peach jam

I love peaches at their peak. So I loved this post from Tea and Cookies. So I unearthed the very old family canning pot from the garage, bought some peaches and some jam jars and waded in to making a batch of peach jam. I used 2 lbs of peaches (5),

1 lb of sugar (enthusiastically measured by T) and the juice of 1 lemon. I diced the peaches, added the sugar and lemon juice and left the mixture to sit while T and I went to the market.

An aside - it was Teddy Bear's picnic today at the market, so T brought along his zebra - he was 1 of 2 children brave enough to march in the parade around the market with their stuffie (although he hung onto me via my bag the whole time). After the parade, the kids got cookies and juice and there was a storytime session and then they could prowl for stuffies in the vendor stands - if they found a stuffie they got to keep it. T found lots - a pink whale, a small beanie giraffe, a panda, a bird, a hello kitty cat, a bear and a blue hedgehog. It has to be said that the vendors he plays peek-a-boo with every week did help him find some of the toys.

When we got home, T went to make a jungle for his stuffies and I turned my attention to the jam. I poured the peach mix into a large pot on low heat and stirred. I washed jars and put them in a low oven to sterilize and I tried to get some of the rust off the canning pot rack...without much success, so I'm going to rest the jars on caps. I found this post by tigress in a jam which helped. Tea's recipe said the stirring could take up to 4 hours, so I brought a chair in from outside and had my book and my tea while occasionally stirring the jam mixture. It smelt so divine. After about an hour and a half it was looking fairly jammy

and sure enough, when I tested it, it was jammy enough. I poured it into jars and ended up with 2 - 250 ml jars and 1 - 125 ml jar with a smidge left over which D inhaled as soon as he came in from work! I did the 2 250 ml jars in the canning bath for 10 minutes just to practise as based on D's reaction to the jam, they aren't going to last very long.

So back to the fruit stand tomorrow for me to buy more peaches.