Crazy Safe & Ready for an Apocalypse

Sunday...  after church I picked up some groceries and headed home to get it all prepped.

I found chicken at Sam's Club for 99 cents a pound for thighs and drumsticks.  Leon loves the drumsticks and I'm a dark meat kind of gal.  I also picked up a ten pound tube of hamburger.

Once home, I threw all the chicken into the oven and roasted the heck out of it. and let it cool.

Simultaneously, frying up all ten pounds of hamburger.  Made a third of it into taco meat and sealed up 3-4 cups at a time in my new seal mate thingy I got for Christmas!

Even if you jump out of air planes, you do NOT know anxiety until the sealer is sucking out all the air and all of the sudden the juices get pulled out and start rising toward the machine. 

SEAL!!! SEAL!!! SEAL!!!!

I never did get any into the machine but cripes, what a rush! 

Here's my sealer!  Isn't she a beaut?

I also sealed up the cooked hamburger into 2 cup packages as well as 5-6 drumsticks per bag as well as 2 cups of cooked chicken and tossed it all in the deep freeze.

Regarding the freezer, when I got home, I put some frozen pizzas and other freezables out there and realized that there was a huge white garbage bag just sitting in there taking up space.

OHHHH!!!  Those were the turkey carcasses from our big Thanksgiving reunion!  I hauled that inside and started pulling things off and filling up my Instant Pots for turkey broth.

Pretty soon, the turkey chunk was really solid and still way too big to fit in even my pressure canner which can double as a jumbo pressure cooker.  So I put the whole shebang turkey chunk into the microwave for a minute at a time, pulling off bits between each minute.

Oof what a mess.  While trying to pry a turkey wing out of the frozen thing, I BROKE one of my good butcher knifes...  The tip broke right off!  I dug it out of the meat.  Don't worry!  No surprises here!

 I filled up two Instant Pots and two pressure canners with them.  I think there were 5 turkeys in there.  I don't know. It was a big greasy mess.  The microwave & tray got cleaned soon after.

I let them pressure cook with water, salt and some poultry seasoning for 3 hours into a beautiful bone broth, then drained it thru a towel into other containers to let cool.

So yesterday morning, I started filling my canning jars with the broth, cleaning the liners on the pressure canners and got the broth canning.  It took 5 loads but I canned 21 jars, mostly quarts.  Only one didn't seal and I didn't realize that until this morning, so I had to dump it.  I don't feel comfortable leaving turkey broth out all night unsealed...

Call me crazy...  or at least safe. 

So the jars all got cleaned up this morning, the rings pulled off and jars stowed in boxes.  Not quite sure where I'll tuck this batch but I can probably safely make soups until next Thanksgiving.  Broth of any sort is one of the easiest to make and can, so I'll probably keep making it.

Tonight is Taco Tuesday and hopefully all the kids can be here.  I'll stick one of these taco meats in the crockpot this afternoon.  Jen was going to make fish tacos too.  

Maybe I'll open one of my salsas. hmmmm

Do you have any set tradition meals per week that you do?