Canning Ham, Dehydrating Sour Cream, Freezing Garlic

Bought some ham on super-duper special; the second batch is in the pressure canner now. It's true that it doesn't make much liquid, but I'm going to take Wendy DeWitt's advice & not worry about it. I'm very pleased to be able to add it to our food storage -- it'll be a nice way to break things up a bit, if & when we ever need to rely on it.

I've been dehydrating cottage cheese for some time now (see earlier post), and have recently started to dry sour cream, as well. You can buy it already powdered, but I'd rather do it myself. Saves the shipping charges, and I prefer not to pay for preservatives or other junk. (I prefer the regular, but you can dry low-fat, as well.) It's not hard to do, but there's an extra step, once the sour cream is dried. Like cottage cheese, it's easiest to deal with if you put it by the spoonful onto the mesh drying trays. (You can oil the trays, or use PAM, to make it come off easier, but it's not absolutely necessary). I don't use the leather trays under the mesh (except the bottom one) because it slows the drying down, but you can if you want to. Try to make each "lump" about the same size, and spread them out as evenly as you can, so that they'll dry evenly. Like cottage cheese, about 3/8" thick seems to work pretty well. Once it's dry, take it off the trays & put it into the freezer. When it's frozen, break it up and put it into a regular-mouth, half-pint canning jar (if your blender accepts them), and blend until powdered, or use the regular blender jar, or a food processor. Of course, you can use this freezing technique with other things that don't powder readily. (I suspect you could also get a finer grind on things like carrots and celery this way, but I haven't tried it.)

This doesn't happen to me often, but I actually ran out of fresh garlic recently. So I bought the industrial-sized container of peeled garlic yesterday at Costco. I'm going to mince it in the food processor (with a little oil mixed in to make it easier to work with later, but you can skip that if you prefer). I learned recently that you can freeze it in little "logs", and break off little clove-sized pieces when you need it. Shouldn't run out of garlic again for quite a while!!

Everything I'm doing has or will ultimately save us money, and I'm extremely grateful for that. I'm saving money now on meat and other perishables because I can stock up when they're on sale, I'm saving money by making sure fewer things go to waste, and I'm saving money (and making my life easier) by pretty much always having what I need on hand for whatever I'm in the mood to cook. I'm also finding that I'm not cooking the same old things out of habit, because I have a greater variety of things on hand & ready to use, and we're both enjoying that!!

I'm very grateful for the opportunity to build up our food storage. And I can't decide which I like better -- the adventure of learning all these new things, the satisfaction of seeing the results of my efforts adding up so quickly, or the money we're saving!! Any way I look at it, I really do feel blessed!!

Note: I added the word "pressure" in front of "canner" above. Even though the banner at the top of the blog reminds the reader that meat must always be pressure canned, I wanted to emphasize that fact and so added this clarification.