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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >In a few days I'll post a few quart recipes for meat and other dinner in a 
> jar stuff.

Canning is an underused skill on modern homesteads and in modern kitchens.  
Home canned "dinners" in a jar are like home brewed beer, there is no 
commercially available equivalent.

On the more humble end of things, we could let most of the shell beans dry in 
the pods and then they store for a long time with no further processing nor 
expenditure. However in practice a great lot of the beans are picked in the 
"green" shell stage and canned in quart jars.  What this means is that when 
we 
have been working all afternoon on this or that project and no one has put on 
dried beans to soak or supervised them while they cooked for more than an 
hour, 
we can come in and open a couple of jars and have supper in the time it takes 
to make the cornbread.

When we make tamales ahead of time (when we make them it is usually 200 or 
more at a time), we freeze them and they can be steamed done later.  But we 
also 
can some of them.  The key, as has already been pointed out, is to make the 
chili sauce much thinner than you would if you were serving them up, almost 
watery.  

James