Peaches - Check!

I think I'm done canning peaches for this year. I found some great sales, cheap enough to make it worth canning, and peaches are SO easy.

19 quarts of peaches (some with cinnamon sticks and light sugar syrup, some with honey syrup)

7 pints of peach butter (a little chunkier than I meant to make it, should have mashed again)

I love how the peach butter tastes. I bought white peaches the second time around, and the acid level is low enough that it's recommended to can with lemon juice. So I canned part of them in halves with a touch of lemon juice and enough honey to compensate, and cooked up the rest. I put them in the crockpot and reached in and squished them all, so fun! They cooked for 24 hours, during which time they managed to ooze juice all over the counter, oops!

I threw the butter in the fridge until the next night when I had time to can. I heated them on the stove and added lemon juice, honey, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. I had found a recipe somewhere on the internet for ginger-white-peach jam and it sounded so good, so I followed the general idea. I simmered it until some more liquid was gone. It actually made 8 pints but my canner would only hold 7, so we enjoyed the extra on fresh bread. It's YUMMY!

I'm sure this doesn't look like an exciting package to you, but I was thrilled to get it! I bought a bulk order of canning lids and all those boxes of lids look so cool to me! There are two layers of regular lids and wide mouth lids underneath.

I'm ready for the next canning project! I'll gladly take excess fruit off trees. In fact, I've been eyeballing the apricot tree across the street. I can't quite tell which backyard it's in, but I'm about to go offer to pick their leftovers and barter bread if needed.