Hello Ladies. I think I am going to have to dedicate September to my fruit.We bought a new home this year with a lot of trees and suddenly I have a bunch of ripe raspberries, peaches, nectarines, pears, and a gazillion apples. HELP ME!!!
What do you do to preserve your fruit? Do you have any great recipes you'd like to share with me? Thank you!!
10 comments:
The only help I can give you is to come take the delicious fruit off your hands...I wish! Wow, what a score to find a home with such wonderfully established fruit trees!
there are so many yummy recipes on line for jams and syrups and all kinds of stuff. also, if you haven't canned before, there are recipes inside the boxes of pectin that you buy at the store. and i would also be more than willing to take some off of your hands!;D
We freeze our raspberries and make jam out of some, we can our peaches straight up and make jam out of the yuckies. As for apples we dehydrate some and make apple sauce and pie filling out of some. It takes time, but isn't hard. Check www.freshpreserving.com for tips. Good luck! And if you do decide to share the bounty...
I make jelly and jam. You can also freeze the berries. A friend of mine dries hers but not sure exactly how.
I also make lots of pies. You could have a cake/bake walk for charity.
You are so blessed to have all that fruit. I'd be glad to come help if I were close by.
I have canned and froze peaches. I like them both ways. I like to use frozen peaches in smoothies--which my kids love by the way. Very simple to do. You can make your peaches and apples into pie filling and can them that way. A little more work, but yummy. I can give you directions for any of those ideas. You are so LUCKY by the way. I have to buy all my peaches.
Wow! Lucky...what I would give to have all of that fruit on hand. I love bottled peaches and pears. Mindy has made some delicious canned pie filling and we are die hards for Raspberry jam around here. Good luck.
I do a lot of jams and jellies too. (Mostly freezer ones) The Ball Blue Book is always a classic for preserving anything.
I just learned how to make homemade fruit leather at Enrichment last week...blend your fruit in a blender and add as much corn syrup as you like to sweeten. Pour the fruit onto parchment paper on cookie sheet and bake at 150 degrees with the oven open for 4 hours; then close the oven and bake overnight and Voila! it is delish, but not so easy if you have small children around the oven:)
Make jams & bake pies then freeze them! or freeze the filling and bake it all later. You can freeze fruit, too, like the stores sell. To do this you cut it and put it on a cookie sheet until it freezes then you can bag it up. Double bag in quart-sized bags and mark with Sharpie - it's the only one that holds up to the freezer.
Also, I LOVE the Gladware containers because you can stack them nicely and things don't get freezer burn. When my dh was an apprentice, we didn't see him 2 nights out of the week and I wanted to be sure he ate well so I'd freeze meals in Gladware & he'd take one to let it thaw in his van during the day and microwave it at night. I tried all kinds & that was the one brand that never let me down.
One last thing, smoothies are a great way to use that fruit. I make one that is absolutely amazing - you toss juice (pineapple or orange) and a banana (adds sweetness) and frozen cherries/strawberries or whatever you like in and blend it. They are an excellent way to put out the fire when you make tacos or other spicy food. That would be a great use of the stuff you might freeze, or while it's fresh, you can add ice cubes for the cold part of the smoothie. Also you can do milk & yogurt with the fruit, I like them both ways. :)
Donna
ps, I know a lady who only makes pie crust in bulk (she has an excellent recipe from a bakery so it is a bulk recipe anyway!). She makes up like 20 pie crusts and freezes balls of dough for pies, and freezes pre-rolled crusts and so on. They are amazing and it makes it so easy to make a pie when you just put the dough in the fridge the night before and roll it out that day, particularly if you've already frozen fillings, too!
Have fun you lucky lady!!
Donna
Post a Comment