Life with The Canning Diva: Home Canning, Meals in a Jar, Seed Saving, and Food Security for a Changing Earth
Welcome back to The Changing Earth Podcast, where author Sara F. Hathaway blends survival fiction and real-world skills so you can dream, survive, and thrive.
This episode is a long, practical conversation with Diane Devereaux, The Canning Diva — internationally recognized food preservation expert, instructor, and author of From Seed to Table, The Canning Diva Presents Meals in a Jar, Preserving For Your Pets, The Complete Guide to Pressure Canning, and more.
Chin sat this one out on purpose. Diane and Sara talk fast, laugh often, and cover a full pantry’s worth of skills: how The Canning Diva was born, why pressure canning meat is safer than most people think, how to can meals in a jar for busy weeknights, how to save heirloom seed, how to feed dogs and cats from the same kitchen that feeds the family, and what to do when the grid, the grocery store, or the jar supply chain gets shaky.
If you are looking for home canning tips, pressure canning meals in a jar, seed saving, food security, or homemade pet food preservation, this is the episode (and the post) to bookmark.
How The Canning Diva Was Born
Diane has been canning since she was thirteen, after her family moved to northern Michigan. It was not a hobby. It was how they ate.
They lived on a hog farm with a two-acre garden for household provisions and about eighty acres in livestock production. As kids, Diane and her siblings did the picking and prep. Mom ran the kitchen. The kids were told, in so many words, to get the produce in and then get away from the stove.
That heritage skill set never really left. After marriage, land, and a son, Diane went right back to the garden and the canner. What changed her path was a career in disaster management.
2010 was the breaking point. She spent about twelve and a half weeks in Haiti after the earthquake. That same year brought the BP oil spill and the Enbridge oil spill in Michigan. She was gone close to thirty-four weeks. Seventy-two hours on, twenty-four off even when the closest disaster was only two hours from home. A great career. A hard year for a family with little ones.
So she and her husband sat down and asked the question every over-traveled preparedness professional eventually asks: What can keep me closer to home and still use what I know?
That is how The Canning Diva was born — disaster knowledge, kitchen skill, and a decision to teach people how to feed themselves.
Sara noted the timing. 2010 was also the year she was finishing Day After Disaster, the first novel in The Changing Earth Series. Two women, two different careers, same year, same instinct: the systems we depend on are thinner than they look.
Heritage Skills: Lard, Bacon Grease, and Getting Off Seed Oils
On the farm they canned, but they also froze. Diane still remembers the back of the hog arriving with the bacon slices — counted, packaged, and frozen. Best bacon ever.
What she is teaching again now are the heritage skills that used to be ordinary:
Saving bacon grease
Rendering lard and tallow
Keeping drippings in the old coffee can under the sink
Cooking without a cabinet full of seed oils
Sara’s kitchen runs the same way. No aerosol spray. Bacon grease in the fridge, used on almost everything. Crisco still has a place in her fryer — she packs the heating element with it — but everyday cooking leans on real fat.
Diane’s mom loved butter-flavored Crisco until the end, especially for pasty dough. Some family recipes stay family recipes. Everything else can come back to the drippings jar.
The point for preparedness listeners is simple: food security is not only jars on a shelf. It is also knowing how to use the whole animal and how to cook without industrial oils when the store is empty or the label is a lie.
Botulism Fear vs. Real Kitchen Risk
Sara admitted she had never done a lot of meat canning. That is the common “danger zone” in home canning conversations. People say they are terrified of botulism.
Diane’s answer is the one every new pressure canner needs to hear:
You have to work at getting botulism. A dirty kitchen, poorly cleaned produce, sloppy process — that is how you get into trouble. Botulism spores are not a fog you walk through. They are not randomly jumping into a clean jar.
What actually ruins home-canned food more often are everyday foodborne pathogens and microorganisms that cause spoilage. Those are controlled by:
Clean produce
Running water
Searing meat when the recipe calls for it
Correct processing in a pressure canner for low-acid foods
A lot of people are not afraid of meat. They are afraid of the pressure canner.
Sara’s household split the jobs the way a lot of couples do. She handles front-end prep. Her husband runs the canner. She is the one who cuts a finger or finds a creative way to break a thing. He checks orifices, seals, and a little oil on the gasket so the canner functions the way it should.
That is a good system. Diane still wants Sara in the room when the weight is rocking. Learn the stove. Learn the gauge. One is none when the skill lives in only one person.
Pressure Canner Weights, Grid-Down Heat, and Outdoor Canning
When Sara’s family moved, they lost a canner weight and bought a whole new canner.
Diane’s class rule: the box comes with one weight. Order two more from the manufacturer or Amazon the same day. Without the weight, the canner is a heavy pot. She used to lose hers. Spare weights live in a drawer.
One is none. That is preparedness, not paranoia.
Canning when the grid is down
Diane’s outdoor setup:
A Camp Chef dual-burner outdoor stove on a propane tank for the big work
A 41.5-quart All-American that holds 20 quart jars
A portable butane burner (the same style they cooked on at Prepper Camp)
Residential ranges are not built for a canner that size or that weight. Sara’s All-American will not even fit between the microwave and the stove. Outdoor heat also keeps a Texas kitchen from fighting the air conditioner for ninety minutes while meals in a jar process.
Tips from the conversation:
Create a no-wind zone
Use the Camp Chef wind barrier
Fire bricks help
Watch airflow outdoors more than you would indoors
Learn that a camp stove behaves differently than a natural-gas range
Sara processed meals in a jar on a hot Texas day for about ninety minutes. Miserable in the house. Sensible outside.
From Seed to Table: Soil, Seed Saving, and Feeding Yourself Without 40 Acres
Sara wanted to start with Diane’s book From Seed to Table because it is the full loop: grow, save seed, preserve, cook, and convert recipes.
Why save your own seed
There is a seed battle happening in plain sight. Consumers are watching genetically modified crops that do not produce reliable seed. Seed companies tighten control. The counter-move is old and local:
Save heirloom seed from the plants that already thrive in your dirt, your heat, your pests, your rainfall.
Those are the genetics that belong on your homestead — whether that homestead is forty acres, one acre in town, a 10x10 backyard, a raised bed, a condo railing, or a window garden.
In From Seed to Table, Diane walks through cultivating, drying, and storing seed so you can keep a garden going year after year. The conflicting internet advice — soak, don’t soak, this method, that method — gets simpler when you separate two jobs:
Planting again right away
Storing seed for the long haul
Long-term storage needs more care. That is where the book’s charts and tips earn their keep.
Soil is the first pantry
Diane starts the book with soil because her stepdad taught her the rule that matters most:
Whatever you do to the soil is eventually what you consume.
Crop rotation, amendments, no-pesticide gardening, and letting nature work are not aesthetic homesteading. They are health. The soil feeds the crop. The crop feeds the cow, the pig, the chicken, the egg. Then it feeds you.
Sara’s Texas reality will sound familiar to a lot of suburban and new-construction listeners. Builders strip the topsoil. Good black manure mix is hard to find. They amended raised beds first, then started a backyard square with burn pile material, compost, and chicken waste. It takes years. Chicken manure is hot. It needs to mellow about a year before you plant into it.
They want a potato patch that will not fit in the raised beds. Next move: rototill, roll in horse manure from down the street, and keep feeding that square until it is alive again.
Diane wrote From Seed to Table for people who do not have a huge homestead. Condo. City. HOA. Suburb. You can still feed yourself. Sara and her family once canned out of a 10x10 space in town. Now they are on one acre, five minutes from the high school, scaling the same skills down from a previous forty-acre life. That is the lesson for listeners: food security is portable.
After the harvest
The book does not stop at the jar. Diane covers:
Canning
Dehydrating
Freeze drying
Freezing (a real preservation method, just shorter-lived)
Dry food storage
Cooking with what you preserved
Converting an online recipe so you can use canned, dehydrated, or fresh in the right ratio
Sara compared that last piece to Granny Pam’s Prepper Camp classes on cooking with commercial dehydrated powders. Diane takes it further: you grew it, you put it up, you know what is in it, and now you can turn it into Tuesday night dinner.
Meals in a Jar: Weeknight Food Security
This is the part of the show that will change how a lot of families eat.
Sara’s weekdays are full: dogs, work, martial arts, a son’s band schedule. They can DoorDash now that they live in town. That does not mean they should. Her old martial arts instructor used to ask how much those kids get paid to make your food. Diane added the worse question: how much does the corporation pay an over-processed plant to pre-make it before a teenager reheats it?
Sara’s line about fast-food volume still hangs in the air. Hundreds of millions of burgers. Where are the cows?
Their answer has been buying local meat, sometimes half a cow, and building a shelf of Meals in a Jar for the nights when energy is gone and quality still matters.
Beef stew, seven quarts, and two canners
Sara made the beef stew from Meals in a Jar. The recipes are built to fill a standard pressure canner load — about seven quarts at a time. With a big All-American, you can run two meals in one day if you plan the heat-up and cool-down.
Potato question from the test batch: Diane’s recipe uses about 1½-inch chunks. Sara wondered if smaller dice would disappear, and whether peeled potatoes that float get a funky top layer after a couple of years.
Diane’s guidance:
The large cut is for a real bite after pressure canning breaks the potato down
You can dice smaller
You can leave skins on if you scrub them well under running water
Chapter three of the book is about customizing safely
Pack the potato the way you want to see it on the fork
Follow the recipe the first time. Off-road the second time.
Siphoning, gas stoves, and lost liquid
Sara lost a lot of liquid and assumed she overfilled.
Diane suspected siphoning. On natural gas, pressure does not always hold a perfect 10 PSI. Gauges climb. The instinct is to crank the knob down hard, then up, then down. That rapid PSI swing drives liquid up and down in the jar.
Fixes from the Diva:
Adjust slower
Learn your stove
Diane’s old gas range ran hot and happy around 13 PSI, which is a higher temperature than 240°F
She learned to pull extra liquid (about two tablespoons, almost another half inch of headspace on a “volcano” sauce) because the stove would not sit at 10–11 pounds
An outdoor Camp Chef stove will feel different again
If the headspace was right, do not beat yourself up. Learn the heat source.
The stew came out beautiful. The family wanted it that night. Sara said no. Those quarts are for the busy days. With five or six people at the table, plan on about two quarts per meal.
The recipe people cannot keep in the house
Diane’s warning: chicken pot pie filling vanishes. Kids come home, heat a jar, eat it with crackers or toast. She used to double-batch it four to six times a year and still could not keep it on the shelf.
Sara’s boys will destroy that one. Christian is growing fast and already loves canning day — the tedious, all-hands version where the whole kitchen starts singing like chickens after a few hours. Many hands make light work. The boys leave with a skill, not just a memory.
Peas, on the other hand, are retired. A whole bag of garden peas once yielded a single pint they never ate. It sat in the fridge as a monument, then went in the move-out trash. Some crops are better as a garden snack than as a canning project.
Ribs, bones, and shorter processing times
Sara asked about the ribs. Do you have to debone? Is anything going in cooked?
Diane: bone-in, raw, all of it goes in.
Leaving the bone in is not laziness. It shortens processing time because the jar is a less dense environment. Chicken on the bone and ribs on the bone can drop a 90-minute process to about 65 minutes.
Old family method: raw chicken legs stacked in a wide-mouth quart, bone up, flesh up, one in the middle — often about six pieces depending on size. Diane’s stepdad would take a jar to work, pop the lid, and eat.
Pulled pork can go two ways. Smoke some for dinner. Can the leftover meat plain, or can it with sauce. Heat and eat.
Beef bulgogi and gluten-sensitive kitchens
One of the most popular recipes in Meals in a Jar is beef bulgogi. Ground meat. Big flavor. Lettuce boats, rice, whatever you have. Sara already had it marked. She is gluten sensitive — she traces a lot of that to how wheat is sprayed — so jar meals that do not depend on a flour-heavy sauce matter.
Custom stir-fry: what belongs in the jar
Sara described a family pork-and-broccoli stir fry with a thick peanut-butter and soy sauce. Should that sauce go in the jar?
Diane, without seeing the exact recipe:
A super-thick peanut sauce is a hot mess in the jar
Make a thinner cooking sauce if you must (sesame oil, coconut aminos or soy, vinegar, a touch of tomato paste)
Better: can the meat, make the thick sauce when you open the jar
Sear pork quickly in cast iron. Do not cook it through. You do not want a boiled texture
Skip canning the broccoli if you want stir-fry crunch. Pressure plus water turns it to mush
Can tenderloin and other sale meats in small amounts for quick dinners
Diane also grabs marked-down beef slices, marinates them, and dehydrates jerky. Same kitchen logic: buy the animal when the price is right, put it up, eat well later.
Chickens, “Cankles,” and Why Homegrown Protein Matters
The conversation wandered into the flock, because on a changing earth the chicken is still one of the most honest food systems you can run.
Sara’s family has learned the hard way about Tractor Supply birds — egg-binding, odd growth, a white fryer they nicknamed Cankles because her ankles were huge and she used her wings like pegs. They processed her before Christmas. She plucked almost too easily. Texture talk led to a bigger point: some commercial chicken has a rubbery, stretching fiber that Sara also got when she cooked a bird without letting it rest after the kill. Processing too fast, growing birds too fast, or both, can wreck the meat.
Newer Texas chickens have been hardier. Two old Tractor Supply hens from 2021 quit laying, got a stew-pot warning, then started laying again and won a stay in the spoiled-birds pen.
They tried a year with no chickens after the move. Sara hated it. Scraps had nowhere honest to go. Eggs from the store tasted like a different food. Deep orange yolks and a closed-loop of scraps-to-eggs-to-compost is a relationship, not a hobby.
Diane misses birds too. She is doing a mini compost system with bran and yeast for now. She would rather run leftovers through chickens and get better eggs. HOA life limited her before. She has plans she cannot announce yet.
Window gardens, container green beans, and soil refreshes came up for the apartment and condo crowd. Green beans in Sara’s house never make it to the freezer. They go in a bowl on the counter and the boys eat them like candy.
The larger argument is the one this podcast always comes back to:
A national food supply that is over-processed and pharmaceutical-adjacent is fragile. Local growers, home gardens, and jars on a shelf make a family and a neighborhood more agile when trucks stop or prices spike.
Preserving For Your Pets: The Other Mouths in the House
Sara first saw the title Preserving For Your Pets and joked that it sounded like taxidermy. Ragnar, you are in trouble.
It is not about stuffing the dog. It is about refusing to forget the animals when you put up food for the humans.
Key points from Diane:
Dogs and cats do not eat like we do
If you use scraps, you have to separate what is safe for pets from what is only safe for people
Fold pet food into the same weekly preservation routine
Many “pet” recipes are good enough that Sara wanted them for the people table: chicken stew, a salmon recipe, beef and carrot jerky bites
The “healthy” aisle at the pet store can run about $50 for an eight-ounce bag
Commercial pet food is a massive industry (Diane cited about $9.2 billion) at the same time people argue there is not enough beef for human hamburgers
Her mom, born in 1941, did not grow up with a month of bagged kibble. Dogs ate what the family ate, plus what they could forage
Golden retrievers are prone to allergies and GI issues. Diane did not want a fully raw program while she was that busy, but she spent years making human-food-based meals
Two dogs once meant about 60 pounds of food a week, often a Sunday project
Liver matters. Do not overcook it. Lightly cooked or freeze-dried is better so pets get the nutrients, including taurine, from the animal — not from whatever a lab puts in kibble
Prepper Camp students who took her pet-preservation class twice are now canning, dehydrating, freeze-drying, and using some raw liver
When Diane travels for Canning Diva work, consistency slips, so the dogs still get high-end kibble plus toppers, with homemade mixed back in when she is home for a stretch
Sara’s gut-check is the one listeners should sit with:
If a food is too unhealthy to feed the dog, why is it on the human plate?
Whole food for the family and whole food for the pets are the same project. Supporting local farmers is part of that project. If the local farms disappear, both the pantry and the dog bowl get brittle.
Jars, Lids, and the Coffee-Pot Rule
Sara asked the supply-chain question preppers do not like to say out loud. A lot of canning
jars are made overseas. You can reuse glass. Glass still cracks in a canner after you have done all that work. Jars also travel poorly on foot.
Reusable lids
Diane uses Harvest House and Tattler (American-made; Tattler is in Reed City, Michigan). She likes reusable lids and uses them more often than not for pressure canning and long-term stockpile meals.
For fast-turnover water-bath foods like salsa, she still uses disposable lids. She also keeps used one-time lids, cleaned, because people do get extra seals out of them — three, four, even five times. If six jars go in and five seal, you eat the unsealed one first. That happens with new lids too.
She has a Tattler-sealed chili from a 2011 sampler that is still sealed. She would not eat it for nutrition at this point. She keeps it as a seal experiment.
Do not pressure-can in bargain-bin glass. Jellies and jams can be more forgiving. Meat and meals in a jar are not the place to cheap out. Take care of good jars and they can be reused for years.
The glass coffee pot analogy
This may be the most useful two minutes in the episode.
Would you empty a hot glass coffee pot and immediately fill it with ice water? No. It can shatter.
Treat canning jars the same way. Do not thermal-shock the glass.
Raw-pack cold meat: start with a cold jar. Canner water should be at least room temperature. Do not hit a cold jar with boiling water.
Hot-pack stew or sauce: use a room-temperature, warm, or dishwasher-hot jar.
Diane runs a quick rinse cycle and leaves jars in the dishwasher until she needs them hot.
Warm them up gradually. Cool them down gradually. That prevents the stress fractures that blow a jar body in the canner.
Why This Matters on a Changing Earth
Late in the show the conversation went where this podcast always goes: not fear, readiness.
Diane mentioned a JP Morgan Chase warning that listeners had already been hearing from other sources — a possible food crisis around early 2027. Grocery prices are not coming back to yesterday. Skills that are not passed down are skills that disappear.
Sara connected local food to disaster agility. When the national supply chain buckles, neighbors who can grow, can, and share look a lot like the Amish crews who showed up to rebuild in North Carolina. Local production is mutual aid with a lid on it.
She skipped Changing Earth News in this episode because the conversation was already an hour, but she still left listeners with the watch list from that week:
Unusual earthquake activity
Volcanic activity
Eyes on the West Coast
El Niño as a giant question mark
A real chance of winter power outages
The homework is not to panic. The homework is to put meals in a jar on the shelf while you still have propane, lids, and a Saturday.
Where to Find The Canning Diva
Website: canningdiva.com
Social: Canning Diva on the major platforms
Books: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart, and wherever books are sold
Titles to start with after this episode:
From Seed to Table — soil, gardening, seed saving, preserving, and cooking from what you grew
The Canning Diva Presents Meals in a Jar — pressure-canned ready meals, including beef stew, chicken pot pie filling, beef bulgogi, ribs, and global recipes
Preserving For Your Pets — canning, dehydrating, freezing, and freeze-drying for dogs and cats
Diane answers questions. She said so. Bother her. That is the job.
And if you are heading to Prepper Camp next year, look for Sara and Diane. God willing, they will both be there.
Quick Takeaways to Use This Week
Order spare pressure canner weights. One is none.
Learn your heat source. Siphoning is often a stove problem, not a “you failed” problem.
Save seed from the plants that already win in your climate.
Feed the soil first. Chicken manure is hot. Give it time.
Can bone-in meat when the recipe allows. Bones can shorten processing time.
Keep thick peanut sauces and crunchy broccoli out of the jar. Can the meat. Finish the stir-fry fresh.
Build meals in a jar for the weeknights you would otherwise outsource to a drive-thru.
Do not forget the dogs and cats. Liver, toppers, and separate-safe scraps belong in the plan.
Use good jars. Do not thermal-shock glass. Think coffee pot, not ice bath.
Local food plus home canning is disaster relief you can eat.
Until next time, from all of us at The Changing Earth Podcast:
Dream. Survive. Thrive.
Get the novels and signed copies at ChangingEarthSeries.com and Amazon. Like, subscribe, and leave a review — it keeps this show in the feed for the next family that needs a full pantry and a calm plan.
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