What Did I Can During 2020? CANNED GOODS TOUR!

Hi guys, this is Megan with the blog watsonhomestead.com and today I'm doing a 2020 canned goods tour. I want to show you guys all the things that I've canned over 2020. I know it's 2021 now but none of the stuff I've canned so far this year has all been kind of in the summer and fall of 2020. I did one of these videos last year and it was a huge hit. All of you guys really enjoyed it so I wanted to do another one this year and I really should have done it sooner because we've actually eaten quite a bit of the stuff but I will fill in and let you guys know what other things we've actually eaten. This year was quite a big canning year for me. I think I've done more canning this year so far than I've done in other years. This has definitely been a record year for me. When I was at the peak of how many jars I had actually canned, I went through I counted them and there was over 400. I don't remember the exact number but I know that it was more than 400 jars so it has been very successful and I love canning. It's a lot of fun and I also just love knowing that our family has a lot of food on hand in case there's ever an emergency. We also don't have to go to the store very much and I also love that a lot of this is from local farmers or from our garden and I just love supporting local people and also just being as self-sufficient as possible and growing everything that we can. So I'm very excited about this and this year we're actually in 2020 right now. Hopefully this next canning season will be even more successful. We have big plans for our garden this summer so hopefully we'll have even more of our own things to can. But anyway, let's just get right into this video. So we are right now in our upstairs storage room. This isn't the most ideal place to keep a food storage because it does get kind of hot in the summer because our old 100 plus year old house is not insulated. But we do not have a basement and our crawl space is very tiny and very hard to get to and it's only like a very narrow pathway to crawl through so it's not the place to store food. So this is our only option really and all of my canned goods have actually done really well in this area. I haven't had any jars unseal. I haven't had any food go bad so I've been really happy with it and hopefully in the next house we'll have a more ideal place for storing all my canned goods. So this shelf right here is actually the original shelving unit that Luke built for my canned goods when we lived in our little studio apartment in the big city when we were very first married and it's just followed us here and it's I'm still using it as a canning shelf. It's very sturdy and I like it. First I'll show you everything I have on this shelf and then we'll move on to the shelf that's in the hallway over there and then the rest of the canned goods are downstairs in the kitchen. Okay so I'm down here on the floor so I can show you easier. So I'll just start over on the side on the top shelf so we have all of these jars here are pickled cauliflower. This is the first year I've done pickled cauliflower and I actually haven't even tried it yet because I wanted to let them sit long enough to get really well pickled so they tasted really good and then now Luke is on the gaff set so I don't want to try them without him and can't have them right now. So they're just going to wait a little longer before we break into those but I love everything pickled so I'm sure we'll love them. So there's 18 quarts total of the pickled cauliflower. Right here are some canned beets. They're just plain canned in in water with some salt so they're just easy to add to soups or as a dinner side or different things and there's four quarts of these. These were from our garden. We did eat a lot of the beets from the garden just as we picked them but these were this this is the stuff that I canned from the garden. Over here is just some extra empty jars so I have plenty of jar storage. I actually ran out of jars kind of in the middle of canning season. I ran out of lids in the middle of the canning season and then since then I found like an extra couple hundred jars so I'm really good on jars so hopefully this next summer when I expand my canning even more I won't run out of jars again. I actually don't even have room to put all of the jars so we're gonna have to rethink our canning storage. I might have to have Luke build me another shelf to put somewhere if I do use all the jars that I have. I also invest in a bunch of tattler reusable lids so hopefully we don't run out of stuff again in the middle of canning season because that is stressful. We have a big section of bread and butter pickles. It goes from here all the way to here so a big huge section. I love bread and butter pickles. We haven't had them in a while because we used to buy them before we got married but I'm just so stubborn about buying things. I won't buy anything from the store. I have to make it myself so my friend shared a really good bread and butter pickle recipe with me this year so I just made a ton of jars and we've been loving them. So there's three pints over here. I just put my extra stuff in pints. It's also nice to have a few pints for giving pickles away as gifts if it's just like a single person who doesn't eat a quart of pickles and sitting like I do. So right here is 20 quarts of bread and butter pickles and you can see here there's three missing and then one missing over here so there was four more that we actually ate. Over here is the dill pickle section. I love dill pickles especially when I'm pregnant. I actually canned all these pickles. I actually canned all of these pickles in preparation for getting pregnant after the GAPS diet so because I can just eat gallons of pickles but they have to be homemade. I can't sit on the store pickles after having homemade. I'm just a little spoiled I guess. So there's six quarts left of the dill pickles which isn't very much. I really wish I had canned more maybe canned more of these kind as these but it's all good. I did eat quite a bit of these. So there's six left and I've already eaten six jars so there was about there was 12 jars total after I canned them. Here we have a section of plum jam down here. This is a plum cinnamon jam. It's really really yummy. This is just a wonderful thing for giving away for gifts and we love eating jam over pancakes and in oatmeal. We don't have a ton of bread usually but you can use jam in so many different things as sweetener instead of sugar. You can use it instead of maple syrup or honey on pancakes. It's just nice to have a different sweetener for things like that. And then of course when I do make some sourdough bread it's really nice to have some homemade jam to have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So there's 18 jars in here. Two of them are half pints but the rest of them are just regular pints. So that'll actually take us a while to go through. I make a huge batch of one kind of jam one year and then the next year I'll make a different kind of jam and all of this jam will probably last us through two or three years. It'll go faster if I'm giving it away as gifts but then I don't have to make several different kinds of jam each year. I just make a huge batch of one each year and that'll last us through. So we have we have apple butter still downstairs from three years ago that we're still eating so I just kind of rotate it through it like that. Here we have a little section of apple pie filling. Some of these I've used tattler lids on. Some of them are regular lids. I just kind of do some of each. I'm slowly transitioning over to just tattler lids but I like the regular ones for certain things. Especially the pie filling it tends to siphon a lot easier than other things when I'm using the tattler lids I've noticed. So everything else did really good with the tattler lids. This apple pie filling though gives me a hard time with the reusable lids. So there's 14 quarts of the apple pie filling here. There's one missing here so there was 15 total. I have this recipe up on my blog. It's a really delicious apple pie filling recipe so I will link that down below if you guys are interested. Over here we have a section of water actually. I like to have some canned water on hand just in case of emergencies. It's just really easy to have. It's also nice if you're just getting into a different kind of canning lid to practice canning water. So I was actually practicing canning with using the tattler lids and I canned some water because then if it doesn't seal or something then that doesn't then that means you don't have a bunch of food that's gone to waste it's just water. So I ended up just keeping it because it's just really nice to have in case you know the power goes out we can't pump the water. I would like to slowly start canning more of it just because that's not going to last us a ton. We do have some more water that I'll get to eventually but right here is eight quarts of water so that's just nice to know that we have like some water just in case. And now we're to the crazy big plum section. So down here starting from there all the way to here right here. This is all canned plums. They're just whole plums that I canned in water. They're not even sweetened so this is really nice to have if we're like on the gaps diet and we can't have like processed sugar. Normally if I'm sweetening fruit I'll use an organic cane sugar but it's just really nice to have this really healthy option. Plus canning them whole with the pit in it saves me so much time canning and they're not really that hard to get hit that once they're canned and you open up a jar and they're all soft and the pits come out really easily so I actually really love canning them like this. So I have 30 quarts of these whole plums plus some more downstairs but they're a different variety of plums so they're actually lighter colored. So we have a lot of plums but it's just nice to have that healthy fruit option. The kids absolutely love these plums and it makes me feel good to know that they don't have a bunch of sugar that I'm giving the kids. Over here we have some more plum stuff. This is actually a spicy plum sauce. It is so delicious. I love this stuff. This is definitely gonna be something I can't every single year. This was the first year I've made it but it's so good. I'll be definitely making it every year. Especially since we stopped buying store-bought condiments like ketchup and different things it's just nice to have this option for putting over food but because it's spicy and sweet it's really good for over dinners. I love it with rice and different things. It's just really good. So I have nine pints of these and actually this little section here was full of them too. So there's actually seven more pints that were sitting here but you can see I really love those and so I've already eaten seven pints of them. I actually see a few more quarts of plums down there so I actually miscounted. I actually have 32 quarts of the whole plums. Okay so that is this first canning shelf so let's move on to the second one. Real quick before we go to the second canning shelf I wanted to show you the rest of my canned water. I actually canned some more in half gallon jars. There's actually four half gallons here so two more gallons of canned water so that's quite a bit of water to have on hand and it just makes me feel good that we have so in case of emergencies. But I really love canning water in half gallon jars. It just saves my quart jars for other things that we will use less quantity of. So this is my second canning shelf. This is the kids bedroom right here and then the stairs are right down here. So it's really nice and handy for coming up here and grabbing something really quick. Just coming up the stairs grabbing it and going back down. So I keep a lot of things on here that I use a lot like lard and tomato sauce and other things like that. So let's start with the top on this side. So right here we have a lot of zucchini bread and butter pickles. This is a really great way to use up those huge massive zucchinis that kind of get away from you. They hide under the leaves in the just like so long and like so thick and then they're a little more tough for using for like just frying for dinner. So I really like to use this up on this kind of thing. So I have 18 pints of these zucchini pickles and they're just really good. Sophia especially loves them. Over here we have a bunch of applesauce. I actually canned a lot of applesauce in quarts this year just because the kids do eat a lot when I open a jar. I also like to use it as a natural sweetener in different desserts and we also use it on top of pancakes sometimes and different things. Over there in the corner I have some pints that are leftover from the year before and then all these quarts are from 2020. So I have six pints left over from 2019 and then I canned 12 quarts this year. Here I have a whole section of tomato sauce. A lot of this is from our garden. A lot of it's from a local farmer that I have found a really good deal on bulk tomatoes for canning. So typically I'll just can plain tomato sauce and then I'll turn it into other things like ketchup or add it to soups or everything. So it's just really versatile and while I'm canning I just want to get it all canned quickly before it goes bad and not like worry about making it a bunch of different things. So sometimes we'll get turned into ketchup. A lot of it goes into soups. Today I made spaghetti with it so it's just very very nice to have some of this on hand because you can use it for like everything. I have some more over here. So right now I have 26 quarts of the tomato sauce and then there was one here and there was one here and there was two there. So there's a few missing that we've used already but especially with it being on the gaps night we're using my little McCann stuff and not any of the stuff any of the organic stuff we got from Costco because he's not supposed to have that. Oh and I totally missed that over here in the corner is more applesauce. So there's actually more quarts of applesauce from this here. Sorry. Some of it's like kind of mixed up and I don't really see it. That is an extra six quarts of applesauce. And then here on this shelf and this shelf and this bottom shelf over here we have green beans. We use a lot of green beans. They're just really nice for having for adding to you're gonna add to soup. They're a really good side. The kids absolutely love them. Jimmy who's 10 months old and is starting to eat a lot of food he really loves them so it's nice to have like a healthy easy snack to give the kids. Some of them are actually yellow beans. We got a combination of yellow beans and jade beans from a local farmer and then we also grew a ton of rattlesnake beans and a different kind of bush bean that I don't remember what it's called. We actually grew like half of these green beans which was pretty impressive. Our plants produce so many green beans and they just kept going like well into the fall. I was like very impressed. So we actually have 45 quarts of the green beans right here and we've used eight quarts already. I was trying to save them as much as I could well into the winter until we didn't have any more fresh vegetables to use up but now we're starting to use them. So I canned a lot of green beans this year as you can see. That is probably my biggest quantity of a single vegetable or fruit that I canned all year. Maybe ever. Maybe that's my biggest record ever because that was a lot. 40. Let's see that's 51 jars total that I canned. So yeah a lot. And then we're over here to the end of this canning shelf and we have this section of lard here. It's actually a combination of lard and tallow. I don't really keep track because we just use them interchangeably but this is lard and tallow that I rendered myself from the the hog and the steer we got this year. I've actually used quite a bit already. I used some in soaps, making different homemade soaps, and then I used a ton in cooking and baking. So I have 18 quarts right here and we will go through this pretty quickly. This is not going to last us all year so I'll need to find some more stuff to render later once this gets lower. And then back here we have actually apple cider. I canned them in half gallon jars because I figured when we open it we're probably going to make like a big thing of wassail or something and it'll last in the refrigerator for a while. So I canned three half gallon jars so we have a gallon and a half of apple cider and this was actually from apples that I picked from my grandparents apple orchard. Actually all of the apple products that I canned this year are from my grandparents apple orchards and they have a cider press. We actually picked these and then we pressed the cider and then I brought home and canned it. So we were in the whole process which was really fun. So that is the whole canned goods storage that I have upstairs. So now I'll take you down with me into the kitchen and show you all the stuff that I'm storing down there. Okay now we're down in my kitchen. Don't mind the mess. We've got crockpot sauce soup and I've got sewing project going on so it's kind of messy in here. But I still want to show you the canned goods that I keep on this back wall here. This is the east wall of my kitchen and it's got these three long shelves that my husband built which are just super awesome for storing canned goods because they're all open and I can actually admire all the work I put into canning stuff this year. So I really love keeping some of the stuff on here that we use pretty often and it's also just nice to have extra storage because those shelves upstairs are pretty full. So we'll just start on the top shelves like we did upstairs. Okay so up here on the very top corner I have three quarts of sauerkraut that I canned. I know it doesn't keep the probiotics in it when you canned it but one of my favorite instant pot dinners is actually steak and sauerkraut and apples and cooking it like that anyway kills the probiotics so I love having some extra to cook like that because it's just so mouth-wateringly delicious. Here we have another big space of empty jars. This is kind of like where my all my empty jars end up after I'm done because the sink's right there over there and then I clean the jars and I don't feel like taking them upstairs they just kind of go here. I need to do a run of taking empty jars upstairs every now and then I do it but most the time I don't really feel like it. So right here we have some green salsa that I canned. This was the first year canning green salsa. It is so delicious. It's definitely going to be another thing that I keep canning over here. We used green tomatoes so this was a good thing to do with all the tomatoes that we had to pick green before the first frost but there's a quart and four pints up there and we've already eaten like five pints oh and I totally forgot there's actually zero left. They were over here in this empty space where my canned jalapenos. I canned like 10 pints I want to say. We ate those up so fast. They were so delicious. I actually have the recipe here on my channel. I'm linking for you guys. I've had so many people make it and say that was like the best thing they canned all year so it's like a must can. I'm going to be canning so much more next year. I actually should just go to the store and get something canned because it's just we just need something in our lives. Here I have six pints of pickled beets. Those are actually from two years ago and we're just taking a long time to go through them because Luke doesn't always love pickled things and I'm supposed to avoid beets because I have kidney stones right now so they're just kind of waiting to be eaten. I may end up giving them away as gifts because a lot of our family members love pickled beets. I actually really love them. I would be eating them but I'm trying to be good about not eating foods that are high in oxalates like beets but you know if the jars are still sealed they're gonna be fine. So even though it's been a while they're still perfectly good they'll just be more pickled. And then we have another big section of empty jars over here. Actually over in this corner I had canned about 30 quarts of nectarines in a very light syrup and there's a local person that I get nectarines from. She also has peaches but I much prefer to get the nectarines because you don't have to blanch them and peel them. You can just chop them in quarters, can them in a light syrup and it's so fast and awesome. So I'm definitely just switching to canning nectarines every week and not peaches unless I'm going to turn them to jam because it's just kind of inconvenient. Over here I have my little apothecary. I have a huge stash of herbs in the laundry room but this is just what I have in jars for easy access but that's not really part of the canned goods story. I have my last jar of apple butter from 2018 and it's still good and like I said we just take a while to go through jam because I make a huge batch at once. I also have one more jar of raspberries from 2018 too and these are just so delicious that we're like savoring them too much. I just need to finish up the jar already. Here's some more of the whole plums I was telling you guys about. They're just a different variety so you can see they're lighter in color than the other ones. The other ones are very dark purpley and these ones are just more yellow. Over here on the very end we have some dilly beans. I did kind of a variation. Some of them are canned with dill like normal and some of them are canned with basil so I just wanted to see which one I liked better. I feel like I'm gonna like the dill better because I generally do but the basil ones are still really good. I think that is actually all of the canned stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I know I'm always getting questions about what things I can this year so I'm really excited to show you guys. If you guys want to see more videos like this please subscribe to my channel. If you want to see particular how-to videos on canning some of these different things let me know. I've been trying to work on my canning playlist. It's just hard to film and can and take care of the children all the same time. Thank you for watching this video and I'll see you next time. Bye!