Thursday, September 11, 2008

Is this not a beautiful sight?



I canned twelve half-pints of chunky peach jam last night, and processed the rest of the box of peaches into less chunky pulp for smooth peach jam. That's in the freezer at the moment, and will be cooked and canned tonight. I ran out of jars.

These are organic Suncrest peaches straight from the orchard, when I was passing through Kimberly, Oregon two weeks ago on a work trip. My co-corker and I each got a 22-lb box from the Kimberly Orchards farmstand, and got to drive home smelling warm, fragrant peaches all the way. They were a bit hard when we bought them, but ripened nicely. They are delicious. We ate some fresh, but 22 lbs is a lot of peaches!

It was perhaps not the best plan to start the canning process at 8:00 pm, after working a full day, but they needed to be processed NOW. If not, there was a danger of them passing from perfectly ripe to rotten. It would have been a crime - a CRIME, I say - to let that happen.

Yum.

3 comments:

Caroline M said...

Peaches don't grow here, not unless you go to a lot of effort anyway. That means that I just can't get my brain around having enought of them to jam, they come in packets of four not by the case. They usually turn from hard to rotten, the juicy peaches of my childhood are just a memory now. I have no idea what they invented to make them so miserable these days.

Suz said...

Wow.. Nice peaches! I just go for the traditional fattening up peach-custom of cobbler. One of these days I've got to try canning.

Anonymous said...

Ohhhhhh, that looks so yummy! I might buy some peaches this weekend and do some brandying, etc. There are some available at my market from Pennsylvania -- they don't grow here.