Saturday morning, bright & early, I headed up to the park to get my peaches. This was so exciting! I was actually feeling a little bit Amish as I brought my peaches home and set them out on the counter along with my Ball Blue Book of Canning.
Now usually I am pretty laid back when it comes to cooking. I don't always follow the recipe exactly as it's written or I'm not always real accurate when I measure but this time I couldn't take any chances so I started reading everything the Ball book had on peaches. I also printed some stuff off a couple of websites just to make sure I had enough information. At this point I was still pretty excited and feeling pretty sure of myself. Then I started laying out everything I needed. I quickly realized that I didn't have all we would need so I headed next door to Marie's house. Since she had done this before I figured she'd have what I need, which she did. Now we were all set.
Vanessa wanted some of the peaches so she had come over to help. I'm sure this was a decision she was regretting because from the start we ran into problems. According to the book the quickest way to peel the peaches was to put them in boiling water for 30 seconds or so and then put them directly into a bowl of ice water at which point the skins should just fall off. Yeah right!!! It was obvious we didn't leave them in the boiling water long enough because the skins were not coming off so as we went to all the work of putting 14 lbs of peaches in boiling water then transferring them to ice water only to have to peel them by hand anyway. Oh well, live and learn, right?!? After they were all peeled we divided them into two batches so that we could have pie filling as well as the canned peaches.
The plan was to start processing the peaches and while we were waiting on them we would get the pie filling ready. Seemed like a good plan at time. Unfortunately it didn't work out so nicely. The book said the best way to clean the jars and keep them hot was to run them through the dishwasher and use the heat cycle to dry them. Well....the jars were clean at least. Hot, they weren't, so I quickly got a pan of water and put a couple of jars in to start boiling. Finally we got the jars filled and in the water to process. Now to start on the pie filling. We started heating more jars while the pie filling was cooking and after filling the first jar I realized that this recipe was made to freeze. I had to quickly dig out some freezer bags so we could start filling them. We got those done just in time because the timer was going off and it was time to take the jars out of the water bath. Now we were scrambling to find room to set the hot jars. Finally they were out and the pie filling was done. We could relax. It had only taken us five hours to can 6 pints of peaches and 7 pints of peach pie filling. The way I figure it if our time is worth, lets say $10 an hour x two people and we spent 5 hours canning plus the cost of the peaches each pint cost me about $5.60. Wow! Not exactly cost effective but on the positive side we learned what not to do the next time. Oh yeah, did I mention, we only did half the peaches. We still had Vanessa's to do.
Throughout all this the boys kept coming in wanting stuff and Eryn was running around. At one point the boys were hungry so I gave them some chocolate pie I had made that morning. We got so involved in our canning project that we didn't know that they had left the pie plate, with pie still in it, on the table. Eryn had discovered this though and was having a great time eating chocolate pie. Oh well, what could be do but laugh and take a picture.
I wonder how long it takes to can spaghetti sauce?
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