Make your own canned beef stew!

Darren and I borrowed a pressure cooker/canner last summer from our friend Mindy to do our canning as we had never done it before and wanted to get a feel for what we were doing before investing of one of our own.  Darren bought us a canner just a few days ago and we just HAD to use it.

We didn't have any veggies to can since it's not summer, but we found a recipe for canned beef stew that was super simple and CHEAP!  It will help to have some of these pre-made meals after the baby is born, so we decided to give it a try.

The recipe was simple:

potatoes
carrots
onions
garlic
celery
roast
thyme
salt
pepper
boiling water

You should take a look at some commercial canned beef soup/stew next time you are at the grocery store.  Most of the ingredients on the label, I cannot even pronounce!

You don't even have to cook the veggies since this whole concoction will "process" in the canner for 90 minutes.  We cut up all the veggies and meat, browned the meat.  Poured hot water over all of it.  Put it in some Quart Mason jars and then put them in our canner to do the rest.  90 minutes later we had 7 quarts of DELICIOUS beef stew all canned and ready for post-baby days!!

We did the math and even using Tri-Tip roast, the meals worked out to only $4.00 per quart/meal!  One quart feeds all three of us with leftovers!

Cheap, quick, fun project to work on together and good for us.  It doesn't get much better than that!!