Canning Sloppy Joes

While making the grocery store run for last minute Thanksgiving dinner items, I found an excellent sale on hamburger meat.  The meat is a prepackaged mixture of hamburger and sausage meat and was high quality meat.  Fortunately our Thanksgiving dinner is just the five of us, and most of my prep work is done, so I have time for one more quick project.  

On days that we volunteer at the food pantry I like to have quick and easy lunch meals available.  Sloppy Joes are one of those simple meals.  

I had six pounds of meat, so I fried it up in two pound batches for easier processing.  

2lbs Ground Beef (cook and drain)

1 C Chopped Onion

1 1/2 C Ketchup (Use Heinz or Hunt, or make sure your brand has no thickeners added)

2 T Brown Sugar

2 T Apple Cider Vinegar

3 T Heinz Chili Sauce

3 t Worcestershire Sauce

2 t Yellow Mustard

1/4 C Water

As I finished each batch I added it to an eight quart stock pot.  When everything was cooked I heated up the mixture to a boil and added began to fill my sterilized Ball Wide Mouth Quart Jars.  The sloppy joe mixture is processed in a pressure cooker at 10lbs for 75 minutes for pint, and 90 minutes for quarts. Remember, you can’t fit much more than a half a cup of meat onto one hamburger bun. That’s four servings per pint and eight servings per quart. (Pints hold about 1 lb of meat; quarts hold approximately 2 lbs.) 

Next time we need a quick and easy lunch I can open a jar and heat up the meat on the stove, serve on hamburger buns with homemade pickles or banana peppers! Again, not really what I had planned to do just days before Thanksgiving but it's all good. It kept me busy while I wait for the boy to come home!    

The meat of their fellowship offering of thanksgiving must be eaten on the day it is offered;
 they must leave none of it till morning.  Leviticus 7:15