Peaches, Done!

 I love peaches.  But they have to be properly ripe, which typically means I don't have fresh peaches until August.  I never buy them from the store, those are always too hard, picked too soon to be as flavorful as I like them to be.

So, unless I can peaches, I go without them a lot.

DH does not like peaches.  He could care less if there was never, ever a peach at this little place here again.  In fact, when our (struggling for many years) peach tree finally croaked this past winter, he wasn't sad.  At all.  Unlike me, who is still wondering if we will be living here long enough to make it worthwhile for me to buy and plant a new peach tree.  With DH hoping to retire in 5-6 years, and then who knows how much longer we'd live at this little place here, probably not.

For this year, I decided to buy peaches from a sort-of nearby farm/orchard and can them.  At least that way I have some that I can eat now and then throughout the next eleven months.

 And, I confess, before I bought a half-bushel for canning, I bought a quart box to taste test.  I ate that quart of peaches one by one (not all in the same day!), standing next to the kitchen sink, which in my book, is the proper place to eat a perfect peach.  Because a perfect one is juicy and the juice will run down your chin and your arms, and you just don't want to drip that sticky juice onto the furniture or the floor.  So you must eat a fresh peach leaning over the kitchen sink.  Let the sink catch those sticky drips.  Easy clean up.  And then you're in prime position to wash your face, hands, and arms when you're done.

Anyway, I spent the vast majority of Friday afternoon canning peaches.  Some of my half-bushel felt like they were too hard to can, so I left those to ripen more and will just eat them fresh in the coming week or so.  But the vast majority were just right, and so I put up 17 pints of peaches.