Hello,
 
We can Chicken Gravy here already.  We used to use the baby food jars
and freeze it until we decided that was silly, and needed a better way of
doing it.
 
We have 8 spoiled brats, and they're so used to the stuff now that when
they get let out, they run and sit in front of the microwave!  Even when
we left them with a friend, they sat in front of her microwave!
 
We are very lucky to have a butcher that grinds the chickens for us.  We
get 4 chickens at a time and do it in one huge batch.  Then we can it in
8 oz jars.  We stocked up on lids, jars and rings from homecanning.com,
and it's been very good.  I would say that when we do 4 chickens at once,
we get about 32 jars out of it.  We have only had two jars go bad/or have
something wrong, and that was this past time.  I'm still not sure what
happened, because all of the rest were good!
 
I've got about 25 jars right now, and would be happy to fork some over for
people to test drive our recipe.
 
 We use:
    4 chickens - completely ground through the grinder, all parts.
    4 to 6 eggs - shells included, ground up and added in.
    Whole oats
    4 cups of Totally Ferret
    Olive oil - to cook the meat and for texture
    Chromium and Papaya tablets (since we have one boy with
      Insulinoma)
    Brewers yeast/garlic tablets
    Ferretone or Ferretvite for flavoring - I never put in a whole
      tube of Ferretvite because of our boy, but I figure half a
      tube in a 4 batch load is not going to hurt him.
 
We cook the chicken alone for 30 to 45 minutes, add the rest of the stuff
and cook for another 20 or so.  It gets ground up in a blender, put in the
jars and put in the canner.  Once the canner gets to boiling/spitting out
steam, we time it for 40 minutes after, and then it cools down.
 
I am not sure what I would charge, as it ends up being more to ship it than
to make it!  Maybe about $2.00 to ship it with box and peanuts?  I'll have
to sit down and do some figuring, or let the German Engineer here do it, he
loves numbers (how gross!).
 
It is a good way to raise money for a shelter or even for yourself.  I've
got two babies now that need to go in for Adrenal surgery and we're trying
to scrape everything we can for that!
 
 Anyone interested in a Test Jar, please email me at
    [log in to unmask]
My Netcom account is being stupid.  I can get email but not send it!
 
Thanks,
Julie
[Posted in FML issue 3079]