Diane Devereaux - The Canning Diva

I am an experienced, serious canner, not a casual one who dabbles in tomatoes, peaches, jams, and pickles. I have and use a pressure canner. There are not a lot of canning resources available for pressure canning, and this cookbook definitely helps to fill that hole.

The critical question is, are the recipes safe? If you contact your local extension office, you will be told to only use recipes from Ball or the National Center for Home Preservation. Having contacted my local extension office, it is clear that staff members are not serious canners themselves and lack an understanding of modern canners’ concerns about preserving healthy food (by reducing sugar, for example) and creating tasty meals. I have compared the recipes in this book to recipes in my Ball cookbooks and only found shorter processing times for vegetable stock and a couple of other vegetable based soups. Everything else was comparable. I feel that these recipes are probably safe, and will just increase the processing times for the vegetable stock and soup recipes to the times listed in my Ball guides.

I purchased the Kindle edition. A benefit to the Kindle edition, is that while at the farmers’ market, if I unexpectedly find the base for one one of the recipes, I can use my phone to check the recipe to see if there are other ingredients I should buy at the market.

Quite a few of the recipes call for pork products or alcohol, so if you do not consume them for medical or religious reasons, you may want to consider that before purchasing.

I have not yet tried any of the recipes, but will rate after I have tried a few.… (altro)