Category: Cassie

09:36 – It was 66.3F (13.5C) and partly cloudy when I took Colin out at 0700. Barbara is due back from Winston around lunchtime, so I need to spend some time de-wrecking the house.

Chris and Tamara Moser stopped over yesterday afternoon. They’re two of the four extra-class hams in the county, and also two of the four county residents who are qualified as Volunteer Examiners that can administer ham license tests.

Chris sent out email yesterday morning asking if anyone had a current copy of the ARRL exam book that they’d be willing to lend to one of the students in the Tech Exam class that commences early next month. I told him he was welcome to borrow mine.

We stood around talking when they got here, and they mentioned that there was a problem with holding the exam. There have to be three VE’s present at any exam, and Chris and Tamara are related to two of the people who’ll be taking the exam. That disqualifies them from being VE’s for that particular exam session.

I told them that the only reason I’d even tried taking the Extra exam when I passed my Tech and General licence exams was so that the county would have one more person qualified to be a VE.

They pointed out that I could still become a VE, but with only a General license that meant I’d only qualify to supervise exams for would-be Tech licensees. Of course, that’s exactly what the upcoming exam is for, so I’m going to go ahead and apply for VE credentials. I’ll probably pick up my Extra-class license at some point, which would qualify me to be a VE for all three license classes.

Email from Cassie yesterday, with the subject line “NEVER AGAIN”. Back in February, with the help of a friend who’s an experienced canner, Cassie had pressure canned 40 pints of chicken that she’d bought on sale. Cassie hadn’t stocked up on canning jars yet, so they used 40 pint jars and Tattler reusable lids supplied by her friend.

For dinner Friday, Cassie pulled a pint jar of canned chicken off her deep pantry shelf. They’d left the bands on the jars when they finished pressure-canning them. When Cassie unscrewed the band, the lid was loose as well. She didn’t have to pry it up, it just separated freely from the jar. Either that jar had never sealed, or it had lost its seal sometime during the seven months or so it had been sitting on the pantry shelf. The meat didn’t stink, but Cassie rightly treated that jar as a rattlesnake.

Obviously, that brought dinner to a crashing halt. Cassie said she almost literally vomited when she realized that they’d eaten several jars of that chicken over the preceding months, and that any one of those jars could have killed them. They ordered take-out for dinner, and while they waited for it to arrive Cassie pulled all the remaining jars of chicken off the shelf and removed the rings. Of the two dozen or so jars remaining, one had completely lost its seal, and she considered two or three more questionable. They decided to pitch all of the remaining jars of chicken, which was the right decision.

She immediately called her friend that had helped her can those jars to give her a heads-up. The friend was mortified, of course. She’d been canning meat with Tattler lids for a decade or more, and this was the first time there’d been any problem.

Cassie pulled the other hundred or so jars of meat she’d canned. Ground beef, beef chunks, pork, and sausage. She’d done those with the single-use metal lids supplied originally with the Ball jars, and every single one of them still had a good seal. Cassie concluded, and I agree, that the problem was the Tattler lids.

She did some additional research and came across this web page, which was originally posted five years ago and has been updated since. Study this page and the links before you even think about using Tattler lids.

Tattler lids are not USDA-approved for pressure canning. The Tattler website weasels around that lack of approval by stating that they use USDA-approved food-grade plastics in their lids, which is not the same as the lids themselves being approved. And the National Center for Home Food Preservation at UGA, which is the authoritative sources on all things related to pressure-canning, specifically recommends against using “reusable” canning lids.

The obvious temptation, particularly for preppers, is to buy a supply of Tattler lids as a long-term reusable solution in a grid-down scenario. The Tattler lids cost four or five times as much as a standard single-use Ball or Kerr metal lid, but can supposedly be reused over and over. I’d actually considered buying a supply of them for just that reason. But my conclusion after reading those pages is that not only can the Tattler lids not be trusted for re-use, they can’t even be trusted for single use. I intend to order a supply of name-brand, US-made Ball and/or Kerr metal single-use lids for just that reason. In bulk, you can find them for 18 or 20 cents each, which is a small price to pay for a reliable and safe seal.

I told Cassie that although I think she should discard all of the remaining canned chicken and the Tattler lids, she needn’t discard the jars themselves or the bands. Just stick them in the dishwasher on its longest cycle with sanitize turned on, and they should be fine. And, oh by the way, you’re not supposed to leave the bands on the jars after they seal. If nothing else, leaving the bands screwed down can give the impression that a jar has a good seal when it fact it’s a false seal. Cassie experienced that with a couple of the Tattler lids. It’s unlikely to happen with the metal lids, but it’s not worth taking the chance.

Cassie had originally bought half a gross of the Tattler lids from Amazon, at roughly a buck apiece. She gave 40 of those to her friend to replace the ones her friend had provided for their first canning session, so she had 32 unused Tattler lids. She’s been using the metal lids provided with the jars ever since, so the rest of what she’s canned is okay. She’s well beyond the Amazon return window, so she’s going to trash the unused lids and eat the cost. She’s pissed, and I don’t blame her. She’s not pissed at her friend or herself or Amazon. She’s pissed at Tattler. Rightly so, in my opinion.

I was actually kind of surprised that this experience didn’t turn her off completely to canning, but it hasn’t. She’s convinced that canning is safe, assuming she uses the right materials and procedures, and that it’s a cost-effective way to store food. In fact, the next time there’s a big sale on chicken, she plans to buy a bunch and can it up.

I almost didn’t mention this, but I decided it was worth noting. Jaime at Guildbrook Farms also pressure cans bulk meats, and she re-uses the METAL lids. According to all the authorities, that’s an unsafe practice, but I told Cassie if she wants to do that I’d suggest opening a sealed jar very, very carefully to avoid damaging the lid and then wash and sterilize that used lid and stick it on the shelf. In an SHTF situation, she could re-use those lids once she couldn’t get new ones, but in the interim I suggested she use new lids every time.

08:13 – It was 30F (-1C) when I took Colin out this morning, with high winds gusting to 60 MPH (96 KPH). As far as I’m concerned, that put the actual wind chill at -30F (-34C). I’ve started leaving a set of lab goggles on the foyer table for just such days. At that temperature and wind speed, I can’t keep my eyes open unless I’m wearing eye protection.

Email over the weekend from Cassie, a relative newbie prepper. When I last heard from her, a month ago, her self-employed husband had just hurt his hand and had to take time off work. Fortunately, he’s fully recovered now and back at work.

Cassie works as a checker at a small local supermarket, where she’s been buying dry staples in quantity regularly. Some of her co-workers noticed and commented on that, and Cassie has become friends with one of them. Because she lacks freezer space and has nowhere to put a standalone freezer, Cassie was considering getting into home pressure canning. She mentioned that to her new friend, who invited her over one day the weekend before last to show her the ropes on home canning.

The supermarket where they both work had a big sale on chicken, so Cassie bought 40 pounds on sale and hauled it over to her new friend’s house, where they pressure-canned it in pint Ball jars. Forty of them, at one pound per jar. Her friend supplied both the canner and the jars, which Cassie will replace with new jars she ordered from Walmart.

Her friend has been canning since she was a little girl and helped her mother and grandmother can. She has two pressure canners, a Presto she bought soon after she got married, and a big All American that her grandmother gave her when she was no longer physically able to can her own stuff. Cassie asked her if the higher price of the All American canner was worth paying. Her friend said she’d been using both for years and that although there were some things she really liked about the All American canner that the cheaper Presto could do everything the more expensive canner could do.

So Cassie ordered the same Presto 23-quart canner we have, along with a gross of pint Ball jars from Walmart. Forty of those go to her friend, which leaves Cassie with 104 canning jars. Her next project is to can a bunch of ground beef, so she’s just waiting for it to go on sale. Her new canner can process 20 pint jars at a time, so she plans to do two or three runs with ground beef to get 40 to 60 jars processed.

For now, Cassie will use the single-use lids that come with the jars, but she owes her friend the 40 Tattler reusable lids they used for her first canning session. Her friend swears by the Tattler lids, which she’s been using for 10 years, so Cassie plans to order a gross of them as well.

She considered buying half-pint jars for her own use, because a pint jar holds about a pound of meat, which is twice what they need for a single meal. But when she saw that half-pint jars sell for only about a buck less per dozen than pint jars, she decided that she didn’t want to spend nearly twice as much on jars to hold the same amount of meat, so she ordered all pint jars except for two dozen quart jars, which she just wanted to have on hand.

* * * * *

10:00 – Barbara is off to the gym and library. She was planning to take Bonnie into town to run some errands today, but Bonnie canceled. That was probably a good thing, since it’s currently raining, breezy, and just over freezing outside. When she gets back from the gym, she’s packing up to head down to Winston first thing tomorrow morning. She’ll stay with Frances and Al tomorrow night and head back to Sparta on Thursday. It’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me.

The rest of my latest Walmart order arrived yesterday. A case of six #10 cans of Augason Farms Potato Shreds. It’s SOP around here. We just finished one can, so I ordered another case. Unusually for food that’s packaged for LTS, these potato shreds are actually cheaper than the Ore-Ida frozen hashbrowns that Barbara used to buy. A 23-ounce can costs $7.12, but by the time they’re rehydrated that 23 ounces turns into about four or five times that mass of the equivalent of fresh potatoes, or the equivalent of about three $3.00 32-ounce bags of the Ore-Idas.

Email overnight from Cassie. Although she voted for Trump, she’s concerned that Trump’s election increases the likelihood of severe problems in the short run, but she voted for Trump because she thinks that another four years or more of the progs running things would inevitably bring on complete collapse. Smart girl.

She and her husband have been busy, prepping on a budget. Their primary concern is food. She works as a checker at the local supermarket and has been buying significant amounts of bulk staples two or three times a week. The first couple of times no one thought that was strange, but as she says all of her coworkers now know that she’s a prepper. A couple of them have commented on it to her, and said they thought it was a good idea. Now one of them has started doing the same thing she’s doing. Between that and stuff they’re ordering from Walmart, Amazon, and Costco on-line, they’re now in pretty good shape. Cassie figures they’re up to at least a six-month supply for the two of them and plans to keep at it until they’re up to at least a one-year supply. The only thing she’s dreading is all the repackaging they have to do, which they haven’t gotten started on yet.