A Peachy Tip

If you’re fortunate enough to get your hands on some Red Haven peaches, you know that the skin simply pulls off when they’re ripe, and then all you have to do is pull that deep red pit out of the middle. I was not able to source Red Haven in this area, at least not for a price I wanted to pay. But I had some business back in orchard country where we come from, and I got a few bushels of peaches called Crest Haven. They also have a red pit, but if you let them ripen until the skins pull off, the peaches are mushy. So there we were a-peeling, not pulling and the girls were helping, but their peeling skills lack a little bit, and there were bits of good peach going to waste.

Actually, they wouldn’t be wasted, because glory be! I have chickens! But I digress. I decided to do a thing that makes me feel very frugal. We saved all the peach skins and pits and then when we were done we simmered them with water for a while, strained off the now-depleted skins. The result was a beautiful rosy peach juice that we use for jelly. My children are not Dutch speakers but they call this “poshing shawleh chelly”. A free years ago I heard my little girl explaining about our favorite jelly to a friend and being astonished that she had never heard of poshing shawlah chelly. This year I also canned some peach juice (nectar?) to flavor my water kefir. It’s rosy and pretty and will taste like summer, what’s not to love?

The chickens took a few interested looks at the remaining peels, brown and desiccated, and decided to see if something better comes along. That’s how I knew I really had wrung out all the goody from those peaches.