My sister and her husband showed up at my house with a bunch of Stanley prune-plums.
We spent the evening poking holes in the plums, making the lightest possible syrup and then putting everything into jars and processing them.
We ended up with fourteen quarts! It's so much fun to listen to the jars seal as they cool - they make little musical tings. The happy sound of success!
I was, therefore, inspired to continue with the canning adventures! While my sister and brother-in-law were off visiting folks in Ohio, I took a table full of red haven peaches...
...and turned them into ten quarts of peach halves. I tossed them in a little lime juice along the way, which gives them a fresh peachy flavor with just a hint of lime tang (one jar failed to seal, so I got to taste the final product). I also put up a batch of pint jars and a couple batches of peach jam.
It will be such a delightful treat to have a taste of summer while snowstorms blow around us!
2 comments:
I was surprised and delighted to note this blog citation, while I was looking for something else. At 92 years I no longer can anything, but I was brought up on canned Stanley plums, you might say, and have most recently canned some myself about ten years ago. A further note is my recent purchase of (only) a quart at a nearby roadside stand (Amish) and cooking the pitted halves to provide what is almost an annual 'fix'. Had the luscious juice over ice cream. My first married home was only two miles from Stanley, NY, and that little elementary school was the first for my two oldest children. I spent my whole working life, except for sabbaticals, at Cornell University's NYS Agr. Expt. Station in Geneva, NY, where the variety was developed and named. It was Cornell's custom to name new ones after nearby communities. Well, that's a long story, but I do like canned plums (or prunes). Note that we always canned them as halves - and of course in light syrup.
Thank you for your wonderful comment! I hope I can still be canning when I'm 82 - you're an inspiration. I also enjoyed learning a little more about the origin of the Stanley prune-plum and the Cornell naming conventions. We can them whole, but the pits are easy to extract from the fruit, when the cans are opened. I love to eat them on yogurt - I haven't tried ice cream, but that would be delicious, too. I remember that our grade school used to serve the Stanley plums at lunchtime, so I've been enjoying them for quite a while, too!
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