Local Cannery Getting Started....

What a fun day! I had the privilege to gather with some of my good friends and can some BEANS! We had three pressure cookers going and canned 48 quarts of beans in 8 hours. If I had tried this with one cooker it would have taken three times as long!!! This is also a much cheaper and healthier way to process food.

I bought a 50 pound bag of beans for $32 which makes the beans around .64 cents a pound. I soaked 20 pounds of beans over night and some of the other ladies brought about 4 pounds of beans with them. This means there is about a half pound of beans per quart container. We used peppers I had frozen from my garden so that didn't cost us anything. We figured it up that each quart jar cost us .32 cents. We all brought our own jars and lids. We're going to work on a system for collecting jars and keeping tabs on how many everyone has so we don't have to haul them around everywhere. We're so blessed to have our local church facility to gather in to have canning days and store some supplies.

This is just one thing we're doing in our local community to help teach others how to live cheaper and healthier. These beans have very little salt and no preservatives. My challenge to the rest of the world... Find like minded people and start doing things together. Work together to enrich each others lives!!! I was so blessed today and I got some canned beans too ;) How about you?

The Canning Crew

Two easy recipes to use your canned beans!
Bean Dip
Take one jar of beans put them in a food processor with a quarter
block of cream cheese and half teaspoon of salt. Process it up and
you have instant bean dip.

Fancy Beans & Rice
Cook 2 cups of rice in a rice cooker with a quart of tomato juice.
Combine rice, one quart of canned beans a quarter of an onion
and some bell peppers. Add a little cajun seasoning, salt and pepper.
Cook on stove top until the onions and peppers are soft.

The Pepper Processing Station (Don't Rub Your Eyes)

Roomy Kitchen

Beans Ready For Canning

Getting the beans into the jars...

Getting the jars into the pressure cookers....

There are three pressure cookers working here and one pot of beans...

This is what the beans look like before and after... aren't they pretty?

The finished product...