Ideas for Peaches

We're coming down with peaches.  Apart from jam and chutney, does anyone have any great recipe ideas to use up peaches.  It would be good if we could 'store' some somehow.  Can I freeze them?

I haven't grown peaches, but I have frozen leftover store-bought peaches for use in smoothies, cobblers and pies. So I would say, yes, freezing works just fine!

Myself and my kids are picky, fickle fruit eaters, so we always seem to have fruit getting too ripe for fresh eating. Freezing is one thing I do when this happens. Another favorite is using the food dehydrator for that fruit that is just a little too soft for good out of hand eating. My kids love dried fruit! You can also make fruit leather in a dehydrator, but the peaches would need to be mixed with some applesauce or other higher pectin fruit so the fruit leather will work.

Thanks Jocelyn.  Freezing it is then as I don't have a dehydrator at the mo.  Lots of places talk about a 'cobbler'.  What is it please?

A cobbler is basically sweetened, thickened fruit (like a pie filling) topped with a soft, faintly sweet biscuit dough (or, some call it dumplings). After it's baked, cobbler can be served warm, with ice cream or cream on top. Google peach cobbler and you'll get lots of recipes.

I think cobblers or crisps/crumbles are much easier than pies because pie crust takes some time to make.

Some people use their ovens as food dehydrators. If you're interested, you might want to google doing that. And, strangely enough, others use cars parked in hot, hot areas.

I love peach butter! that is my favorite thing to do with peaches. one of my other favorite things to do with canned peaches (I'm sure this could be easily adapted to fresh) is coffee cake with peaches on the bottom

1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
2tsp. baking powder
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup oil

stir together ingredients till just mixed. pour over 1 can well drained peaches in a greased 9x9 pan.

mix

1/4 cup brown sugar
1 Tb. flour
1 TB. softened butter
1 tsp. cinnamon.

mash this mix till crumbly. I often double the amounts  sprinkle on top of batter.

bake at 375* for uuhhhh I dunno. maybe 35 minutes?? till toothpick in center comes out clean. mmmmmm.  dang. now I am going to have to go make breakfast...

You could bottle them - they'll store for years like that in a dark cool place.



You'll find everything you need for bottling in almost any country hardware store.

Bellinis. 

There's also an oft-forgotten branch of the cobbler/crisp/crumble family known as a "buckle".

Great, thanks.

Re bottling/canning.  We're trying to reduce power consumption here - plus reduce gadgets that only come out of the cupboard once a year and don't earn their keep (yikes I've got loads of those  ops:).  I'm concerned that bottling/canning might mean the electric hob being on for ages (too hot here in summer for the wood-burning range).  So I wondered about one of these big sterilising urns having read that you can also use them for yoghurt making - but then they're 1800watt rated.  Plus really only suitable for fruit???  Does veg need a pressure cooker?  Can you use a pressure cooker with a range stove when not doing summer bottling/canning?  Why does being environmentally aware make things like this so complicated???  Oh what an easy life to live in blissful consumer ignorance (or ignore-ance)

A normal pressure cooker is a bit OTT for fruit and veg and won't reduce your veg to concentrate it. Why not rig up a rocket stove ?

This summer we've had no solar panels to heat our water so we've been using a simple little rocket stove to heat directly under our back boiler (That's the cauldron in the photo). In the winter we heat the water with a normal fire but the chimney is designed to be a thermal mass and retain heat so the little rocket stove is doing a great job keeping the heat exactly where we want it.   

You can use small branches of wood as your fuel but as well as wood we have thousands of light, clean, dry corn husks - we normally grow a couple of hectares a year for animal feed. We've been using them in the rocket stove with really good results. Today I was bottling veg and wanted to experiment with the stove instead of using gas, so we rigged up sort of flat plate (Which we grilled our lunch on!) with a chimney which led the flames up towards the back boiler. With one bucket of husks we slowly reduced 7 kilos of tomatoes (four hours) and now there's enough water for a bath !

Irene, that is so cool! I posted about your pocket rocket and water heating over in the alternative energy forum. (You know, just in case some of the tinkering types don't look at the kitchen stuff much. )