Peach purée

Five years ago, we planted four peach trees.

Peaches are, hands down, my all-time favorite fruit, so I was anxious to get some trees established as early as possible here in our current home. We chose four different varieties that are resistant to peach curl.

Despite cages and fencing, it's been a battle against the deer, who want nothing more than to consume these poor little trees down to nubbins. As a result, they are misshapen and a few branches are dead from the times the deer won.

Despite that, these brave trees are producing fruit. Last year, I harvested about ten pounds. This year ... yowza. One tree in particular came into its own, and its branches were heavy with peaches.

It's the first time we've had anything akin to a decent crop, and I was giddy with delight.

A couple weeks ago, I went and cleaned out the one tree whose peaches were ready to pick. (The other trees, being different varieties, are lagging behind and will be ready to harvest in early September.)

I filled a 30-gallon tub about half-full of fruit just off this one tree.

Curious, I weighed them. Forty pounds. Forty. Pounds. Off one tree. Remember, last year I only got a combined harvest of ten pounds from all four trees.

The next step was to let them ripen. I put down a towel and spread the peaches out on the surface of the woodstove.

They didn't all fit, so I put overflow peaches on a couple of cookie sheets lined with dish towels.

I covered all the fruit with netting to keep the fruit flies off. That prevented a huge source of spoilage.

After a week, the peaches were ripe enough to process. I pulled aside a bowl of the best ones for fresh eating.

I decided to turn the rest into peach purée, since I still had plenty of sliced canned peaches in the pantry. I use peach purée a lot to flavor yogurt and ice cream.

The first step is to scald the peaches in hot water for a few minutes so the skins will slip easily. I completely forgot to get a photo of this step. By the time I remembered to document my progress, I was elbow-deep in the process. Cooling peaches on the left, debris (including small unripe peaches) on the right.

Since I was pureeing the bunch, I didn't bother trying to make tidy slices. I just gutted the peeled peaches and tossed them in a bowl.

As each batch  got processed, I ran the peaches through the blender.

Then I poured the purée into gallon jugs. By this point it was late enough in the day that canning would interfere with our evening chores. After all that work, the volume was reduced to two full gallons of purée. I put these in the refrigerator overnight.

Here's the debris, ready to go into the compost tumbler.

The next morning, I assembled lids, rings, and clean jars.

Filling the jars.

Final tally: 18 pints.

In a tremendously exciting turn of events, my birthday water-bath canners held all 18 pints at once! How wonderful is that? Honestly, why did I wait so many decades to get these canners?

I set two timers, one for each pot, for 35 minutes. I only started the timers when the pots reached a rolling boil.

Out of the canner. This is plenty of purée to last the entire year. And I can't forget, I have three other peach trees still to harvest!

Making strawberry preserves

Don has slowly been painting the outside of our house, one side at a time. During the course of this project, we needed to move our chest freezer (located on the back porch out of direct sunlight) away from the wall so he could paint behind it.

This meant emptying the freezer of all its contents. This wasn't a bad thing, since it allowed us to sort, group, organize, inventory, and discard as needed.

Which is how I found myself with bags and bags and bags of sliced and frozen strawberries. For the last couple of years, any strawberries that I picked and which I didn't use immediately, I sliced and froze. Many of these bags had somehow migrated to the very bottom of the freezer. Time to do something with them.

I'm not a big fan of jams or jellies, so those are not my go-to options when it comes to putting up fruit. However the exception is strawberry preserves. These are easy to make, dense with strawberries, and require only three ingredients (strawberries, lemon juice, sugar).

This is actually a Martha Stewart recipe, one of the few recipes she has that isn't a logistical nightmare to follow. (You know the kind of Martha Stewart recipes I mean: "Fly to Madagascar and harvest three fresh vanilla bean pods. Hang them to dry for several weeks, then condition them for six months in closed boxes. Steep the pods in 35% ethanol for two weeks. Use one teaspoon of this vanilla extract to...")

Anyway, back to preserves. First step: Let all the bags of strawberries defrost overnight.

Then I drained all the juice with a colander.

I planned to cook down the strawberries in my water-bath pots (which are very large). First I needed to get the tare weight of the pot so I could determine the weight of the strawberries.

This is the pot, full of strawberries. Weight of the fruit: Eleven pounds.

According to the recipe, for every 2 lbs. of strawberries, I needed 3 1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice and 1 cup sugar.

Because I had 11 lbs. of strawberries, I had to do a little of the good ol' cross-multiply-and-divide technique to figure out how much lemon juice and sugar I needed.

(Side note: This is possibly THE single-most useful mathematical trick I remember from high school. I use it constantly.)

I added the lemon juice to the strawberries...

...then let the fruit cook over a low heat for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. This releases the juices.

Meanwhile I had the necessary amount of sugar pre-measured.

I poured in the sugar after the strawberries and lemon juice had been stewing for the requisite amount of time.

Stirring in the sugar.

At this point, the fruit mixture needs to come to a boil over medium heat. I used a thermometer to check the temperature. Notice the foam on top. This gets skimmed off after the strawberries reach the required temperature.

When the fruit reached 210F, I turned off the heat and let it cool down, a process that takes a couple of hours. When it was cool, I spooned the preserves into colanders over bowls to drain excess juice. (This keeps the preserves from being too runny.)

Filling the jars.

Into the water bath.  The preserves are processed for 15 minutes at a rolling boil.

Final tally, four quarts and one pint.

The processed jars of fruit preserves were so pretty, I almost hated to move them out of the kitchen. After admiring them for a day or two, though, I finally labeled and dated them, and tucked them in the pantry.

Man I love canning.

Thirty-minute mozzarella

I wanted to make some pizza, but we were out of (bulk store-bought) mozzarella cheese. I'd been too busy to make regular mozzarella lately, so I decided to try something that was – supposedly – quick'n'easy: Thirty-minute mozzarella.

Even though this recipe appears in my extremely trusty copy of "Home Cheese Making," for some reason I was inclined to dismiss it as a gimmick. Cheese in half an hour? C'mon. Certainly I had never tried it before.

However, faced with a shortage of both time and mozzarella, I decided to give it a go.

I started with a gallon of milk over low heat. I always nest two pots, double-boiler style, to make a water jacket. This prevents the milk from scorching.

To the milk, I added a teaspoon and a half of citric acid dissolved in half a cup of cool water.

When the milk hit 90F, I added a quarter-teaspoon of rennet mixed with a quarter-cup of cool water.

When the milk hit about 101F, I turned off the heat and let the rennet do its thing. With this recipe, it only takes about five minutes for the curds and whey to separate.

See? Already it looks mozzarella-ish.

I scooped all the curds into a large bowl, and used the spoon to sorta press out the whey. I poured off the whey, pressed some more, poured off the whey, etc.

Then I put the curds into the microwave for one minute. I donned a latex kitchen glove (which the recipe book recommended) and used one hand to flip the curds around, draining off excess whey. The glove protects my skin from the heat of the mozzarella.

At this point I added a bit of cheese salt and, with my gloved hand, massaged it into the cheese.

I microwaved the cheese for thirty seconds, pressed it using my gloved hand, and drained off the whey. Then I repeated this step.

And you know what? It worked! The result was a nice warm ball of mozzarella cheese.

The last step is to add cold water to the bowl and place ice cubes in it to cool the cheese.

I was astonished how quick and easy this cheese was. Bonus point: It's great on homemade pizza.

I put the kitchen gloves into their own Ziploc baggie, clearly marked for food use. I know I'll be using them again.

In fact, I know what I'll be doing with a lot of my surplus milk from now on...