Canning In Instant Pot Max

 The weeks just fly by like moments.  My plan (always!) is to put out a blog post every week day with occasional "special" posts on a weekend day.  This is not happening.  I get busy with life then spend the evening sitting like a lump in my swivel rocker with Dear One watching a variety of shows from the sublime to the ridiculous while I knit.  My newest plan is to work work work during the day then in the evening sit down and watch one sublime program then move into the workroom for writing. After writing then I can knit on whatever project is in the pipeline.  That is the current plan.  Let us see if it can happen....

Today I want to talk about something important to my mental health:  the Instant Pot Max!  You laugh.  Not really a laughing matter.  All our lives together we have had a garden.  With a garden there is produce to harvest and "put away" for when there is no harvest. In Vermont there are many months when no production is possible due to ice and snow.  Garden season is very short, but it is oh, so sweet, to harvest yellow string beans, tomatoes, apples, etc and eat them.  There is always more to harvest than can be eaten at once.  I have tried, and you can see where that got me!  Well, you could see if I put up a picture, but I won't do that.

(You will notice that along the right side of the readout there is the word CANNING.  This is the ONLY Instant Pot that safely cans food.)

So during the many years of our marriage we have done water bath canning and pressure canning depending on the rules of the USDA for safe canning.  When we came to South Carolina I left the pressure canners in Vermont and just brought the smaller water bath canner with us.  When we arrived almost immediately I purchased a new pressure canner because it seemed like we would be able to have lots of produce to can since there is such a long growing season, in fact, there seem to be two growing seasons,  Well, I used that canner once.  ONE TIME!  So once we purchased the Instant Pot Max last November we gave away that big old almost brand new canner to a wonderful young family who are successful gardeners and who have lots of children.  Win for everyone!  And it made me happy.

Here in the hot humid south it turns out that you cannot use your garage for food storage if you want the food to be good  when you open the jars. AND we do not have as much room as you might think for attractive storage shelves.  That is somewhat because I "store" a lot of stuff, some of which is unsightly.  Much to the chagrin of Dear One...

Anyway...it turned out that we did not need a big pressure canner that would can hundreds of quarts of things as we did in Vermont.  There are just the two of us after all.  Then last fall just before Thanksgiving I read online that Instant Pot makes a pressure cooker that actually CAN get the contents high enough in temperature and pressure long enough that it is safe to can foods.  This is a six-quart machine so you can only can 4 pints of food at a time.  THIS IS PERFECT FOR TWO OLD PEOPLE!

So what do we can as our gardens are such a failure so far and since Dear One is totally on board to plow under the gardens (if we had a plow or equipment like plows!) and turn them back into lawn. He says it would make lawn mowing so much easier.  I guess it would. 

 It happens that often I prepare food in quantities more in keeping with feeding a family of five teenagers than a family of two old people who only need about one-third the daily calories than we previously ate so, surprisingly enough, there are leftovers.  I have mentioned before that Dear One is not a big leftovers fan.  He is agreeable to eating the same food a second time but a third time, well, that is anathema.  And he is (kindly) clear on that.  

Now that we have an Instant Pot Max on our shelf, I am able to can up left over soups so we can eat them next month when I don't feel like making a fresh meal.  AND IT IS OKAY WITH HIM!  

So last week we had a Grub and Gab Potluck Luncheon for ladies at church.  I made some bean soup from the Blue Zones American Kitchen cookbook which we just acquired with the idea that we would eat more healthy so we could live to one hundred.  Of course the quantity was too much and as we had a small group of sisters at the luncheon there was leftovers.  The moment I got home I put four pints of soups into new widemouth pint jars and started the Instant Pot canning.  So great!

(Here is a picture of the second batch of bean soup after being pressure canned.  You can clearly see that two of the lids have not "pinged".  The upper left one never did so it was refrigerated, and now has been consumed.)

When the first batch was done and the canner was cool, I brought out the jars and processed a second batch.  The only glitch in the system was that I had stopped at the hardware store for more widemouth canning lids.  They only had an off brand, as in, NOT Ball brand which I have always used.  One of the jars did not "ping" so I put it in the refrigerator and served it to Dear One on Sunday.  Apparently he had been waiting for bean soup...!

So this is the story of the bean soup and canning in the Instant Pot Max.  Please know that it is ONLY in the Instant Pot Max that you can safely pressure can food.  I am so thrilled with this new way to put up food which works with my cooking methods so less food is wasted.  Now if I can study up on how to do the same thing with even denser food like leftover sweet potatoes...I bet RoseRed Homestead has instructions!