The Tangrens

This week I decided to try canning peaches by myself. I've never done peaches by myself nor had a recent refresher course with anyone to really feel confident in knowing I could do it so I was a little nervous. My mother in law was coming down for the weekend and is a big canner. ( Can I just show you my basement filled with every last thing you would need for canning as well as 14 BOXES of jars ready to be filled?) I felt more confident in knowing she could be there to help me so I made plans to can when she came. Then it was going to be upper 80s and near 90's the day we could do it and in our fans only house that would be a little miserable. So I thought maybe we wouldn't do it. But we picked up a half bushel of peaches anyway. And I gathered my courage. A storm came through the day my in laws left and I ate a peach and it was pretty ripe so I knew I'd need to do it fast if I was going to do it.

Monday morning dawned cool and drizzly so I busted out the newly found Ball Blue Book of Preserving ( aka the canning Bible) and got to it. When I got everything ready I realized that I had to use every last burner on the stove to have everything cooking at the same time.

I hadn't put on the pan for the lids in this picture.

I learned from doing tomatoes that standing on a tile kitchen floor all day really hurts your back so I decided to try wearing some thick fluffy slippers to see if that helped.

As I got started I flipped on the i-tunes and then as my peaches bathed in the boiling water a fitting song came on.

I'm a little worried about Hyrum's rhythm. He seems to get his rhythm from his Dad. Sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. Please ignore that he's in his jammies with peanut butter on his face from his breakfast toast in early afternoon.

As I peeled off the skin of warm peaches my mind wandered back to doing the same thing all growing up. Most of the time I couldn't resist the heavenly smell of the warm peaches and had to have one. I'd sit with my arms dripping with peach juice and a huge smile on my face. Most of the time I'd make myself sick indulging myself. Later in life I would drop peaches in warm water just to taste the warm heavenly goodness I remembered when canning peaches as a child. This time I was able to muster some restraint and only ate one warm peach...just for old times sake.

Aren't they pretty? When you boil or steam them they loose a bit of their color but I just loved how they looked in the jars before I processed them.

So a half bushel (keeping in mind that we took the biggest most heaping box we could find) of about baseball sized peaches gave me 16 quarts and a pint. I got four peaches in each quart (some of them took a half a peach more). So, that'll last us about a month. Of course I do have that nectarine tree in the back yard with about baseball sized nectarines promising a fabulous harvest but they're still pretty green and hard. I'm getting impatient.

I've been told that you don't take the skin off nectarines or at least you don't have to. I'm not sure how I feel about canning something with skins on. I think I'll try it both ways. I've heard it's not worth it to take off the skins. We'll see. I'll probably still dunk them in the warm water to see if they taste as good. :) If not I'm going to be on the look out for a good canning peach tree.