A Visit With My Three Friends

I am not kidding about the three friends but the three friends in this case are not humans.  Do you feel like sometimes you don’t have many REAL friends that you can share your idea of a successful day of adding  food to your storage?  I have found that I don’t have any REAL friends that accept me for my oddities of preparing for a possibly bleak future.  They tell me I am obsessive and paranoid.  They laugh about me when they think I can’t hear.  So I don’t talk about my trips to the LDS Cannery or my day of shopping for sale items that I can buy 40 or 50 cans of vegetables or tuna for my storage.  My Dad used to tell me that I would be lucky if I could claim one good and real friend by the time I die.  I think he was right.  I would just like to find one friend locally that would call me and tell me that they saw boneless chicken breasts for $1.87 lb. and for me to get my shoes on because we were going to buy 20 lbs each to can!  Or someone who would smile and ask to see my food storage because she wanted to see what she might be missing in hers.  Those kind of friends are hard to find.  I spent the day with the only friends that accept me and help me with my food storage.
The first one is called Excalibur.  He just loves to take my vegetables and fruits and turn them into long term storage for me.  He works for me while I sleep and then my second friend welcomes me to join him in packing my newly dried veggies in canning jars and making sure they last as long as possible.  His name is Foodsaver.  He sucks the air out of my jars of dried vegetables.  He pulls a vacuum and makes sure that the food that Excalibur prepared will last for years.  They work well together and they both like me visiting them and working with them.  Now lastly I am preparing to visit my third friend this afternoon.  My third friend really sizzles and has quite a temper and I call her Old Ma.  Old Ma is the friend that cans all my meats for me.  I prepare my jars by using my dishwasher.  I put my two new cases of Ball canning jars in the dishwasher to make sure they are as clean as possible.  Then I will cut up my large chuck roast I bought and my 6 lbs. of chicken breasts and my 7 lb. ham that is in the fridge.  I will do two loads of jars of meat tonight and 2 loads tomorrow and I will be done for the week. Next week will be breakfast sausage of which I have 9 lbs.  and then I will be canning butter after that.  Old Ma won’t be joining in on the fun of canning the butter though.   Now I will save the butter canning for next time I visit the blog.  I will give a step by step account of my adventures in canning butter.  It will be my first time canning butter so I will try to give my problems and successes with it.  See you next time. 

Shirley (Gram of Gram’s Survival Kitchen)