Food storage...and high grocery cost

snow pea from May 2011

We started a pretty good garden this last year only to have drought take over. We weren't the only ones with this problem. I was pretty proud of what little we had going though and we have some ideas in store for this coming spring/summer to hopefully combat the high heat and drought conditions. I will go into that later. Something else that has come up is the cost of food. It is really getting high. The last few times we've gone to the store I found the cheapest thing I really saw was a whole cut up fryer for like $5.00 and that was on sale. Which was okay but hamburger which used to be one of those cheap meats has gone up tremendously. Pork seems to be the other cheap meat. I have recently started reading up on canning which turns out to be one of those ..."Why didn't I learn that before?" things. I grew up on a farm/ wooded acreage. I never learned this. Mom said she just never really got into it though we usually had a large abundant garden. My dad had a green thumb when it came to that. Disgusts me that I didn't inherit that from him. I find my plants do great so long as I don't touch them or really water them or ...well look in their direction. I know how to kill, de-feather, and cut up a chicken but not that. Another thing I want to learn is something my grandma knew. She could go out in the wood and identify most plants and use them for a dinner salad. She also cooked old school. She could make squirrel and turtle, things like that. Things people might cringe at now but was fairly common back then. They didn't have plumbing til my Mom got older. Stories like that I actually found interesting growing up and am finding fairly useful now. I think people may find that they need to go back to their roots. Anyway....In my quest to find a good starter pressure canner (which I checked into it and apparently you want a pressure canner NOT a water bath canner to kill the botulism bacteria and such and you can can more things safely with it) I found that so far the Presto gets consistently high ratings and seems to follow the same make they've had forever. I tend to prefer the older model stuff because I truly believe it was made better back in the day. I think in these times we've become a disposable society. Everything is made to be thrown away or replaced with another cheap replica of the same item. I think I've found my starter canner kit. Presto 16 quart canning kit. Walmart sells it for around 74$ which is a pretty expensive start up cost for something I am inexperienced in but I really think in the long run it will save us enough to be worth it. I am a bit nervous about it but also very hopeful.  I like that this one has such high reviews (something I always check) and that it comes with a beginners kit. I want to do this so that we can buy meats and such on sale, make meals, and then store them without worry of refrigeration being a problem as we have lost food to that in the past. (Referring to the tornado) I have to admit I am guilty of thinking of mainly vegetables and jams when I thought of canning and hadn't even thought about the possibility of entire meals to be put up and stored. Wish I had of thought of that a long time ago. As for dried goods something else we recently discovered is an over looked storage container. We sometimes buy beans, rice, things like that to put up because they don't spoil. The problem is during this drought mice have become a problem for a lot of people. Coming in to look for water. We don't want anything getting into the beans and rice (or dried soups etc) and don't want to spend a lot of money on plastic containers. We also like to slip in a bit of recycling when we can. So something we came across recently was using empty pop bottles (which we tend to drink a lot of that ...a habit I'd been trying to break). You can store the rice and whatever in those after disinfecting and drying them. Here is a good link on a blogger who covers this. using soda bottles for storage. I have not tried this yet but I plan to this summer. My worry is humidity in the heat but they also suggest using those little packets that keep them dry. Another suggestion I have is we use a lot of peanut butter and thus have a lot of peanut butter jars on hand. My favorites are those huge commodity sized ones you can find at the grocery store but I'm sure you could use about any plastic or *glass < I worry about them being easily broken...containers that are you are done using so long as they are disinfected and dry and sealed. I am always looking for other suggestions too so if anyone has any feel free to leave a comment.