Mason Jar Self Reliance Projects Craziness

As part of a project that Kirk and I are working on to be more self sufficient we are trying to put together as many mason jars as we can for as little cost as possible.  I just got 96 mason jars for $48!  Granted they are all used, but that doesn't really matter to me on this one.  60 of them are pint sized and 30 are quarts.  I'm so excited!

I'm going to use the pints for fermenting vegetables and fresh veggie juices in small quantities, so that we don't have to eat tons at a time (even though the probiotics from tons at a time would probably be really healthy).  I also want them to put our homemade soups into (with a bone broth base) for Kirk to take to work with him.  I heard that they are also great for storing spices properly too.  Of course once the ingredients are in them I am ultimately planning on vacuum sealing everything for either pantry or freezer storage.

The quarts could be for a number of different dried goods.  One example is chocolate chips, which can last longer than 3 years when vacuum sealed in a mason jar.  I have also heard that it can triple the life of grains like rice to vacuum seal those in mason jars too (one lady I talked to said her rice lasted 7 years instead of 1 - now thats what I call extended shelf life).  I want to get as many of my dried goods vacuum sealed as is feasible in mason jars so that it all can last longer in the pantry.  I hate throwing away food that would have been good if we had eaten it sooner or stored it in a better way.  Outside of dry pantry style goods, I am kinda excited to use quart jars for "salad in a jar" and "soup in a jar" and even what I am going to term "bakery in a jar".  The first two are kind of self explanatory, just making a soup or salad compilation in a mason jar.  To make it fun though, you can layer parts of the salad to make a fun pattern for "eye-candy" before shaking it all up and eating it.  The "bakery in a jar" refers to all the different types of baked goods that can be baked in mason jars.  To do this properly, it is my understanding that they must be placed on a deep cookie tray that has a layer of water in it.  Its awesome.  You can make mason jar bread, pies, cookies, brownies, etc.  I'm excited to experiment and start making more of my own recipes for these like I did when I wanted more multi-grain recipes and couldn't find what I liked or wanted.

I think it would be cool to only have wide mouth straight edged jars, however that would cost a lot more.  So I will try to slowly accrue larger straight edged jars (that I need to do the bakery stuff) and just go with the great deals on these other jars for all the other awesome things I am gonna start doing with them.

Because of purchasing our foodsaver type vacuum sealer called the seal-a-meal secondhand it did not come with the tube that sucks air out of attachments.  We could not find any place that carried the tube attachment so decided we would take it into our own hands and figure out making one with parts from home depot.  We read online that some people did this, but no one said how.  We decided to make a video to post on you tube for those in our same situation with this same project.  It was a clear tube 1/4" big, the length doesn't really matter (although if its super long it can take a longer time to seal things) and the nozzle thing (called a double sided barb) we found was 3/16".  Here's the video if you are interested.