We ran out of home canned peaches a few months ago. After purchasing some cans of peaches at the store when they went on sale I discovered that I really really prefer home canned. I’ve gotten spoiled but these are the best. So we bought 3 baskets of peaches which is one more than we bought last year; each basket weighing around 25 pounds. There wasn’t a single bad peach in the bunch and we put nearly half a basket worth of peaches into the fridge to eat fresh. These taste wonderful and juicy.
We sorted through the peaches and washed them. I put the softer peaches aside and blanched the crispest ones to skin them.
The peaches were so large that I was going to have trouble fitting them into regular mouth jars in quarters even so I pitted and quartered them. I soaked them differently this year. Last year I used fruit fresh to keep the fruit from browning. This year I used a method that I got from a friend of a friend’s husband’s grandmother. (I know everyone in that relationship EXCEPT the grandmother). My friend said she’s been following this advice for years with no problem and so I followed the advice to lightly salt the cold water and float the peaches in that before cold packing the peaches into bottles with light to medium syrup. The salt gives the sweet peaches an extra bite, is much cheaper than the fruit fresh which I will save to use with apples and it totally works. The peach pits collected in a pot were later dropped outside in a concealed area of the yard. I figure some little critter would enjoy nibbling the rest of the peach bits off and maybe even want to take the pits.
We took turns through the day with various people entering the kitchen to help or taking turns helping out of the kitchen with other needs. If you are going to produce family sized batches of food then the family should help. We got our little kitchen together utilizing the flexibility of a dishwasher on wheels which we used to extend the assembly line we had going on with our counter space. Kaitlyn and Lindsay both LOVED skinning peaches. Haley and Lindsay were both very helpful with blanching and Haley made several batches of syrup to heat. Lindsay took a turn at halving the peaches and pitting them. The sweet smell of peaches wafted through the house and smelled wonderful upon re-entry. Once you’d been in the house for a while you didn’t notice though so you had to leave and come back in.
I chose to cold pack peach quarters in syrup. The soft peaches that were set aside plus a few more were then blanched, skinned, halved, pitted and they were put on the stove with just enough water to keep the peaches sticking to the bottom and heated until tender. I ran the tender steaming peaches through the food mill at that point. Then in a large pot the milled fruit was combined with some of the peach juice as well as sugar and spices. Stirring and steaming it for about 90 minutes until the concoction rounded on a spoon I was left with peach butter which I’ve never had before or even eaten before but it smells and tastes like a bit of spiced peach pie on a freshly baked biscuit. So Good!!! At the end of two days in a warm kitchen I was left with 37 1/2 quarts of peach quarters and 10 1/2 pints of spiced peach butter; bottles of sunshine for biscuits with steamy soup through the winter months.
And just when we thought our baskets were finally empty… they weren’t! And side note, I priced these baskets the other day at the craft store at $7.99 a piece! Mine are coming free with purchase of fruit and they are so useful as well as pleasant looking.
Now to clean a VERY sticky kitchen…
I love homemade pickles and I’m sure it’s because of the “pucker power” that my grandmother’s pickles had when she made them during my childhood. Hers were the BEST pickles and nobody could duplicate them. They certainly could not be bought. Once, after we’d moved away from her I said that the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a jar of Grandma’s pickles. I wasn’t lying but maybe her secret recipe would have been better to ask for! She wouldn’t tell a soul. And though I make good pickles now, they are not hers.
On day three that week the temperature again climbed higher than forecasted which was becoming quite regular. But my real problem; the humidity was climbing and I knew that time with open windows was limited plus my fresh cucumbers had been waiting days already… a whole bushel of cucumbers in fact that I bought at the Farm Market; wholesale for $20.
So we began washing our bushel of cucumbers for pickling. Making pickles has got to be one of the easiest things to make and they are so yummy. I haven’t bought pickles at the store in over a year and we went pickle-less for months just so we could open our last jar on July 4th for our backyard picnic. Pickles, once made, have to “pickle” for no less than four weeks also so at this point we really are pickle-less… sort of. We’re counting the weeks. And I may get the opportunity to make some more pickles as my cucumbers out in the garden look to be taking off, but we will eat as many as we can fresh. A few years ago I had a really great patch of cucumbers growing… out my ears in fact!!! With my first attempt at making pickles ever I had to go on a pickle buying strike finally until those darn things were gone… they weren’t too good I have to admit but I learned from that and now we make terrific pickles. They make a great vegetable; especially fun for eating in lunches if you aren’t too concerned with sodium. A spear or two is fine… my older son would just keep eating them!
I washed and prepared the fragrant dill and garlic next, another farm fresh purchase. Check out the size of the cucumbers! There wasn’t a bad one in the bushel either. Every single one was firm and crisp.
Pickling an extra half bushel this year required the purchase of two more cases of wide mouth quart jars. If you want to start a conversation with anyone and everyone at the grocery store just go buy canning supplies and wheel your cart toward the checkout. You get all sorts of people asking questions inside of those five minutes. Most people, I find, don’t know you can actually make your own food. Food preparation seems to be one of the more mysterious parts of life which is pretty funny considering how often we have to eat. Kids at school have actually told my kids that pickles can’t be “made” to which my kids respond “well, someone makes them. They don’t just grow like that”. We’ve come a long way from the farm, for sure.
One reason I think pickles are easy is that they are washed, cut and cold packed in brine. There is no blanching, skinning, boiling or anything. The brine is a simple mixture of water, vinegar and canning salt (not regular, iodized salt) heated to steaming with a cheese cloth bag filled with pickling spices. Each jar has dill, mustard seed, garlic, pickle crisp and bay leaves added before the cucumbers and brine. And I only make dill pickles. Nobody in my family likes any other kind of pickle so it’s simple and every body is happy.
Mostly I made dill pickle spears but I did make a few jars of dill pickle chips which we call “Izzy Style” after a favorite local restaurant we like to visit once every so often. At the end of two more days of canning I had processed 32 1/2 quarts of pickles and made loads of crispy cucumber salad. The humidity had really crept up and I was grateful to shower that night, close the house back up and turn on the central air. I felt grateful that we had been able to open up the house for four days, feel the breezes, let the kids out to play and get all that good food taken care of.
