Pear Preserves

The other day while I was at the grocery store, I saw pears were on sale for 77¢ a pound!  Around here they are usually around $.149/lb.  So I grabbed a few bags and stuffed them full of pears!  It just happens that we had recently run out of our favorite 'jam'...pear preserves.

I was introduced to this wonderful stuff when I married my husband.  My father-in-law likes to make pear preserves.  It's a perfect blend of sweet fruit flavor and spicy cinnamon.  It's absolutely amazing on my buttermilk biscuits.

So this past Friday, my husband and I worked on peeling, coring and slicing over 20 pounds of pears.  We ended up with about 45 cups of pears, and about 15 cups of peelings, etc. (I'll tell you what I did with those later)  When we were done cooking them down, we had a total of 7 quarts of pear preserves.  We started with jelly jars, but ended up scrambling for all the jars we had available. :)

Here is the recipe for pear preserves...in a smaller batch. :)

Pear Preserves

15 cups pears, peeled, cored and thinly sliced

5 cups sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon powder

1/8 teaspoon vanilla

Put the pears and sugar together in a large bowl.  Stir until all the pears are coated in sugar.  Now let them set for a couple hours.  The sugar will draw some of the juice out of the pears and they will get syrupy.  After a couple of hours, put the pears and syrup into a large stockpot.  Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for several hours, stirring occasionally.  You want to cook them until the pears are translucent and alot of the liquid has boiled off, leaving a thick syrup.  Spoon into sterilized canning jars and seal with sterilized lids.  Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.  Remove from the water and place in a non-drafty area for them to seal.  Enjoy!



As for the peelings, I put them in a sauce pan with 2 cups water, and two cups sugar.  I boiled this down for an hour or so, then strained out the peelings, and boiled the juice down some more to make syrup!   Yummy!

Note:  It is best to remove the cores/seeds before boiling the peels, as consuming too many of the seeds can be poisonous.

Find more canning and preserving recipes at Little Natural Cottage at http://www.littlenaturalcottage.com/?p=2155

Peaches!

Peaches are in season here in July and the first part of August.  I'd been meaning to go pick some for weeks, but things kept coming up that kept me extremely busy.  So I almost missed out this year!

Saturday we finally had a free day, so we called some of the orchards around here to see if they still had peaches.  The answer was always the same, "Sorry, we're out for the season.".  I was beginning to think we weren't going to find any!  We drove to a produce stand about 50 miles away, and they had two small boxes of local peaches left.  So I got the last of the local peaches!  And it was totally worth it!

The peaches were very ripe, so we had to put them up right away.  We blanched them in boiling water for about 30 seconds, then put them in cold water.  The peels slide right off!

My husband even donned an apron and helped me peel them!

Then I sliced them up and put some right into the freezer bags.

For some more of them I used this recipe from Where the Wild Ferns Grow : Frozen Peaches With Orange Juice.  I thought I had orange juice concentrate so I didn't buy any more.  It turns out what I had was Orange Peach Mango juice concentrate, so that's what I used.  It turned out awesome!  I let the peaches sit in the juice for a while as I finished up the other peaches, and the juice turned a pretty pinkish color with the yellow peaches peeking through.   It really is like frozen sunshine!

I made a peach crisp dessert with the 'frozen sunshine' peaches and it was really good served with vanilla ice cream!

Peach Crisp

4 cups peaches in juice concentrate

1/3 to 1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 cup flour

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup quick cooking oatmeal

Put peaches in an ungreased 8 inch square baking pan.  Crumble together brown sugar, flour, salt butter and oatmeal.  Spread on top of peaches.  Bake at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes or until lightly browned.  Serve with vanilla ice cream!

With the rest of the peaches I made my sister-in-law's recipe from Little House on the Prairie Living : Peach - Cantaloupe Butter.  Cantaloupes are also in season here, so this is as fresh and as tasty as it gets!

+

= Delicious!