Can-O-Rama!

Our family home evening consisted of teaching the kids the importance of self-reliance and food storage.  Then we canned some food!  The sealer we borrowed from the cannery was slick!  It wasn't completely automated, like the one at the cannery, but used a torque wrench to seal cans.  I had to lean all my weight onto the wrench to get enough torque to seal the cans.  Merril, on the other hand, could just stand there and do it.  Merril's holding the first can off the assembly line.  

Maxine was good at writing the date on the labels and affixing labels to the cans.  She'd also write on the boxes.  Jack was good at touching all the wheat that went into the cans.

We canned a bag of wheat and then put the kids to bed.  Merril and I finished the bulk of the canning on Monday night.  I went to Wal-Mart and purchased different kinds of noodles, cornmeal, and cream of wheat to can.  I finished canning those up Tuesday night.  We ended up canning 115 cans of food.  Harmons was having a sale on Morning Moos milk so I bought 6 cans of regular milk and 2 cans of chocolate milk.  I also bought some salt, honey and crisco (for oil). The only thing left to purchase are some buckets for the sugar and a 55-gallon drum for water.  I've heard that canned sugar can take on a metallic taste so I decided plastic buckets are going to be the way to go.  

I also bought a ton of soap and toothpaste.  In an emergency, I want to be as clean as possible.  Merril and I estimated that we have around 6 months of food storage.  We figure that's a good start for now!  My next task is to learn how to use my pressure cooker to bottle some chicken, beef stew meat and hamburger.  Yikes!