The story of Jam

Last week, my sister called my mom and I up to tell us to go pick peaches from her inlaw's tree becuase it was crazy full and they needed to be picked AsAP! She also told us they were small, so they'd only be good to eat or make jam, maybe. Well, who doesn't like homemade peach jam? We called them to check if we could come by and they told us irrigation was coming 1st thing in the morning so we'd have to come now, we figured, oh we have 15 min of sunlight left, maybe, we'll be fine. So off we went with our buckets and flashlight. It was quite the sight. These peaches were TINY!!! They made apricots look like giants. So here we were one of us holding the flashlight while the other picked mini peaches in the dark. We picked till our hearts delight and came home with quite the collection of peaches in our buckets and on the bottom of our shoes.

2 days later it was jam making time. So, my cousin and I decided the easiest and best way is to blanch the peaches, so we did and it took about an hour to do them all, it's not the most fun process that blanching. So I gathered my newly blanched peaches to pick out the pits and grind them up for jam, when I got them all ready, I was quite ah-struck. All that work and all those little peaches gave us a whopping 6 cups of mashed peaches, enough for one, yes ONE batch of peach jam, which, thanks for ultra gel (most amazing stuff) took about 10 min to make. Not quite worth the time rummaging through the dark picking the darn things and definitely not worth the hour+ blanching the dumb things. But when all was said and done, the jam tastes great!

My advice to you? Steer clear of any peach that is smaller than an apricot.