Canning Green Beans

A month ago there was a post about canning and I instantly thought, "Oh yeah. Now we're talking! This I CAN do!" And then my friend Heather mentioned my canning craziness and finally, I was reminded last night why I got all excited when I read both of their posts. I love canning.

First off, clean your kitchen. It's so much nicer to prepare food in a clean space.

Wash the beans. I weighed myself then the beans and came to the conclusion that I had 10 pounds of green beans. The easiest way I have found to wash them is to dump them into a clean sink and fill it with water.

Make sure there is plenty of water so you can swoosh them around and get the dirt off 'em:

Now swoosh 'em and move 'em and push 'em and... you get the idea. Clean 'em.

In smaller batches, I put a couple handfulls in my awesome strainer and work from that:

Now get to snippin'! The fastest and easiest way is to use your hands to snip off each end and then snip them in twos or thirds: Putting newspaper under your work area will catch all the loose ends and make clean up a breeze.

Place the snipped beans in a clean container, like my stainless steel mixing bowl:

Get all abled (and not) bodies to help snip. Here you can see what happens when my Dad arrives unexpectedly during this process:

Boil lids.

Invite company over and don't tell them what you're going to do. Then put them to work. Here is one guest filling CLEAN jars with snipped beans. Pack them tightly, lady!

Leave 1' headspace. That's the space between the beans and the top of the jar.

Fill the jars with hot water. Please be careful and don't burn yourself. Remember, it's HOT water!

After you add the jars to the pressure cooker...following your cookers instructions carefully, get the cooker boiling and steam coming out of the release valve for a full 10 minutes. Once you have done that, you put the weight on, or however your cooker works, and bring it to a full 10 pounds of pressure:

Keep it at 10 pounds, adjusting the burner temperature as needed, for 25 minutes. Then, turn off the burner and let the pressure drop to 0. Or, be like me and turn off the burner and go to bed. It'll be fine come morning and you won't be worried about opening the lid. I do take off the weight once it's at 0 to release the pressure. (See your book for official instructions.)

Gorgeous home canned grean beans. I am happy to say they all sealed!