Preserving the Protein.

Over the weekend, my wife had been shopping at Fred Meyers and found one of those 'deals she couldn't resist' on turkey...buy X amount and recieve 'Y' amount off per pound for the turkey.  Since she didn't buy anything we didn't need, it was a good deal.  The only problem is, I still haven't bought a 2nd freezer, so there really wasn't room to just throw it in the freezer for later.  Instead, she had to cook it on Wednesday, which still isn't a bad thing.

Even being a smaller bird, and me not being 100% efficient at stripping every last bit of meat off the carcass, there was over 4 pounds of left over meat...and still not a lot of room in the freezer.  It seemed like as good a time as any to break out the pressure canner.

After taking as much meat off the bird as I could, I shredded/chopped it up, and threw it in a pot with some chicken broth, to heat it back up. 

In case you didn't know what turkey in broth looks like.

 I always forget how long pressure canning takes...I mean, yeah, 75 minutes to process pint jars of most meats, but, the time to get to pressure, then the wait for the canner to cool down to atmospheric pressure on it own.  That kind of feels like a lot of work for the end result, but...what else was I doing sitting around the house with that 2 hours of my life?

So, in the end, canning takes much longer than properly vacuum sealing these things for the freezer would take, but, the cannin might be better, and not just from a 'prepper' point of view.  It's shelf stable even through power losses, and it's ready to use Right Now.  Forget to take something out of the freezer to thaw?  Just grab a can of beef or turkey from the garage, heat it in a pan with some corn starch to ticken the browth to gravy, and dump it over some rice or mashed taters!