Can It!

I haven't written for the past week because my mom has been down visiting. I love my mom, and I am so thankful that she doesn't ever complain about all the travel she does to come visit us at least a couple times a year. It is a 14 hour drive, but we flew her down here with our airmiles this time. She is such a help to me, always cleaning up, doing the dishes, the laundry, almost everything! She takes the girls for a walk everyday, and always trying to entertain them for me. It is excellent. And I enjoy visiting with her too, though a lot of the time, we just are together in the house, not having depp, in-depth conversations. She will read a book and I will do whatever it is I am doing. (Maybe reading blogs.)

Every fall my mom cans peaches and pears, and this year, she helped me do it. I have never canned before so I was very excited to try. First we went to the fruit stand to buy our fruit, and we decided to only do peaches because the pears were still too hard and we didn't have the time to wait for them to ripen. We only did a 10 lb box. Some were too soft already, and we just used them for pie (which I am baking at this moment). We blanched the peaches to make them easier to peel, but it only worked for some of them. I enjoyed the peeling, even if it was difficult on some of them. We had the syrup boiling beforehand, 14 cups water to 7 cups white sugar. Mom would take our jars as we filled them and pour the syrup in them right away. Once we filled them all and put the caps on we put them in the canning pot, boiling them for 20 minutes.

I actually enjoyed the whole process; it was not as much work as I thought it would be. My mom was obviously there overseeing it, so I don't think I would attempt doing this by myself, but would ask (force) my hubby to help me. He likes to cook and he is the one who likes to eat the peaches. I had borrowed my friend's canning pot, so I think that I will just invest in my own.

Surveying my cans after sealing them, I felt very proud of doing this for the first time. The only down side was that my husband commented that the slices looked small, he was used to seeing canned fruit in quarters. He didn't complain, but I felt like I had disappointed him. Next time I will remember to make the slices much bigger. So maybe next week I will have pears done!