperature for a certain period of time. IT ACTUALLY CAN ONLY BE USED FOR ACID FOODS LIKE TOMATOES. Not pink or yellow or orange tomatoes, mind you (those are low acid types) – and even red ones might not be acid enough. And if you mix your tomatoes with something else, like onions or zuccini, it’s not safe at all. The pots are huge things. I used them early on, but never liked it and now we don’t have the space for the pots. At the same time, the prime time to can is summer – using a water bath canner releases a huge amount of moisture and heat into the kitchen. A pressure canner is a much better idea: uses less energy, does not release all that heat and humidity, and you can use it for everything: green beans, meat sauce, tomatoes, fruit, meat. Everything. Why keep space for two different technologies when one will do all the job?

Here are some resources to help you get started, whether it is finding supplies, recipes, books, and so on.

Supplies and Canner Parts:
Cooking and Canning
Canning Pantry
Pick Your Own – Canning Supplies
Store It Foods – Canning

Canning Instructions and Videos:
All About Canning
Canning Videos 1
Canning Videos 2

Recipes:
Canning Recipes1
Canning Recipes2
Meat1
Meat2

One of the things you will want to know to get started is – how much xxx do I want to end up with? Not that you want to sit down and think, “How many big cans of tomatoes do I use in a year?” – you’d be canning tomatoes forever. But if you want a case of quarts of canned tomatoes, you will need to get your head around some basic measures so that whether you buy at the farmers market, go and pick your own or whatever, you will have a pretty decent idea of how many jars you will end up with. Here is a great charge that shows how many pounds are in a bushel of xxx. Scroll down from the top to find the fruits and veggies section.How much is in a bushel?

Really do get a good canning book; it is worth it to have on the shelf. Now my favorite book, which I got years ago, Farm Journal’s Freezing and Canning Cookbook, (and by the way, any book that you find put out by Farm Journal is worth having, so try used book sites, etc. to find them because I think they are OOP) says, for example, that for a bushel of tomatoes(which weighs about 53 pounds), you will get 20 canned quarts. A bushel of green snap beans, 15-20 canned quarts. So, think about what you want to end up with so that you don’t end up standing in a steaming kitchen at 2 a.m. and cursing yourself.

The other thing to think about is this: When you are doing your own processing, you are in complete control of what goes into that jar. One of the things is energy – no matter what happens later, the only energy you have used is the electricity or LP (or whatever form of heat you use) used with the canning process. After that, you are not using any energy to keep that food safe. One time energy use — unlike freezing where you continue to use energy in the freezer until you take the food out to eat it. Secondly, all food made in a pressure canner has been ‘cooked in the jar’ – if you had no energy, you could still open it up and eat it. Again. one time energy use. Second control is food quality: If you don’t want salt in your canned beans, you don’t need to put it in – you are using a pressure canner, so you don’t need salt for that (making pickled things is another issue). If you don’t want to can your fruit with syrups, you don’t have to – you can process them with plain water(and they actually make a really tasty juice that way, too). If you want to put a clove of garlic in the jar with the beans, you can do that (and by the way, it tastes great that way). But the other part of this is the quality of the stuff that is going into the jar. Commercial processors are not going through the beans one by one or even combing through the bushels. What comes out of the can is never better than what goes INTO it – so make sure that when you buy or pick your fruits, veggies, meats, etc. that they are the freshest you can get. Make sure you also wash everything really really well (organic doesn’t necessarily mean ‘spotlessly clean’). If you pick a tomato out of the bushel and there is a spot on it, even if it’s been washed – cut it out. Make sure that the product that you are putting into the jar and processing has its best chance of tasting fantastic when you open that jar back up. If you are processing stone fruits – peaches, cherries and so forth, make sure you get all the pits out (and with peaches, you are also going to want to dip them in boiling water for a bit and then into ice water to loosen up the skins so that you can take those off and get rid of them before you cut up the peaches and put them into the jars).

When you have finished with processing, and the jars are all cool and you’ve wiped them off with a damp cloth or a sponge, you can then put them away. If you don’t have a celler to store them, put the jars right back into the case boxes that you bought them in and label them so that you know what you have and when you made them. Put the cases into a closet, under the livingroom couch or your bed..wherever you can room to stash them. It’s your private food bank account. No matter what happens in terms of storms when you can’t get to the grocery store or losing your power, you’ve got a whole lot of food that is already pre-cooked, safe and edible.

Bon Appetit!
(photograph courtesy of Baha’i Views)

Aunt Toby, the DH and all the little Chez Siberians(who are not longer so little, nor are they in residence), have experienced this. Thunderstorms that knocked power out for hours. Ice storms in the winter that have snapped trees in half on top of power lines and left us without power to run the blower on the furnace for days at a time. Gentlemen at the control of backhoes who..well, we won’t talk about the whole ‘call before you dig’ from people who won’t.

The results are the same. No power. It doesn’t matter if you live in New York City, Bugtussle, Idaho, Chez Siberia, or any place else. If you don’t have power, there are certain basic things that do not function. If you live in a rural area, there are an additional group of things that cease to function as well and we will discuss those at a later date.

One of the things that just stops (though for a while it can provide a certain amount of function) is a refrigerator. Freezers are in the same category. Now, if you lose your power for only a couple of hours – even a day – if you have a freezer full of frozen food and no one does the obvious thing and opens it up (why do that? Really? You’ve looked in there a zillion times; the freezer does not contain anything new or wondrous in it just because the substation down the road got zapped because a squirrel decided that the coating on a cable looked appetizing. Trust me on that one), then you are pretty safe. Once the power goes on, you are good to go. If you lose the power and it’s longer than a day, then we’re talking real damage to food. Another thing that stops is all other electric appliances such as washers, dryers and cooking devices and a stove.

Ah – frozen food and no stove to cook it with.

Even if this occurs during the summer (and if you live in a city, you have additional troubles if the power cuts out for more than a day in a place like New York City in August – we’re talking dangerous) so you don’t have issues with heating (just keeping cool), you still have issues with keeping fed and not losing the food you have to spoilage.

So, Aunt Toby is going to suggest something radical, cutting edge, green…even.

It’s time to think about preserving food in ways that do not require the constant application of electric energy. Those ways are canning and drying (there are certain things that really only work well with freezing, but we will discuss that at another time as well since the case being made here is to use preservation techniques that if the electricity goes out, it won’t make any difference at all). And also time to think about cooking food in ways that do not use electric power and possibly do not even use things like propane tanks, charcoal or other fuels. It’s one thing to do a little bit of a grill out on the deck; it’s quite another thing if it’s the middle of the winter and you are faced with nothing but a fireplace or a woodstove in your house and firing up the hibachi just might be the most dangerous thing you can do.

So, in her new resolution to actually perform what she says she’s going to perform, Aunt Toby is planning this: A multipart series on Canning, Drying, and cooking when you don’t have your usual venues at your disposal, plus an extra added series on freezing. How does that sound to you? Everyone like that? Good.

And in the meantime, to whet people’s appetites, here is an article from a recent copy of the New York Times about gourmet canning. Time in a Bottle

And commit the song at the top to memory.