This website was insanely helpful. It will tell you anything you need to know about canning peaches.

In fact, I’m not even going to publish a recipe here on this, because that other website was so insanely helpful and tells you all you need to know. I will tell you that the method of dropping the peaches in boiling water for a few seconds and then dropping them in ice water was a great trick. The skins slid off so easily. It saved me a lot of time peeling peaches, and a it saved a lot of peach that would have come off with the peels. It also made the most beautiful sight. The skinless peaches were beautiful. There can’t be enough pictures of them really.

I love fruit cups. For years I always kept them stocked in the fridge. They were a great snack. A sweet treat. But I stopped buying them when I started reading the labels. Too much sugar. Too many preservatives. Too much stuff that I couldn’t pronounce. But, after my canning class, I came to realize there was no reason I couldn’t just make my own.  So now I have a pantry shelf full of homemade fruit cups. It wasn’t a hard process. It wasn’t complicated. It is basically just peaches in a simple syrup. I added a little cinnamon and was done. I used the “medium syrup” from the peach canning site. And I know this may be an over the top number of photos of canned peaches, but I just couldn’t choose. They were all just so beautiful. 
They will make me think of summer in the dark rainy winter months. They will taste like sunshine. I only wish cherries were still in season when I started this canning adventure. Then I would have some nice cherries to put in my Manhattans. And though peaches are pretty much done for the year as well, it is the perfect time to get some pears cooked up and saved in your pantry. That way you’ll have some fruit to enjoy in February that didn’t come from the other side of the world.

Enjoy.

Photographs by Jessica Yager