I can can!!

I am loving my new canner! Those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile know that my DH works out of town four days a week in a teensy weensy town on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. In an effort to help him maintain our healthy lifestyle while he is working long shifts out of town I pack a car cooler full of healthy meals for him to take. I love cooking and enjoying doing this for him because he works so hard and travels so much. But it does take a good chunk of one of our days off together to get these meals ready. I have been reading a lot about canning and discovered how easy it is to can whole meals like chili, stew and soup. So I thought I would make a giant batch of chili, can it in 500ml jars so he can have them for lunch. He won't have to worry about refrigerating them and we can still control the amount of fat and sodium in the meals. I started with chili and it worked great. I did enough in an afternoon for him to have lunch for a month. I will still make him dinners to take up but my prep time will be a lot less! Here are some pictures of the chili.

I also used my crazy growing cucumbers from my garden and made us enough relish to last until next summer. The relish was unbelievably easy to make and so delicious.

I have plans to can every evening for the next week, salsa, stew, Shepard's pie mix, chutney, more chili, soup and spaghetti sauce. The local farmers markets have such great prices on produce right now - I'm going to take advantage of the fresh veggies and fill my pantry with easy meals. I think this will really help get me through those inevitable slumps when making a healthy meals seems so hard. My grandma would be so proud of me!!!

I went to the gym again last night (yay to the exercise bug biting me again!!) and I had a great workout. I did a vigorous 30 minutes on the elliptical - I was sweating like a maniac. I can't believe that I used to hate sweating, I thought it was gross and nasty - now when I sweat in a workout it makes me feel proud of how I can push myself and I see it as a sign of strength. The scale has fallen a little more in the past few days and I think I will be back under 210 by my next official weigh in woo hoo!