The plan for the day was to get the peaches canned, along with a bit of applesauce and apple butter. However, nature had other plans in store.
When I went down this morning to check the peaches, of course they weren’t ready yet. Usually they are ripe and ready to be used about three days after we bring them home. Not this time, most were still pretty hard. Hopefully they will be ready tomorrow after work.
Last night I did a whole lot of prep and labeling of ingredients. The goal was to put up some peach chutney, jelly, chili sauce, fruit cocktail, and depending on how many peaches were left, peach syrup. Need to make sure there are some for the family to eat this time as well. Personally, I don’t like peaches with their skin still on. The fuzz sends my senses into overdrive for some reason.
The good thing is, I was still able to work with the 1/2 bushel of apples we bought from the farm yesterday. In case you didn’t know, there are a lot of apples in a 1/2 bushel. I’ve never bought that many before, so I was hoping there would be at least enough to make the applesauce and apple butter. Most definitely there were enough! Enough in fact to where I was able to make three quarts of applesauce, 7-1/2 pints of apple butter, an apple pie, almost a dozen apple empanadas, and still had about a dozen apples left over. I may make an apple crisp later this week once the other desserts are gone.
I did get to use my new juicer/strainer though. It worked wonderfully. Loved how I didn’t have to peel the apples before cooking them. The new toy took all of it off and squeezed every last bit of pulp out of the apples. The directions said I could have just quartered the apples and let the machine take care of the cores and the seeds. I wasn’t ready to test that theory yet.
Seeing how well it worked, I’m looking forward to using it to make seedless blackberry and strawberry jams—going blackberry picking next weekend. Still have to figure out where I can go to pick some strawberries, if they are still in season.
Now I’m the happy kind of tired this evening. Feels good to finally sit down for a moment. Need to restore my energy because I’m pretty sure those peaches are going to be ready tomorrow, meaning it will be several hours of canning tomorrow evening too.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man 