Peach Jam

One of our families favorite chicken dinners (which is pretty much all we eat anymore) is something we call 'red chicken'. We're not very creative in the Garver house, most of my recipes get renamed according to their color or main ingredient....red chicken, cheese chicken, mustard chicken...you get the idea.

Anyway, this particular recipe has 3 ingredients (besides chicken) - apricot/pineapple jam, Lipton soup mix, and Russian dressing. To continue with my Pantry Replacement resolution I want to replace all 3 with home-made versions. On this day I made peach/pineapple jam, which contains peaches, nectarines and apricots...as well as pineapple .

Every time we bought peaches, usually at the fruit stand near our house, there would inevitably be a few that didn't get eaten and started to soften more than we care for (Wilson likes his rock-hard) so I would put them in the freezer. By the end of August, we had quite a bit of fruit in there. Same with the pineapple. Usually the fruit is used in smoothies but with warmer weather starting to wind down (we don't do smoothies in winter) it was time to use up the fruit. Ignore the Dibbs in the background....those were purchased in a moment of weakness....I was actually looking for Bonbons :)

Peeled the fruit, cooked it up, added sugar and pectin and canned in a water-bath for 15 minutes.

I ended up with 7 pints and 3 half-pints of peach/pineapple jam. At the rate we eat 'red chicken' this should get us thru Christmas!

...Plus I made a seperate batch of peach jam and got 7 more pints and 5 half-pints.