The Best Peach Jam I've Ever Had

OK, disclaimers first: I used nectarines, not peaches, because the sale-price nectarines were riper than the sale-price peaches. So there.

Back to our show: The jam. This batch of sugary goo is out. of. control. The boys wanted to just eat and eat it once I gave them a little taster. I intentionally preserved it in smaller jars so we wouldn't eat it all in one fell swoop once opened. It has a few less-than-conventional ingredients, but I think they are completely worth it. Oh, and go easy on the almond extract—we're talking drops, not anything more. That stuff will take over if you let it.

My Perfect Peach/Nectarine Jam

makes 6-8 cups

3-4 pounds ripe peaches and/or nectarines

7 1/2 cups sugar

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup water

1 cinnamon stick

1 vanilla bean, split

1/2 tsp unsalted butter

scant 1/8 tsp almond extract

2- 3oz. packets liquid pectin

Peel, pit, and chop peaches. Give them a good mashing—I used my hands and just squished them about, but you could also use a potato masher or pulse them a bit in a food processor. I got some great textural variety using my hands; I think I'd do it again.

Put peaches in a large, heavy saucepan, and add sugar, lemon juice, water, cinnamon stick, and vanilla. Stir to combine, and put over medium heat; stir until sugar is dissolved. Add butter and almond (I warned you—be careful with that stuff—err on the side of caution, and adjust to taste) and stir to combine. Heat, stirring constantly, until jam reaches a steady boil. Add both packets of pectin, and return to a boil. Boil 1 minute, remove from heat, and bottle that stuff using good common sense.

You don't have to preserve it of course. You could just put it in jars in the refrigerator and eat it up with a spoon. Or you could put it in a sweet dough shell and have an instant summer tart. No matter what you do with it, you're going to love the complex, smooth, summery flavour, especially in the dead of winter when you pull that jar off the pantry shelf. I know I'm looking forward to it.

Peach Syrup

Today our peaches were finally ready for canning. We, of course, have been eating them constantly since Monday night, but they weren't peeling and pitting easily, so we gave them a couple days to ripen up. Oh, Hallelujah! did they ripen up. They're amazing, especially for so early in the season, and we were happy to put up a dozen quarts in jars and a few more in the freezer for smoothies.

When all the peaches were packed away, I found myself with several cups of accumulated peach juice and a huge pile of peach peel. It seemed too promising to throw away, so I searched and adjusted and finally settled on making some peach syrup to have on hand for when we need a little waffle love or a pancake party.

Most of this is principle and taste based—it'll kind of depend on what you want in the end, but here are the principles:

• You need peach juice, about 8 cups. Mine was a combination of what drained from the peaches and some I made by steeping the skins in water. I let it steep until it tasted wonderful, and called it good. So, if you have more juice on hand, add less water, just plan for 8 cups total.
• You should use 1/2 as much sugar as juice. So, if you have 8 cups juice, you should use 4 cups sugar. Jams and jellies tend to use 7/8-1 cup sugar per sup of juice, but syrup doesn't need to be as thick, so you can go easy. You'll want to measure your juice before adding your sugar to make sure you don't overdo it.
• Pectin is optional. I added some because I was trying to finish two different types of stuff and the same time and didn't want to wait any longer. You're looking for a temperature between 215˚ and 220˚ for your syrup if you don't use pectin. The best way to check it is with a frozen plate. It'll cool a dribble of jam quickly so you know how it will set. It's like the water test for candy.

So here's how I made mine today, and I consider it a great triumph for people who want to use every last bit of their fruit!

Peach syrup

makes 3-4 pints

3 cups peach juice (leftovers from canning)

3 cups peach peels and small chunks of fruit

5 cups water

4 cups sugar

2 Tbsp pectin+1/3 cup sugar [optional]

Boil peach juice, peels, and water gently until the taste is about where you want it, strong enough for the flavour of your syrup. Drain through a sieve, and press all the liquid out of the solids. Discard solids. Return juice to stove and bring to a boil. Add sugar, and boil gently, stirring often, until the frozen plate test gives you the desired thickness. If you're in a hurry, mix pectin and sugar, then add to syrup (careful, it will foam up!) and cook 2 minutes at a rolling boil. Preserve using good sense.

Radish Relish

Have you ever had spring time and too many radishes? Yeah, it's never happened to me before, either.

We actually ate all the lovely French breakfast radishes form our garden, but the Community garden we work has so many radishes that they've now either gone to seed or become so big that they're really just spicy potatoes. They also didn't get thinned, so they all worked their giant selves up into their air so they're vulnerable to bugs and drying and such. So, yesterday we picked about 10 pounds of radishes—that's the weight of the roots, not the leaves—and today I set to do something useful with them.

Enter Radish Relish. Now, I don't know how it will be after spending a few weeks/months in the cupboard, but today it's a little spicy, a little tangy, a little sweet, and would be excellent on a hamburger. Or roast beef. It's like pickle relish (well, duh . . .) but a little more exciting, to my mind, like a cross between relish and horseradish. When you come visit, I'll let you try it.

Radish Relish

makes 2-3 pints, but I made, um, SIX batches, so I have 8 quarts.

1 pound radishes

1/2 pound celery stalks

1/2 large sweet onion (about 1 cup)

1/2 jalapeño pepper, seeds and all

1 cup sugar

1 tablespoon mustard seed

2 teaspoons salt

1 1/2 teaspoons dill seed

White Vinegar to cover

Grate radishes, celery, onion, and jalapeño in your food processor, and mix them all together. Combine with remaining ingredients in a large pan, cover with vinegar (you may want to weigh down the vegetables to keep them from floating up) and let stand on the counter for 3 hours. After sitting time, bring to boil, and cook for 10 minutes. Ladle into jars and store in the refrigerator, or follow good health canning guidelines to preserve on the shelf.

Jalapeño Jelly

I have a new bane. Of my existence. The people who previously occupied my increasingly fabulous home not only painted it all beige, which is not the focus of this post, but let the backyard apple tree grow to epic proportions without regard to health, safety, or how many freakin' apples would end up on the ground feeding our now pestilent insect population. It's so large that my apple picker won't reach the top boughs. When I'm standing on the deck.

Right.

All fragments aside, I do loathe this tree, and I had every intention of either carefully molding it down to manageable size, or chopping it down entirely. It is a nuisance, and I've no time for nuisances.

Now that I've ranted a diva's portion, let me show you what I did decide to do with the apples my boys and I could gather.

Don't you just imagine that this is what jelly in heaven looks like? I, of course, agree wholeheartedly. Rather than peel, core, slice, mash, or otherwise push myself to the brink of insanity by dissecting and cooking down my smaller than the grocery store sized apples, I opted to chop them up, combine them intelligently with other bounties of our garden, and create my first jalapeño jelly. Oh, and it's divine, made completely with organic ingredients from our garden, excepting the two things I can't grow here: cranberries and sugar. No added pectin, colors, or flavours, just delicious freshness, sweetness, and a kick that reminds you that this pairs as well with peanut butter as it does with smooth cream cheese.

Jalapeño Jelly

adapted from Simply Recipes

yield 4-6 cups jelly

I doubled this, but it proved a massive challenge to my cookware restraints, especially during boiling. It did, however, set up just fine, since it used natural pectin and sugar to do sorather than store bought stuff.

4 lbs of tart apples (e.g. Granny Smith), unpeeled, chopped into big pieces, including the cores

5 jalapeño chili peppers, chopped (remove the ribs and seeds to make it mild)

1 serrano pepper, chopped (you could replace this with another jalapeño if you want)

1 bell pepper, seeds and ribs removed, chopped

1 cup cranberries (optional but recommended, will help with color and with setting)

3 cups water

3 cups white vinegar

3 1/2 cups sugar (7/8 cup for each cup of juice)

Combine the apple pieces, apple cores (needed for their pectin content), jalapenos, bell pepper, cranberries (if using), water and vinegar in a large pot. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to medium-low, simmering for about 20 minutes, or until the apples, cranberries, and peppers are soft. Stir occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan where it might burn. When apples are soft, use a potato masher or stick blender to mash up the apple pieces to the consistency of slightly runny apple sauce.

Spoon the mash into a douple layer of cheesecloth set inside a colander and set over a large bowl. Leave to strain for several hours or overnight—the longer it sits, the more juice and flavour you'll get. If your pulp is too thick, and nothing is coming out, you can add an extra 1/2 cup or cup of water to it. You want to end up with about 4 cups of juice, although I came up with 6-7 cups because I let it drain almost 24 hours.

Measure the juice, then pour into a large, wide, thick-bottomed pot. Add the sugar (7/8 a cup for each cup of juice—3 1/2 cups is a guide, use the 7/8 rule to get it just right.) Heat gently, stirring to make sure the sugar gets dissolved and doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Bring to a boil and cook forEVER. The original recipe said 10-15 minutes, but I sat there for almost two hours last night carefully making sure it didn't boil over in my unacceptably-sized pot. Use a spoon to skim off the surface scum. Continue to boil until a candy thermometer shows that the temperature has reached 220-222°F (8-10°F above the boiling point at your altitude). Additional time needed for cooking can be anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or longer, depending on the amount of water, sugar, and apple pectin in the mix. Candy thermometers aren't always the most reliable indicators of whether or not a jelly is done. Another way to test is put a half teaspoonful of the jelly on a chilled (in the freezer) plate. Allow the jelly to cool a few seconds, then push it with your fingertip. If it wrinkles up, it's ready. That's how I did it, and I'm happy with the results; for those checking, it was at 225˚ when it wrinkled on the plate.

Pour jelly into sterilized jars to within 1/4" of the top and seal in a hot water bath following good health guidelines.