A Clean Pair of Hands

When I'm canning, I always wish that there was some way to always have a clean pair of hands in the kitchen so I could be more efficient. Q was kind enough to be those for me this weekend and we got a huge quantity of peaches put up in record time. (He was also responsible for creating a new marinara recipe, which I'll share tomorrow.)


I thought I'd give a quick snapshot of my canning process. I've got it tuned to just how I like it now. (Thanks for the action shot, Q.)

The prep station

The blue bowl is a citric acid dip with a colander in it so the peaches can be drained in situ before getting poured into the syrup. The silver bowl is compost. The white plate was whole pits. I'm saving them to try and grow my own peach trees. Putting my cutting board into a baking pan has totally contained all of the peach mess.

The canning pots

Back left is the boiling water canner. Front left is the blanching pot (it has a built in colander!). The front right has a couple of inches of water and jars upside down in it steam sterilizing as the canner is processing. The back right has the syrup. We have gotten very good at rotating them around as needed. I'm am frequently grateful for the granite countertops during this type of procedure.

We're almost done preserving for the season - and the peaches are definitely done!