Hunting And Election After Action Report: Part 6: Canning

Lets talk homesteading technologies. Pressure canners rock!

This year’s hunt led to a rare event with butchering and then into the mysteries of canning. Canning is a whole new world for me. We took “better than burger, worse than steak” meat from our hunt and pressure canned it. This came mostly from my smaller deer but it was still a lot of work and plenty of meat to keep me occupied.

Up until this point we did everything in my workshop (which my hunting partner and I had cleaned for this very purpose). With the switch to canning, we had to abandon the garage and perform a forward incursion into Mrs. Curmudgeon’s domain of the kitchen. Just for the record we left it much cleaner when we were done than when we started.

In the middle of the process, my hunting partner wound up carrying a tub of 20# of raw meat while our dog just completely went bonkers. The dog is a good 90 pounds and it tried to climb into his back pocket to get at the meat!

The poor dog was completely out of sorts! Not aggressive, but more like an addict who’s realized you’ve got a pound of cocaine in your hand. We gave it a few treats, carefully placed in its bowl (to avoid teaching it to beg) and that just barely kept the dog from exploding. (Mrs. Curmudgeon has given the dog all manner of treats so don’t blame me if it’s a begging dog. Also, no dog is so utterly civilized that 20 pounds of cubed raw game meat won’t blow a few circuit breakers.)

There are a thousand ways to pressure can meat. I think they’re ALL just fine, so long as you do the sterile part properly. I let my partner show his method and nodded my head in agreement whenever he asked a question.

We browned it, meaning there was a bucket of meat the size of which you’d use at the kitchen in a battleship and it was filled with warm, tasty, yummy smelling, meat. The dog had a stroke. After browning it, we added water and simmered until we’d made a broth. I had to agree with the dog; it smelled delicious.

We hot-packed. Meaning we ladled the hot meat into pre-heated jars and topped it off with hot broth. Then we sealed it in a canner; which violated a lifetime of carefully avoiding situations that build pressure!

I’m still new at this but I was pleased with the results. Out of my tiny harvest I got a happy pile of frozen steaks, a bunch of 1 pound bags of burger, AND 8 quarts of that heavenly dog addicting meat. After that we canned 11 pints of broth! I tasted some with a spoon and it was good enough to make a salad bar weep! There was a little broth left. We poured it on the dog’s food; which sent it to canine bliss. I also kept a pint of broth out of the canner for immediate use as gravy on mashed potatoes.

Given I’d started with a small deer and had no clue, I’m impressed with how it worked out. I want to see how the canned stuff holds up but it looks so darned good I may need to chain it down before Mrs. Curmudgeon breaks it open (or the dog evolves opposable thumbs out of pure desire and gets it into them).

This was shortly after the election but I was making progress in my own life. Thus the world’s worries just didn’t seem to matter. It was a distant far away sadness; like hearing someone you don’t know has died after a long painful cancer. The eternal cut me some slack in a world that’s increasingly frustrating to me. It shielded me from the election results. No TV, too busy to linger on the interwebs, no long rides to get Public Radio shoved in my ears, and for 15 hours at the election place itself I carefully avoided all mention of any political opinion.

This last part is key. As any damn fool knows, a judge should never voice a political opinion. (I’m going to just put this out there, Ruth Bader Ginsberg sucked as a judge and part of how you know that is there were RGB T-shirts and memes. A good judge, like good plumbing, should do their job without becoming the focus of attention! If there are action figure dolls and fan clubs for a judge, that judge sucks.).

So yeah, when everyone was either elated or immiserated I was too busy to follow the “fall of Rome” spiral. It went to shit but I was too busy to let the shit pull me under. First I had a job to do which prohibits getting wound up and then I had a job to do which had me concentrating on canning pressures and laughing at a spastic dog.

A boat can sail right over a tsunami; provided it’s sailing in deep water.

Could I have done what I did without a bit of divine intervention? Hard to know. I’d rather not take bets on it. I’m just happy for my good luck; which may be less luck than proper living.

I did the right thing for the right reason. That’s all any man can do. As I’ve already mentioned: “If honest people do nothing, then honest people will have done nothing.”

Which brings me to the reaction to my silly camping story. I got a few very nice comments. That made me very happy. I also got a bunch of very well appreciated “coffees”. But there’s more. Y’all aren’t privy to every reaction that yours truly gets. I’ve gotten a few compliments through private e-mail and they mean the most to me. (You know who you are and I hope you know it made my day!)

That story was a happy thing I did. I set out to shine a light. Yeah, I glance at the abyss, as we all do; especially in these dark days of societal decline. But I do not let the abyss gaze into me. There’s so much that’s good and happy in the world; don’t step past a sunset to seethe at Twitter. I thought maybe my blog would reach a few who could use a happy story. It seems to have done just that. People need to hear a voice from the “real” world and once in a while I fill that need.

I hope my stories are a welcome distraction but the thing is that they’re not distractions at all. To sit by a fire and ponder one’s place in the universe is the whole point. The. Whole. Point. People mired in politics lose their humanity (for some, they never had it). For it is in the pursuit of power over others that one forgets the reason for the self.

Right under the Eye of Sauron you can live so well it’ll make the political slavers cry. Eat a steak, laugh as the dog flips out, mess with a pressure canner in the kitchen, and live a life that’s rooted.  Two teams out there are going berserk on bread and circuses as Rome collapses into dust… but that’s not your burden. Enjoy nature and the good things in life and maybe you’ll still be smiling when wildflowers grow where the great coliseum once stood; DC and it’s cancerous tendrils are annoying but ultimately ephemeral.

Thanks for reading.

A.C.