Beans, beans the magical fruit...

I got a pressure canner a few months ago and it has just been sitting still wrapped up and in the box. I decided that I wanted to try it out and since there are no veggies to can I thought I would try pinto beans. Sounds easy enough. Soak them, boil them for a little while, put in jars and process. Piece of cake. In the Ball Blue Book for home canning it had instructions and quantities. It told me that 2.25 lbs of dry beans would do 1 quart. I wanted to do the 7 quarts that would fit in the canner, so I used 15 lbs. of beans. When I dumped them out on the counter to check through them, it seemed like an awful lot of beans. But I was being a good girl and followed the instructions. I found the largest stock pot that I own to soak them overnight in. They had soaked for about 6 hours when I was ready to go to bed so I checked on them. They had absorbed all of the water and were almost overflowing the stock pot. I split them in half into another pot and filled them both back up with more water. I was starting to realize that I probably had too many beans for only 7 quarts! But at this point I couldn't do anything else with them because they had already soaked and would be ruined and wasted it I didn't get them canned.

Then next day they were done soaking and I was ready to do the canning. Instead of 7 quart jars, I had the boys bring up 14 so that I would have enough for all of the beans. At this point I realize that the Blue Book had a major typo. I started filling jars and soon realized that 14 jars weren't going to be enough! In all I was able to fill 27 jars with beans!!!! It took 4 rounds to process them all, but they turned out GREAT! Yeah for my first experience with a pressure canner!

What did I learn from this? Trust my instincts and not just blindly follow a recipe. For 7 quarts I should have only used 4 lbs. of dried beans!

I did have 2 jars not seal, so we will be having Green Chili Burritos tonight! Yum!