Thriving A to Z: J - Jars (Thrive Life) {recipe} (2024)

Due to the properties of freeze-dried food, Thrive Life is ideal for jar recipes.

Why Jars?

Why might you want to prepare jar recipes?

• As part of your emergency food supply, a ready-to-go meal is easier to use than individual ingredients. (This won’t keep as well as never-opened, factory-sealed food storage, though, so only use this as part of your food storage solution.)
• As easy last-minute dinners
• For travel (Depending on the type of travel you’re doing, something like this might be more packable than an actual glass jar.)
• To make it easy to take meals to those who are sick, have just had surgery, or recently had babies/adopted children.
• As gifts

Making Mixes

When I got married, I was given a book calledMarnie’s Kitchen Shortcuts. This has a whole chapter about making mixes. In a nutshell, it suggests converting frequently-used recipes to mixes where this is advantageous. When many of the ingredients are already dry ingredients, or can be converted to dry ingredients, the recipe can be turned into a mix. (If most, but notall,of the ingredients are dry or can be made so, then the remaining ingredients would be added at preparation time.)

Freeze-dried foods provide the added advantage that many ingredients which would nototherwisebe dry, now are. So where youdidhave a recipe for, say, chili mix that called for the addition of browned beef and kidney beans, you can now make the entire thing a mix. (This is an actual example. My chili and white chicken chili both originated with Marnie’s book, and both can be made all-dry with the addition of a few Thrive Life ingredients.)

If the recipe is already mostly a mix, as with the chili example, you have a head start, so they’re probably the easiest to start with if you’re new to this process.

As you work at converting recipes, though, be aware that freeze-dried is not the same thing as dehydrated. The process is different and it results in different bulk and different quantities of water required for rehydration. It’s okay to use both in the same recipe; just be sure you know what ingredients you’re working with and adjust your liquid amounts accordingly.

The Jar Principle

If you work together in a group — particularly with your children or a church group — the preparation of jar mixes can also double as an object lesson. The jar principle, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is an object lesson about priorities. If you fill a jar with sand, you can’t fit any rocks in it. If, however, you fill a jar with large rocks, there’s still a lot of space for pebbles. And around the pebbles, you can still fit a good bit of sand. The point is that if you let your life fill up with petty things there’s no room for the big, important things. But if you plug the big things in first, you still have plenty of room for lots of little things.

You could do the same thing with, say, beans, and rice, and spices as you’re preparing jar meals.

Packing the Jars

Those who have been at this for a while have come up with some great tips. Most people “dry-pack” their canning jars when preparing meals like this. (Click the link for a how-to.) And one blogger used a disposable cup as a funnel.

Recipes to Get You Started

If you need some inspiration to get you started, there’s a directory of 100’s of food-in-jars recipes/mixes at Rock It Like a Mom. There are additional meals in jars at Mom with a Prep. Stephanie Petersen has a whole cookbook of meals in jars that were created with freeze-dried foods much like this. (When the book was written, she was working with another company, but she now makes the same recipes with Thrive Life ingredients.)

The Meals in a Jar Handbook: Gourmet Food Storage Made Easy

The following chicken soup recipe was adapted from Smithsonian Mag online.