Home canning for convenience

If you peruse Frugal Farm Wife for very long, you’ll find a number of canning recipes. There’s more than one reason why I love to share simple canning recipes, but the main one is that it preserves your food independent of electricity. Frozen food is great, but it requires an ongoing electric bill and can spoil the minute you have a storm that takes down your part of the grid for a little while.

It also can’t travel the way canned food can. I can’t even count the number of family trips we’ve taken where home-canned meals we’ve brought have been our primary menu.

Despite all this, I haven’t always felt charitably about canning.

I did much of it with my mom and various neighbors growing up, and I viewed it as a lot of work. It seemed like it was always done under the pressure of getting it finished and out of the way quickly before anything spoiled so we could get on with other things. There was always frustration with canning and getting it all done.

As an adult, learning to slow down and enjoy the process has been a process all in itself. I’ve had to work on my mindset and internalize the truth that, as an adult and mom, work is never-ending. I don’t have to rush through one task to get to another because the others will always be there. When I get them done, they’ll come back. So there’s no need to rush through anything.

One thing that has helped me is learning that I can not just can food, but food that makes my life more convenient.

Sure, there’s some work up front, but in this case, it is a one-and-done scenario, where you do the work once and have weeks worth of meals done or components of easy meals on your pantry shelves.

The first step to making canning convenient is clearing a space on your calendar to give yourself ample time.

But the second step is planning ahead just a little bit. Ask yourself, “How do I want to use this in the future?” and plan accordingly.

Home Canned Convenience Food

For instance, when I’m canning beef or deer meat, I know that we like pot roast and Italian beef, so I season my meat as I can it.

You can read all about canning deer meat/beef here.

But once it’s canned, all I need to do to make a meal is make mashed potatoes or cook the potatoes in the juice from the jar as you would with a pot roast and make gravy from the remaining broth.

Or even better, serve the canned meat with fresh sourdough buns and the canning broth as dipping juice.

Another way to plan is canning ground meat.

Can your ground meat as meatballs to add to spaghetti sauce, soup, etc. or patties. This works especially well with sausage patties. In this case, it’s best to hot pack your meat – brown the meatballs or patties, and then can them.

Now, you don’t have to think about thawing meat out for dinner or even cooking it – it’s already ready for you!

As a side note, I don’t recommend just packing ground meat into jars and canning it. You will probably find the texture is not the best, plus solidly packed ground meat is dense and not as safe since the dense packing makes it difficult for the heat to penetrate to the center.

How to can chicken for convenience food.

I like to separate my chicken, light meat, from dark meat. I raw pack the light meat into jars with salt and pepper but no broth. After it’s canned, it’s ready to chop for chicken salad, to be breaded and flash fried, or chopped and added to casseroles or soups.

For the dark meat, I usually cook it with bones, then debone the meat, shred it, and can add it with broth so that it’s ready to add to soups or casseroles. Read about canning chicken here.

Canning whole meals

One of the best meals to can is soup.

My number one soup is beef and vegetable soup (recipe here).

This is a great recipe for the end of the garden in the late summer, but it can be made any time of year (even if you use frozen veggies to make it) and is so good for a quick dinner on a busy night. It’s perfectly served with a side of the recipe here. 

The same is true of home-canned beef stew. These two canned goods, along with home-canned pot roast, are our go-tos when we’re traveling. It’s easy to open a can and heat it in a hotel microwave when you’re on the road. 

Another soup that I personally love is tomato soup. We can a tomato soup base with our garden tomatoes in the spring. Now, a quick lunch looks like heating up that base with some added cream and making grilled cheese to go with it. Hey presto! Lunch is served!

Canned baked beans are another excellent convenience food. Making and baking beans takes a few hours, so why not make a huge batch and can it so you can open a jar and serve baked beans whenever the mood strikes? This is one of my husband’s favorites, so I try to do a few large batches in the winter to serve us throughout the year.

We’re a family who likes beans in our chili. Yes, I know it’s controversial, but we’re bean lovers. So, I like to can some chili-seasoned beans to add to our chili in the winter. It makes creating flavorful chili quickly and very easy.

The best thing about canning your convenience food is that you control every ingredient. You can ensure the nutritional value of what you’re serving is high, even while serving your family quick dinners. Let’s be real: if convenience was the only factor, you could always buy canned goods off the shelf.

But boosting your nutrition and preserving garden produce are also essential factors for me, and probably for you too, as well as hopefully saving some money.

And that brings me to canning your own salsa. As a proper Texas family, we put salsa on a lot of things, and so making our salsa is a game changer for having a quality, affordable condiment to put on the table.

This is one we make in the summer when we have an overabundance of tomatoes and enjoy all year.

Is canning for everyone? Probably not. And I’m not a hater of freezing. We freeze our fair share of vegetables, such as zucchini, and especially meat. 

But more and more, I find the benefits of canning outweigh the immediate convenience of freezing. 

• Instantly ready food
• Shelf stable
• Portable
• Reusable containers (jars vs. plastic bags)
• More sustainable

These are all things to consider when deciding how to preserve your produce. But whatever you decide, always consider how to do it in a way that makes life more convenient for you in the future.