Awake at 4:00 seems reasonable when you go to bed at 8:00. It is true what our elders tell young parents, that the day will come when sleep returns. Days and nights all our own, and just to emphasize the cliche further: yes, you will miss those little buggers and their pointy-elbows-jammed-into-your-neck-snuggles. At the same time, you’ll revel in sleeping all starfish-like in your very own spacious bed. Writing by 5:20 and it’s still dark outside. Summer has felt relentless this year with oppressive humidity and rain, heat too, but that’s not the challenging part. It’s the humidity that’ll do you in. These last few days we’ve been blessed with a taste of autumn. Nothing committal, but enough to make having the canner running for most of the day a pleasant experience. Forty quarts later, we’ve got plenty of peaches to fill our wintry days and nights. I was hoping for fifty quarts, maybe next year. In the meantime, forty isn’t something to complain about. And we’re still on track for one hundred quarts of fruit overall, which was the main goal.
I always take the time to peel peaches when canning or freezing, which seems terribly laborious, but given yesterday’s cool breeze and the fact that I’d set the day aside for the job, was not something I minded. Plus, peach skin in your yogurt or cobbler is not pleasant. The skins have to go. The trick to easy-ish peach processing is to make sure you have freestone peaches, that they are of perfect ripeness (underripe peaches do not peel well, overripe peaches can turn mushy), and to score a large “x” on the bottom of each peach with your knife before dropping it in the blanching water. By "large" I mean let the “x” go up the sides of the peach a third of the way. Score it like you mean it. Then, after blanching and after they’ve sat in the ice water bath for a couple of minutes, you just peel up each corner from where you made the “x” and the skin slips off in four easy sheets. Truly, not troublesome. Sure, it takes some time to get through a large quantity, but it’s not a frustrating task when done this way. Those score marks combined with the perfect ripeness are everything. Once peeled, just slice wedges of peach right off the pit with your paring knife. They pop right off when using freestones. I actually do this right over the jar when canning, as I try to handle the delicate slices as little as possible. Place a wide mouth funnel in the jar to direct your aim. To be sure, preserving peaches - no matter how efficiently you come at it - is still a sticky mess, but that’s nothing a little soap and hot water can’t take care of. Cracking open a jar of summer peaches on a wintry day to make cinnamon scented crisp, sure makes a little effort in August seem worth it.
