I love black mission figs, and I bought some last week at Balducci's and then a big box at Trader Joe's yesterday. Jonathan does not like figs, and I was faced with the possibility that I wouldn't eat them all before they went bad. So I made a conserve with the figs, the zest and juice of an orange, some sugar, a healthy slug of Pernod and a sprinkling of powdered lavender. And though I intended to reduce it significantly I added about 3/4 tsp. of apple pectin, from a bulk container I bought at Surfa's in L.A. I didn't have enough figs to make a multi jar batch. I ended up with a full pint jar and a little bit extra, which I just ate with a spoon because it turned out so freakin' delicious. This jam is for me. I'm not giving any away. I'm just going to keep it in the fridge and have it with cheese. Well, maybe if someone comes over, I might share a little.

<knock, knock>

Yes?

Do you add any Fruit Fresh (Vitamin C) to your peaches before you canned the halves? Also, did you cook the peaches a bit before canning or did you can them raw?

You have to cook the peaces or they will turn brown even with ascorbic acid. A few things don't need to be cooked such as cherries before pickling but pears,apples,peaches do. Don't wing this! Use a recipe!

I've been looking at a few different recipes but they seemed to offer differing opionions on cooking/not cooking. Thanks for the experienced recommendation!

If you process the peaches in a water-bath or pressure canner after covering them with hot sugar syrup, they will get cooked in the jars.

One recipe I saw called for precooking them for 5 minutes before putting them in jars and processing for an additional 25 minutes or putting them in raw and processing for 30 minutes. The total cooking time is the same but some online reviews claimed to prefer one or the other. I will probably do the precooking method since I would imagine that you could pack cooked peaches a little more densely in the jars.

Hi Everyone-
I am a new canner. I had mild success with jam earlier in the summer (who was it that said jam is easy to make and hard to make well?) I am looking for a peach salsa recipe that includes tomatoes and is safe for hot water bath canning. Does anyone out there have a recipe? I'd be most appreciative!!

Our elderly neighbor came by the other night to offer us some ripe figs from his trees. He was the one who gave my mother-in-law the cutting that became our tree, and he had some of the same brown figs that we are now getting in abundance. But he also brought a second variety, a bright green Kadota fig, that was about ten times more delicious than the brown ones we have. He gave my MIL the wrong cutting, that's for sure! We ate some of the ripe green figs with some cheese, and the remaining few I mixed with the figs that I've picked from our tree, to make two different fig preserves. The first, which I'd started before he showed up, is made with French lavender honey, powdered lavender flowers, fresh bay leaf, a splash of St. Germaine elderflower liqueur and lemon juice and zest. It was macerating in the fridge overnight, and I added some of the Kadota figs before I cooked it up and packed the jars. The second type, which is made with the less tasty brown figs mixed with some dried black mission figs from California, is more heavily spiced with cinnamon, star anise and cardamom, orange juice and zest and a splash of Pernod. I don't have a great number of jars of either type, but since I only made a small amount of other jams this summer, I will use the fig preserves as hostess and Christmas gifts and save the sour cherry (Jonathan's favorite) and brandied apricot preserves for our own consumption.

Frozen tomato sauce.

I canned the peaches and meh. They taste better than storebought but they still taste like canned peaches. I brought another half bushel home from PA this weekend and I'll be simply slicing and freezing these.

How do you prep them for the freezer? Last year the ones I did stayed good only about through December.

I was just going to slice and vacuum pack in bags but after I saw your question I did a bit of googling and ended up adding a bit of light syrup and ascorbic acid to the bags before vacuum sealing them.

I took a sack of very ripe Italian prune plums found on sale at Balducci's a few days ago and mixed them with some under-ripe plums I'd gotten at the Dupont Market and made a spiced plum preserve with lavender, Creme de Violette, orange zest, after an overnight maceration that included cinnamon stick and bay leaf with the previously mentioned flavor elements.
Cooking it down using the recommended method in Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber (although the recipe was my own) resulted in only five half-pint jars. But the flavor is very intense.

I love that book. It has been a great resource not only for recipes, but also for inspiration. Once I started macerating everything in her 1 kilo of fruit to 800 g of sugar ratio, all my preserves became both more beautiful in the jars and more flavorful. The plum sounds wonderful, as does the fig you mentioned above. I have a fig tree in a pot, and I'm hoping it does well once I get it in the ground.