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Waste Not Jars

We don't buy a lot of food in jars these days. I can enough tomatoes that I can cook down a marinara sauce as often as I need it, and with butter, cream and cheese aplenty from our cow alfredo sauce doesn't need to come out of a jar either. If I buy jelly or jam it's in a large jar, so I don't have to do it often, and before long I hope to be weaned of that habit too. Applesauce is home made.

One food I do buy in jars is pickles. I buy Mt. Olive dill pickles by the gallon; at $5 per gallon I get a gallon jar for $5 and a whole bunch of dill pickles for free! If I want relish I chop them up, add pickle juice and stir in some mustard. If I want dill chips for hamburgers I slice them thin, and if I want dill spears to go alongside sandwiches I cut them lengthwise into quarters. The empty jars are perfect for storing milk, incubating yogurt, or for lactofermenting more pickles. One such jar is currently the home of my kombucha scoby.

The problem with buying so little of our food is that I don't get very many jars, and they are just so handy. Glass jars are especially useful. When I buy beans in bulk (or in plastic bags from the store, for that matter), I fill jars with them; when the lids are twisted on tight, they prevent any insect infestations, and mice can't get in either. (Sometimes I even use plastic peanut butter jars for dry beans, but they are not rodent proof--it hasn't been a problem for us yet, but let the buyer beware.) And when I render lard or tallow, I often store at least some of it in glass jars from the grocery store instead of using up my precious mason jars. Once more, lids tightly twisted means excellent protection for my precious stores.

While jars are very useful when you have something to put in them, they're a waste of space when empty; you can get around this by starting a dry goods stockpile and by otherwise filling them with non perishable goods. Anything from the bulk aisle at the grocery store is a good bet. Once filled and closed tightly, put them in a dark place, the cooler the better, and they'll keep their contents safe and edible much more effectively than its plastic store packaging, and much more economically than mason jars or purchased storage containers.

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