Preserving a box of Peaches

This week at the farmers market I decided to get another box of fresh and delicious peaches.  This week's variety were semi cling, so still not quite what I wanted for canning peach slices.  Instead I decided to try a couple of new things: peach pie filling and peach jelly.  Those recipes only used about half of the box, so I decided to dehydrate the rest for more yummy sweet snacks.

Round one of canning was the peach pie filling.  I skinned and sliced up the peaches and added chopped apples, raisins, sugar and spices to the mix.  It smelled amazing in my kitchen while this was cooking down.

The end result was seven pints of peach pie filling.  I am sure that these will become dessert in no time and I should make a few more for good measure.

The peach jelly was next on the list, but it takes a two step process.  The first step is getting juice out of the peaches.  This is basically boiling quartered peaches until they are soft and then collecting the juice with a strainer overnight.  The next step is making the juice into jelly.  For this you need to add sugar, pectin and heat.  The end result of this process was five half pints of beautiful pink peach jelly.

Last but not least was dehydrating what was left of the box of peaches so they wouldn't go to waste.  These peaches were so perfectly ripe that the skins came right off with hardly any effort from me.  I sliced the flesh off the pits and filled my dehydrator trays one by one.  When I was done I had reduced several pounds of peaches down to a few ounces of dried slices.