Morning in the kitchen

Made some yummy peach butter this morning - yeah I had never heard of it either but it sounded so good I decided that I needed some.

First I had to blanch the peaches, which is pretty easy. It is just putting your peaches in boiling water for about 50 seconds and then putting them in ice water to cool off quickly. Then the skin on the peaches just peels right off. It looks like this:

Boiling the peaches

Then they go straight to the ice bath - in this picture you can see where I scored it on the bottom, the skin is starting to peel away

Then you can just peel the skin right off

And you end up with peaches that look like this

poor little naked peaches.....

Now you just slice them up add some water ( I think I added around 1/2 cup of water) and cook them until the peaches are all mushy and soft

Let me tell you they smelled really, really good.

This is the part where the kitchen got real messy and hot. I used the food mill and mushed the peaches up and then added the sugar (about 4 cups) and cooked them until thick and then processed in cans. I did add some cinnamon to the mixture to spice it up a bit. I ended up with this:

These will make nice Christmas gifts tucked in a basket with some shortbread. Maybe I need to make some shortbread today as well........you know, to try out


Oh, how could I forget?! The rain lilies bloomed