Home Canned Gold

Some years back a dear friend and neighbor taught me how to can peaches. I vowed to can every year after that and while life hasn't always allowed that, I most certainly love it when late summer rolls around and I'm in a position to do so. I love pulling out my canner, my pretty quart jars, and all the canning gadgets that my hubby bought me a few years back.

This year was my 1st time canning in two years. I managed it when Claire was just over 1 year old but overdid myself. At the time, it was less than a year after my back and brain surgeries and my body didn't care for standing on my feet all day. I'm thinking that last year the memory of the pain that canning caused back in '08 was still too fresh so I didn't really give it much thought. But this year, nothing was going to stop me. Especially considering that I had the perfect opportunity to pick up a 1/2 bushel of beautiful peaches while in Brigham City.

I spent a good chunk of the Monday and Thursday after going to Peach Days canning those beautiful Suncrest peaches. I am a touch meticulous about prepping them...in addition to pitting and peeling them, I also cut out the center of the fruit where the "grippies" around the pit are. This year at the suggestion of a couple of friends, I tried briefly boiling a number of the peaches to make peeling faster/simpler. Being the weirdy that I am, I hated it! Some of the peels were easier to remove but I found the fruit to be slippery, some of them were hard to halve because they were so slick, and I didn't like the cooked texture of the outermost layer. So back to my hand peeling with a soup spoon (my favorite trick). The prepping is always the most time consuming part but from there on, it's smooth sailing with getting the jars into the canner(s) and then kicking back and letting the stove do it's thing.

I now have 12 gorgeous quarts of home canned peaches sitting in the storage room in my basement. A perfectly lined up shelf of pure gold that won't be touched until I'm good and ready and the memory of the hours I spent working on them has faded a bit. But when they do get pulled off the shelf...oh, how sweet it will be! Peaches for breakfast in the winter and fresh peach cobbler at a moment's notice. Mmmmmmm!