Peaches!

No, we don't have any peaches ready right now. We harvested them about a month ago, but somehow the pictures slipped between the cyber-cracks, and I just noticed them on my computer desktop. They're so beautiful I still had to share. No, I'm not bragging about my photography skills; I'm talking about how gorgeous those peaches are! Makes me want to go grab a jar out of the freezer!

In the past we've always made peach jam, but I wanted to do something different this year. After looking through my canning books, we decided to make peach pie filling from them this time. It was my job to drop them in boiling water and then slip off the skins, and then Mike sliced them and put them into the pot.

The only snafu in the process came after quite a bit of boiling when we realized that the peaches were falling apart, and the whole thing was getting more liquid rather than thicker. I called my good friend and canning queen extraordinaire, Cathy Lafrenz in Iowa, to ask her what was up with the Ball Blue Book recipe. I was guessing that we'd have to add corn starch or something before actually using this as a pie filling, and yep, she said that I was correct. One thing I have noticed about the Ball Blue book in the past is that it doesn't always give you all of the directions for things. It only tells you how to preserve something but not what to do with it after it's canned or frozen.

Of course, the peaches did not fill up an exact number of jars, so we used the left-overs to top our cheese blintzes that we had for breakfast the next morning, and that was delicious! Now that the weather is cooling off some, I'll probably make a pie soon. But if we don't really like this as a pie fillin, I know we can certainly use it as a topping for cheese blintzes.