Pantry Challenge.....finally!

I mentioned earlier that I had deviated from the original replacement plan which was to make mushroom soup. When our neighbor gave us access to ALL his grapefruit, I just had to go with it.

And since the BIG freezer is still on our 'wish list', I decided to can the juice.

I found a couple recipes in the Ball Home Preserving book for canned juice. One was for a 'Four Fruit Nectar' that combined grapefruit, orange, and pineapple juices with peach puree. We happen to have some frozen peaches left from last summer but no other citrus handy, so I improvised.

I had frozen the peaches whole with the skin on....which makes them SO easy to peal when you need to use them. Just wash under warm water and the peelings slip right off....yea!

Then I sliced them up and pureed the fruit in the food processor.

The kids helped me juice all the grapefruits....not enthusiastically, but they got the job done :)

I mixed the peach puree and the juice in a large pot, heated it thru and filled the hot jars....

...leaving a quarter inch of head space.

I processed the jars in a water bath for 20minutes....

....and ta da! 7 quarts of grapefruit peach and 4 quarts of grapefruit berry.

The berry juice was the second batch I made. We have such a small freezer and it was overflowing at this point so I decided to use up all the 'smoothie' fruit (since we really only drink smoothies in the summer anyway). After looking thru the fruit juice recipe section, I decided to try a rendition of 'Strawberry Lemonade'. I used a combination of strawberry, blackberry and raspberries with the grapefruit juice. The grapefruits are almost as tart as lemons so it came out pretty yummy (with very little added sugar).

My little kitchen helper :)

We drink ALOT of grapefruit juice in the summer. It's great added to sparkling mineral water, on ice, especially when the temps creep up to the 110 mark. It'll be so nice this summer to open up our very own homemade juice drinks....yea!