Benefits Of Cooking With Canned Food ~ Things You May Not Know!
Did you know that cooking with canned food is actually good for you? I think that canned foods have gotten a bad rap and people don’t realize just how beneficial cooking with canned food can be. I am a huge fan of growing my own food in my garden and every Fall I spend a good amount of time in my kitchen canning. This has become a bit of a lost art. Our grandparents and their parents all canned their foods so they could enjoy them all year long. Even when the snow is flying here in Minnesota, I can have green beans from my garden thanks to canning. Buying canned foods at the grocery store is much the same. The canning process locks in foods’ freshness, flavor and nutrients at the peak of ripeness, just hours after picking. It’s field to sealed! That means I can serve canned foods anytime, and with confidence. I had the opportunity to visit the Cans Get You Cooking booth when I attended the BlogHer conference in Chicago this Summer and I learned a lot of great facts about canned food that I didn’t know before. I’m sharing my pictures of their booth so that you can benefit from them too!
One thing that we lack here in Minnesota in the Winter is fresh fruit. The fruit is pretty slim pickings until the weather warms up so we rely on canned fruits to provide us with the nutrients and fresh flavor we desire. The Oregon State University conducted a study that proved that canned peaches are nutritionally on par with fresh which came as a surprising discovery to me! I was glad to learn that we are not giving up nutrients when we serve canned foods.
I like to keep a well stocked “cantry” i.e-pantry, so that I can quickly and easily prepare homemade meals without the worry of keeping fresh ingredients on hand at all times. I can’t tell you how much fresh produce we end up throwing out because we don’t use it up right away. I usually make one trip a week to the store so I’ve learned to stock up on fresh produce for the beginning of the week and rely on canned goods to get me through until my next trip to the store.
Now you can take this knowledge you learned and feel good about serving your family meals prepared with canned goods.
I had to show you this can that the Cans Get You Cooking booth made me. The put ME on a can! Now if only I could can myself and leave me at home with the kids while I go run errands! 🙂
Do you use canned goods? Were you surprised to learn that they are nutritionally on par with their fresh and frozen counterparts?
We like to keep a well stocked Cantry as well. One thing that I make with cans is busy day chili, just adding ground meat with my canned items. We are the same way with fresh produce; so much of it goes to waste. There are some things that we use mostly frozen though, like peas, but many other veggies and such come in cans in our house. 🙂
I like how you said that you spend a lot of time canning your own food. My wife and I would really love to get some kind of a can seamer and then start putting our own food into cans. That way we can be sure to have food for any situation because it will last much longer.