I came across some information the other day on how you can use a pressure canner to store meat.  This allows the meat to last for at least 3 years and it comes out tasting really good and "fall off the bone" in the way it behaves.  Also, most appealing to me was how easy it is to can meat.  One of the easiest is with chicken breast.  You put the raw chicken breast into the jar with some canning salt, put on the lid, and then follow the directions that come with your canner to properly pressure seal it.  That is it.

After much consideration, I just purchased the Fagor 9 piece pressure canning set from Amazon for under $100 (which is about $20 less than it was a week ago).  This is stainless steel vs the aluminum that many canners are, but that is likely because it is also a pressure cooker and I doubt you want to be cooking in aluminum.  It comes with all the different tools that you will likely need to do your canning.  While this one is smaller (10 quart) than many of the other canners out there, I think it will be perfect for a starter canner so I don't get too overwhelmed with its size.  If I find that I am going to really get into massive amounts of canning I will look into purchasing a bigger canner.  So, now all I need to do is wait for my canner to arrive, get some jars with lids, and figure out what I want to can.

Along this journey of learning to can meat, I came across Wendy DeWitt's Food Storage Seminar.  You can watch her video series to learn her system for food storage.  She believes everyone should have enough food in storage to be able to feed your family for 1 year.  She explains why and how to go about it in her videos and in her document Everything Under the Sun.  It can be found on her website www.everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com or by emailing her directly at [email protected] which is what I did so that I would be able to print it off easily if I want to.

I will try to sum the main part of her system up quickly.  You need to pick recipes for 7 breakfasts and 7 dinners (or 14 if you want more variety) and record them on note cards.  You will take the ingredients from these and multiply them by 52 to give you the food you would need to feed your family for a year (this does not include the extras like desserts and baked goods that you might want to make extra).  She shows you have to go about documenting all this in a notebook.  She teaches you how to store the food, how long it can be stored for, how to rotate it, how to cook it, and much more.  Did I mention that she provides all this for free just because she wants everyone to have the information.  She does not sell anything!

Hopefully this will give you some ideas to ponder.  I'm not sure how far I will go with this.  Only time will tell. 

Just wanted to add on that there are only 3 of these canners that I got left in stock and the price just went down again.  So, if you are at all looking into getting this particular one for this low price, I would move quickly on it.