Canning and Preserving
Jam Making Basics – What is Pectin?
Learn how to make jam successfully – with a little help from pectin
Dark Chocolate Covered Orange Peel
Surprise your Valentine with homemade candied orange peel dipped in dark chocolate. As a thrifty Yankee I find it difficult to throw away perfectly good food. Leftover spinach salad gets added to frittatas, dried up cheese ends flavor soup, and even citrus wrappings are turned into sweet candied orange peel. Never had candied orange peel? […]
All-Natural White Peach Applesauce
Let the true peach and apple flavors shine through – make your own applesauce. Applesauce never goes out of style. It is loved by babies, great-grandmas, and everyone in between. But I always find the commercially made kind a bit disappointing. So much of it is full of high fructose corn syrup or preservatives. Luckily […]
Small Batch White Peach Prosecco Jam
Combine late summer white peaches with sparkling wine for a Bellini-type jam. Do you hang on to summer as long as possible? I sure do. Although autumn brings its own charms, I love summer, and especially love summer fruit. So, when the Washington State Fruit Commission Canbassador program asked if I would like to write […]
Macerated Dried Peaches
Macerate peaches and then dehydrate them for chewy goodness and a perfect lunchbox snack. Every summer I dehydrate a few peaches. Usually I slice, treat in lemon juice so they keep their color, and then dry till crumbly. This method works great if you want to rehydrate them at a later time to top oatmeal […]
Technique Tuesday: How to Make Candied Peach Bits
Turn fresh summer peaches into candied bits for later fruitcakes and other baked goods. Candying fruit is basically a process that replaces the water in fruit with sugar. Sugar keeps the fruit from spoiling, a preserving method that has been around since ancient times. Today most of us are familiar with candied fruit in one […]
Honey Peach Apricot Jam
Peaches plus apricots plus honey combine for a desert-island worthy jam! What are your three desert-island foods? The three foods that you can’t live without? The three delicacies that cure a bad mood, soothe hurt feelings, and brighten your day? My desert-island foods have always been a rosy, vine-ripened tomato; dark, bittersweet chocolate; and a […]
Sunshine Fruit Butter
I can’t let anything go to waste, which I how I came up with this fruit butter concoction of mangoes, apricots, and peaches – sunshine fruits! August – perhaps the most perfect time of the year. Locally, instead of lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), August brings berries and late apricots and peaches. Since […]
Technique Tuesday: How to Can Summer Fruit at Home
Now is the time to can ripe summer apricots, peaches, berries and other fruit. August – when summer fruits are at their best. This week at the local Farmer’s Market I found lipstick-red strawberries, plump blueberries, sweet (not mouth-puckering) blackberries, luscious peaches of every shape and variety, Ginger Gold apples, green, pink, red, yellow, and […]
Technique Tuesday: How to Check for the Jam Setting Point
Don’t overcook your delicious homemade jam – count on one of these 4 methods to successfully check the jam setting point. Making jam or jelly with prepared pectin is supposed to be an easy project. Add the pectin, bring to a boil, boil for 2 minutes and voila! Perfectly prepared jam. It doesn’t always work […]
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