If you’re new to pressure canning, beef stew is one of the easiest meals in a jar you can make. It’s simple, forgiving, and when you’re done you’ve got a full meal sitting on the shelf ready to go. On those days when you don’t feel like cooking, all you have to do is open a jar, warm it up, and dinner is basically ready.

I’m calling this beef stew, but in my case it actually started with a couple of moose outside round roasts that I cut into cubes. That works just fine. Beef, moose, venison, even chicken will work for a meal like this. These are usually tougher cuts of meat, but that’s exactly what stewing and pressure canning are good at. By the time the jars are finished processing, that meat comes out nice and tender.

I started by browning the cubed meat in batches in a frying pan with a little canola oil. You don’t want to crowd the pan, so doing it in batches works best. You’re not trying to cook the meat through here, just getting a bit of color on it. That browning adds a lot of flavor to the stew later on.

The recipe I was following from Ball calls for six cups of cubed potatoes, but honestly that felt like a bit much to me, so I cut it back to four cups. That’s one of the nice things with a recipe like this. You can reduce the vegetables or swap them around a bit as long as they’re vegetables that are safe for canning.

I also ran short on carrots, so instead of the four cups the recipe suggested, I ended up with about three cups of sliced carrots. Along with that I sliced up about a cup and a half of celery and chopped two onions.

At first I thought I could do everything in my Dutch oven, but once the meat and vegetables started going in it became obvious it wasn’t going to be big enough. So I switched everything over to my three-gallon pot where I had a little room to work.

Once everything was in the pot I added the seasoning: about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pickling salt, half a teaspoon of thyme, and a quarter teaspoon of pepper. After giving that a good stir, it was time to add the liquid.

Ball’s recipe suggests using water, which works perfectly fine, but I had some beef stock on the shelf that I canned earlier so I decided to use that instead. Either way works. The main thing is bringing the liquid to a boil and adding enough to cover the stew mixture. In my case it took five pints of stock to get everything covered. Looking back I probably could have used half stock and half water, or even just water, and it would still have turned out fine.

While the pot was coming back up to a boil, I put my jars into hot water to warm them up. Once the stew was boiling, I started filling the jars. I packed the solids in first until they were just under one inch of headspace, then I ladled in the hot stock until everything was covered and the headspace was right at that one-inch mark.

After that I wiped the jar rims with a paper towel dampened with a little vinegar to make sure they were clean. Then the lids went on and the bands were tightened just finger tight.

The jars went into my Carey electric pressure canner. My manual calls for eight cups of water in the canner, so that went in along with a splash of vinegar to help keep the jars from getting cloudy during processing.

I set the canner for 75 minutes of pressure canning, which is what the recipe calls for. At the start I left the vent open so the canner could do its ten minutes of exhausting. When the canner beeped to let me know those ten minutes were done, I closed the pressure vent and let it come up to pressure. Once it reached pressure, the 75-minute countdown started.

When the processing time was finished, the canner shut itself off. I just left it alone and waited until it depressurized on its own. After that I carefully opened the lid and let the jars sit in the canner for another ten minutes before taking them out.

There was a little stew left over that didn’t quite make a full jar, so I put that into a casserole dish, added a bit of thickener, and set it in the oven at about 220 degrees for the rest of the day. By supper time it had thickened up nicely and tasted great.

The next morning I checked the jars and every one of them had sealed properly, so they went onto the shelf for storage.

If you’re looking for a good, simple meal-in-a-jar recipe to start with, this is a hard one to beat. It’s straightforward, it uses ingredients most people already have, and when you open one of those jars later on you’ve got a hearty stew ready to warm up and eat.