Canning Chicken

Do you love chicken??

Do you ever find yourself needing to make dinner, but don't have much time?!

Is your house overflowing with jars you've been saving for the past 15 years thinking, "I know I'll use these!" but haven't figured out what to do with them yet?!?!

Then keep reading and learn how you can take care of all three of these questions at once!

What you'll need:

• Chicken
• Jars
• Jar lids and fitted rings
• Mom's pressure cooker
• 5lb weight for the cooker
• Roughly 2 hours

If you are using old jars, it's a good idea to sterilize them. If they are new jars, it still wouldn't hurt, but you are probably fine to skip this step.

Fill a pot with about 1/2 to 1 inch of water and let it boil. Then place the jars upside-down in the pot for about 5 minutes. Then remove them from the pot to cool down.

Cut the chicken into medium-largeish sized pieces and stuff them into the jars leaving about 1/4 inch of room at the top.

Clean around the opening of the jars with a clean, wet wash towel. The main reason for this is to prevent the jars from sticking when you finally want to eat the chicken.

Put new lids on the jars with fitted rings.

(IMPORTANT!!! The lids need to be new or the seal won't work! The fitted rings can be as old as you want)

Fill the pressure cooker with:

• 5 quarts of water
• 1 Tablespoon Vinegar (this prevents your pressure cooker from turning black)

Then place your jars in face up (jars should not be completely submerged, the water should be somewhere below the fitted rings).

Seal off the pressure cooker and place over high heat. Let the water boil, which will cause steam to escape from the top.

10 minutes after it began to steam, skillfully place the 5 pound weight on top.

Now set your timer for 1 hour and 30 minutes. Once the weight starts spinning "quickly," turn down the heat a little bit.

After the timer goes off, turn off the heat.

Let the pressure cooker cool before removing the lid (there should be a pressure indicator on your cooker, once that goes down it means the pressure inside the cooker is the same as the pressure outside the cooker). This is important for two reasons, one is your safety (lots of really hot steam will shoot at you) and the quick change in pressure can break the jars. So just be patient.

Remove the jars and let them cool.

Store the chicken until hungry.

Chicken does not need to be refrigerated. This stuff will last for a long time (at least a year, maybe more).

The main reason we do this is for quick and easy meals. The chicken is already cooked so we just throw it in our favorite recipe and heat it up. The chicken is very tender and easy to shred after this process.

What can you make with Canned Chicken:

• Any meal that requires shredded chicken
• Chicken Salad
• Chicken Taco Soup
• Chicken Enchiladas
• Hawaiian Haystacks
• Chicken Sandwiches
• Chicken and Ritz Casserole (probably our absolute favorite, so we made an instructable for this meal!