Ever put up mushrooms? Me either. Until now.

Lately, I've been reading my Ball Blue Book as if it were a bodice ripper and I were a lonely housewife.  Or like I was a teenager again using my aunt K’s bathroom – she had a corner bookshelf full of romance novels in her bathroom!  I kid you not.   I spent WAY too much time in there.  J

A person can put up just about anything they can think of, including mushrooms.  Which got me to thinking…

1. We make several dishes that we like mushrooms in – pizza, beef stroganoff, spaghetti.
2. I don’t like to buy canned mushrooms because of the sodium content so we usually buy  fresh which can be expensive if they’re not on sale.
3. They aren’t often on my grocery list so we usually end up eating whatever it is without them.
4. Maybe I can can some.

While doing our regular grocery shopping I came across 3 10 oz packages of Baby Bellas (short for Portobella) on manager’s special for $1.50 each.  Ok, not bad and the expiration date was 3 days away so I picked them up thinking I would try the canning thing.

I read up on the process and it says you need 1 lb of mushrooms for every pint.  I didn’t even have 2 lbs of mushrooms.  Those 3 packages weren’t going to get me anywhere.  Then I remembered I had 2 - $2 catalina coupons from Kroger from when I stocked up on toothpaste last week.  Kroger had a 24 oz package of white mushrooms for $3.99 so I grabbed them as well.  Now at least I had a little over 3 lbs which should net me about 3 pints or 6 half pints.

So, I went to town cleaning and trimming stems.  Here’s my pile of cleaned and trimmed ‘shrooms.

 

Next, I sliced them.  I tried using my little egg slicer from Pampered Chef.  You know what I’m talking about…this little do-hicky.

 

Photo courtesy of http://www.pamperedchef.com/



It wasn’t working very well though.  It would slice them, but it wouldn’t go all the way through and would hold onto the mushroom causing me to tear them when I pulled them out.  Maybe there's a reason it's called an egg slicer and not a mushroom slicer?  I ended up just using my chef’s knife to slice those babies up.

Next, I boiled them for 10 minutes and boy, did they shrink!  That’s why you need so much to start with – they lose a lot of water in the cooking process.  After boiling them I put them in sterilized half pint jars, ladled the hot liquid over them, leaving 1” headspace and dropped in ½ of a 500-milligram Vitamin C tablet.  It is supposed to help with color.  I got that little tip here. 

The jars were then processed for 45 minutes at 10 lbs of pressure.  I ended up with 7 half pints.  I kept the white mushrooms and the baby bellas separate to see if there is a difference in taste.  I was pretty pleased and Hubz was too.  He had no idea you can can mushrooms.  I love saying can can.  I love that I can…can.

Add this to my 6 pints of pickled beets, 11 pints of green beans, last years pickles and my little pantry shelf is starting to fill up!

What have you put up lately?