7 Easy Foods to Preserve With Kids

Hi, this is Sheri from the blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com, where I share encouragement for everyday moms. We are in full summer mode. We finished school about a week ago, so our academic work is behind us, but I feel like a lot of our learning takes place in the summer. It may not be book learning, but the kids learn a ton of skills during the summer, and it's just a different kind of learning. I'm gonna be sharing with you in this video some easy foods that you can preserve with your kids this summer. I've made a list of some foods that are easy to preserve with kids for the summer. Now that gas prices are really high and the cost of groceries just keeps climbing, this is a great time to start thinking of ways that you can cut corners and you can save up food for your family. In the past, we started preserving food just slowly. When we first got married, I knew very little about canning, but my husband's family, they grew up canning and preserving food, and so I kind of slowly got introduced to it, and the more our family grew, it was just so helpful to learn how to do some of these skills. So if you're looking for ways to teach your kids some traditional skills and to teach them how they can grow and preserve their own foods, these are the easiest foods that I would start with. Kids love to contribute to the family, and when they're doing work that is meaningful for them and they feel like it's helping the family, kids are always asking, can I help you whenever I'm cooking? Can I help you? Can I do that? Can I help with this? And this is a way for them to be involved and to feel like they're contributing. It's also nice in winter, especially if you have a large family like we do, to just have a stash of food that you can kind of rely on when you can't get to the grocery store as quickly. Now, I've listed on my blog how we make each of these foods. Some of them I do can, I think there's about three recipes that I can, and canning does involve a little bit more work, especially for the adults or the mom. But a lot of them I freeze, and that's very simple, and you can put them in your freezer, you may need an additional deep freezer for them. But these are things that we've started with slowly. So initially when I got married, my husband's family cans applesauce, and they always came and helped us can applesauce every year. But when I started trying to do some things on my own, we just started with one thing at a time, and one thing we love is jam, strawberry jam. And that one was easy, I knew my kids would eat it. And so we just made some strawberry jam, the next year we made a little bit more, and that's kind of how we've done it with each of these things. We haven't tried to learn how to do a whole bunch of different foods, we've just tried with something that works, and then the next year we'll do more of it. I've listed these foods in order of how they come in season. So the first one will be strawberries. Like I said, some of them I do can, but many of them I freeze, if canning intimidates you. The freezing process, really the kids can help with a lot of them. So the first food that we like to preserve is strawberries. In May or June they come in season, and the kids can do a lot with this. This is a recipe that we do not can, we freeze. We buy the little Sure Gel packets and follow the directions on there, and we cook it up and we put it into mason jars and put it in the freezer. So this is very simple. The kids can help with picking the strawberries if you have your own garden, or even if you go out to a place where you can pick. If you don't like to pick and you just like to buy it at the garden, they can help with washing them, with taking off the stems. They can help with, we use a potato masher. We have about three of these, and just get like a wide little tub, and kids can use this to mash them. So they can wash, they can cut, they can mash, and then I usually do the part of cooking the jam and pouring it into the mason jars. The second thing that kids can help with is blueberries. Blueberries are just a delicious treat in the winter to pull out of a bag and eat for a snack, and it's also very healthy. We usually buy ours at a market. The kids can help wash them. They can pick off the stems, and then we freeze our blueberries. So for this, you would need some quart-sized freezer bags, and we wash them. After we wash them, we lay them out on a cookie sheet and freeze them in our freezer for just about an hour until they're semi-frozen. We take a spatula, scrape them off, and put them into the freezer bags, and it's that simple, and then we just put those in our freezer. So the kids can help with a lot of that process. In fact, some of the older kids can almost do that process themselves if they had wanted to. The third food that you can preserve with kids this summer is pickled cucumbers. We have a recipe that we have used. It's very simple. It includes sugar, vinegar, water, and salt, and just some spices. And like I said before, I have all these instructions for how we make these on my website, ourlifehomeschooling.com, if you would like to try them. This is a recipe that we do can, so it does involve a little bit more. I have to help a little bit with the end of the process, canning and putting things in jars. But the kids can wash the cucumbers. They can cut and slice them depending on their age. Obviously, we wouldn't have a young child doing that. When we make our cucumbers, we use a quart-sized jar. We put a few spices in the bottom, fill it up with cucumbers, put some spices on the top, and so the kids can do all those parts. They can put the spice in the bottom, cut them, fill them up, put the spice on the top. I make a brine. Some of my older kids have tried making a brine themselves. It's just sugar, water, vinegar, and salt that we make over the stove top and just heat it until it dissolves. And so if it's cool enough, of course they can pour it into the jars as well. And then I finish up with the canning process. We love having pickled cucumbers with a sandwich in the summer. We use them all year long. It's nice to have in our pantry. The fourth food that you can preserve with kids is green beans. This is one that I've only added in the past couple years. We eat a lot of green beans, and I read an article in Consumer Reports about how green beans is the number one vegetable that you should buy organically because of all the pesticides that are sprayed on it. So we, over time, have just added green beans to our garden. They produce more than once. So after they're done producing the first time, if you wait a little bit, they'll produce again. And it's a really easy food to preserve with kids. We freeze our green beans, so there's very little processing involved. The kids can help pick them from the garden. If you don't grow them in your garden, they can help wash them after you bring them in from the market or wherever you've gotten them. And they can cut the ends off, cut them in half, and put them into a big bowl. The next thing we do is to rinse them with water. You can rinse them with water. And then I blanch green beans, which means to cook them in boiling water for about a minute. This is to keep them from getting freezer burn and from losing some of their taste in the freezer. After they're blanched for a minute, I put them in large 9x13 pans just to cool. Once they're cool, the kids can scoop them into freezer bags and just pile them and put them in the freezer. So that is one that keeps kids really busy and is a way that they can feel like they're contributing. So green beans is really easy for kids to do and to have them help with. A fifth food is diced tomatoes. Now, initially I made diced tomatoes on my own. I canned them the first year. It took a ton of work and I really just didn't think it was worth it. But then that year I ended up loving my canned tomatoes. At first I thought, is this really worth it? Because I can just buy a can of tomatoes for less than $2. But we use quart-sized jars. A quart-sized jar is two cans of 15-ounce tomatoes. So it's perfect for our family because we make a lot of big pots of soup or just big dishes that I usually will use two 15-ounce cans anyway. I ended up loving these quarts of diced tomatoes. I love that my jars don't have that BPA lining that you get when you take the lids off of regular food cans. So I decided to give it a try again. And the second time I included the kids in it and it went a lot faster and I'm gonna keep doing it. So for our canned tomatoes, we bring them in from the garden or if you wanna buy them at the market, the kids can help wash them. They can cut the tops off of them. And then I do a similar process to the green beans. We blanch them or we cook them in boiling water for about 30 to 60 seconds. So I have a mesh bag that I bought. Put a bunch of the tomatoes in them and I dip the mesh bag in the boiling water for about 30 to 60 seconds and take it out and put it in a bowl of cold water to just set and cool. After that, you can put them into just a bowl without water and the kids can easily peel them off. The peels come right off. So that's a process that they can do, taking the peels off. And then if they're old enough to use a knife, they can dice them and fill a mason jar with them. So we fill a mason jar. You have to kind of keep pushing it down until they get to the top. We put salt in the top and a little bit of acidic acid to keep them from turning color. And again, I have all this on the blog if you want some more information on it. And then I do have to finish with the canning process. But the washing, cutting the tops off, taking the peels off and dicing the tomatoes and filling the jars keeps the kids really busy. The sixth food that you can preserve with kids this summer is creamed corn. If you have never had creamed corn, you are missing out. This is not something that you can buy in the grocery store, but it is something that is delicious. And we try to make enough creamed corn to last us all year long. And it's never enough. Creamed corn is pretty easy to make. You have to buy corn on the cob in bulk when it's in season. You're trying to grow it this year. We've kind of upped what we're planning this year and we're planting a ton of corn. But in the past, we've always bought corn from just a local farmer. So the kids can help with husking the corn. They can help with washing it and trying to take some of the silk off. And then we boil our corn for 10 minutes in a kettle. That's what I and my husband do. And when it comes out of the pot, then you can put it on a tea towel to cool. If you want the cooling process to happen faster, you can put it into a big tub of cold water and just let it in there for a minute and then put it on the tea towels to cool. Once the corn is cool, you'll need a corn creamer. And I have links for where you can get these. And this is something that sits over a bowl and the kids can cream the corn just by pushing the corn across the top and the cream comes down below. And so it's kind of nice to have a couple of these so the kids can, you know, a couple of them can be doing it. Once you have a bowl of cream corn, all you have to do next is just scoop it into freezer bags and it's ready to go in the freezer. The last food that you can easily preserve with kids this summer is applesauce. Kids can help pick the apples. If you like to go to an apple orchard, they can wash the apples. Older kids can help cut the apples. When we make our applesauce, we just take the cores out. We don't peel them and we put them in a big stock pot. So after they're cutting them, it takes quite a while to just fill a big stock pot and put about six to eight cups of water in. You almost have to kind of feel it out to see how much water you'll need. Too much water will make it too soupy. Too little water makes it too thick. And you boil your apples. Then you can run them through a saucer. We use a KitchenAid attachment. And the kids can help with this part, older kids, because the applesauce is hot after it's boiled on the stove. But you can have them pour into the saucer and the saucer will take out any seeds that are left. It'll take out the peels and out comes the nice applesauce. Older kids can also help spoon the applesauce into mason jars. And then after the jars are full, then I would help with the canning process. So thanks for stopping by. I hope that you can find some fun things to do with your kids this summer. And I'll see you next time. ♪♪♪