We’ve been selling peaches, but we’ve also been buying some for ourselves. The girls have been processing a box or 2 each week, but they are out of town this week, so it fell to me.

Roy often goes into the kitchen wanting something interesting to eat or drink, and always comes out with a nice surprise. This week it was simply peach tea. It seemed like an ordinary enough concoction, perhaps like Snapple Peach Tea, but it was sensational! Far better than anything like it that we’d ever had. He declared it his favorite concoction ever (surprisingly, it was the simplest he’s ever produced) and he wouldn’t mind a bit if I turned every peach, now and forever, into juice.

He had juiced a couple of peaches with my old ricer…the mortar and pestle style that has a stand. He just cut out the pit and threw the whole peach in and mashed it, which left pulp and such that went into the compost. I wasn’t sure I wanted to waste that much peach. So, I decided to blanch and peel them all first. The processing wasn’t hard at all, and it left a yummy pulp that wasn’t moist enough for cobbler, but was perfect for fried peach pies!

We had 3/4 of a bushel on hand and I was able to put up 4 1/2 qts of juice and 3 qts of fried pie filling. I used qt bags for the juice and stood them up on the freezer door.

I love peach cobbler too much to juice every future peach, but I will juice enough of them for us to regularly indulge in a glass of peach tea.