Can Jam: Peach Butter

Trust me.  You're not all I've been neglecting.  You should see how overgrown my garlic bed is.  (Yes, it's all I've managed to grow.  No, I'm not proud of it.)

Current favorite way to eat peach butter:  over a lot of very thick plain Greek yogurt.

But I'm happy to report that my first-ever attempt at canning fruit was a smashing success.  It turns out, if you go to the farmer's market and inform the folks in the booths that you'll be canning (better yet, making a jam of sorts), they're likely to magically produce a basket of "not-quite-perfect" fruits that they wouldn't have been able to sell.  Those, they'll give to you for a song (literally, in my case).

One of the baskets of peaches, doing time before a super hot bath

So I had tons of utterly fantastic Fredericksburg peaches (yep, they have their own website, they're that good), so I set about peeling them.  

I'm no dummy.  I totally Googled peeling tons of peaches at a time.  I tried the boiling/ice water bath method.  For some of them, it worked.  For the rest, well - let's just say I spent a while peeling peaches.  By the time it was over, I had four pounds of peeled peaches, sticky forearms, and the start of an ache in my lower back.  I tossed all of the peaches into the blender with the juice of two lemons and dumped the whole thing into a crock pot with one cup of sugar (more to balance out the lemon juice than to sweeten the peaches - they were plenty sweet on their own).  Then I let it reduce until it was about 1/3 of the original volume and canned in a water bath.