Peaches do not come from a can

I think I was in junior high on a road trip to Mexico the first time I heard Peaches by The Presidents of the United States of America. I never forgot the line "peaches come from a can, they were put there by a man..." and everyone in the van singing the song as loudly as we could get away with.

We ordered some peaches several months ago and they arrived in boxes: two 20-pound boxes.



The first thing we made was peach oat muffins for our friend Debra's birthday. After returning from her party on Saturday, we made two batches of peach jam. On Sunday we froze a bunch of peaches, canned a bunch of peaches, and Jeremy made some spicy peach chutney.




We canned 7 pint jars of peaches and threw in 2 quart jars (since we were out of pints). We removed the skins of the peaches, sliced them up, and stuffed them in the jars. Then we added hot water, sealed the jars, and started placing them in the hot water bath. As Jeremy was easing one of the quart jars in we heard an unmistakable cracking sound. Jeremy slowly lifted the jar out and put it on the stove top. It must have been a hairline fracture or something - I never actually saw a crack or break, but we tossed out that jar anyway.

The rest of the jars were fine, so we set a timer and went off to do other tasks. I ran to the bathroom and Jeremy went to the basement with a load of other things we'd canned. I came back into the kitchen and noticed the lid of the canner was askew. Jeremy had come back upstairs so I thought he'd moved the lid and was venting the canner for some reason. Then I looked more closely and realized there were peaches floating in the water!



The other quart jar had burst at the bottom. We lifted the canner lid and found it floating there with just a couple peaches caught inside. We removed the jar and those peaches. The rest of the jars are fine. We think we just didn't preheat these ones enough. But it was odd that the jar exploded (enough to push the canner lid off) while we were both out of the room!



We still have most of a box of peaches left. We're freezing a few more and I'll be making a peach kuchen soon. Mmmm, peaches...