While I'd love to spend all my time paper crafting, there are other things in life. We planted a peach tree several years ago, and this is the second year we've gotten a pretty good crop from it. We were also given some from Mom & Dad's tree - and a friend gave us some berries. SO . . . we've been canning - all that fruit AND some oranges & lemons that we purchased made great jam and sauces!
Here is what we made:
- Peach Almond Jam - The first batch had more vanilla and almond extracts in it than I would have liked, but the second batch was pretty good. We ended up with eleven 1/2-pints and thirteen 4-oz jars from the two batches.
- Peach Jalapeno Jam - I'm not interested in this type of jam, but Geof likes it - and so might some of my siblings and nephews. We made two 1/2-pints and seven 4-oz jars of this.
- Peach Citrus Marmalade - This one is one of my favorites. It is SO good! Of course, that's only if you like marmalades. We made eighteen 1/2-pints and one 4-oz of this one.
- Maple Vanilla Peach Jam - The recipe made it sound really good, but I wasn't particularly impressed when I first tasted it. It DOES have the distinction of only having maple syrup for sweetener. HOWEVER, after it sat for a couple of days, the flavors were so enhanced - IT IS DELICIOUS! We got five 1/2-pints and six 4-oz jars of this one, BUT we could have had 2 more 1/2-pints if one jar hadn't broken and I hadn't reserved another 1/2-pints worth for eating now!
- Chocolate Orange Marmalade - This sounded SO good, that I made two batches. It IS good, but I don't really taste that much chocolate in it. It's still good marmalade. We made twelve 1/2-pints and five 4-oz jars of this one.
- Peach Melba Sauce - I was glad when we were given some raspberries so I could use them with some of the peaches to try this recipe. I decided to make sauce instead of jam because I realized fruit sauces for waffles etc. would be something we could really enjoy (and would use less pectin as we were running low). If I had realized how good this would turn out to be, I would have made several more batches! As it was, we made seven 1/2-pints and three 4-oz jars of this scrumptious sauce.
- Berry Blitz Sauce - We had more raspberries and some blackberries - just enough to make this recipe. Again, it was a jam recipe that we turned into a fruit sauce recipe. It was good, but next time I'd make more of the Peach Melba instead. We made six 1/2-pints and two 4-oz of this berry sauce.
- Peach Sauce - We still had a bunch of peaches and decided to make the rest into plain peach sauce. From the remaining peaches, we made three 3/4-pint and twenty-seven 1/2-pints.
Whew! That was a lot of jams, marmalades, and sauces - a total of THREE 3/4-pints, EIGHTY-THREE 1/2-pints, and thirty-seven 4-oz jars.