Leveling Up the DIY-ness: Pressure Canner

If we were video game characters, we would have leveled up in "weirdness" today. We finally bought a pressure canner:



It's something we'd been mentioning for a while, ever since we started getting more serious about gardening. The final straw came today. Actually, it's more accurate to say that the final straw was assembled over the past few days:

• Harmony's mom brought us about 2 dozen peaches, of which we ate some and wanted to can the rest as jam.


• Spurred by good sales, Harmony bought more than 20 pounds of chicken parts, with the intention of making stock.

The trouble is that she announced that we have no more room in either of our freezers for another gallon of chicken stock. Our chest freezer is chock full of frozen meats, about 10 pounds of blueberries (majority of which were picked by us and not pesticide sprayed), and Luna's food. Our fridge's freezer is chock full of Luna's meats and other vegetables. So due to lack of space, we took the plunge and bought a pressure canner. We haven't used it yet, but probably will in the next day or so (and I expect that Ginny will have some words of encouragement).

In other news, I suffered a couple of minor injuries while helping Harmony with the chicken stock. She has me cut up the chicken wings in order to expose more marrow. I do this with kitchen shears, and parts of the wings require quite a bit of strength in order to break through. After a good number of wings, I checked to see why parts of my hands felt sort of achy. Thus the minor injuries, which I guess qualify me as an XtRemE ChKeN sToCkeR.




In real life, the blood blister is much more highly contrasted with the rest of the skin. There's no blister in the second picture; the little bit of raised skin you see is skin that I wore away whilst operating the scissors. Anyone else ever been injured while making chicken stock?