I got free peaches!

Yesterday the "peach man" was selling his wares at the Farm Center parking lot.  I bought two bags at $6.00/piece and noticed he was throwing some into a bucket outside the van during his sort to fill my bags.  I asked him what he was going to do with those and he said get rid of them unless someone wants them.

Last week I read a good article by Stephanie over at Saving Naturally about Why We Waste Food: Are We Too Picky?   In Stephanie's article she says:

"The only thing that could probably be said for them was that their imperfections offended my culturally-influenced concept of what “good” food ought to look like."

This really got me thinking about that bucket of bruised and imperfect peaches and all the things I could do with them.  Even if I couldn't think of any wonderful baked desserts and peach goodies, there's always smoothies that make any imperfect fruit look good.

I still have never canned or preserved any great quantities of food, but I was sure I could figure it out.  So, I asked him if I could have them and he said "sure!".  He went through the rest of his crates to pick out the "spoils" and I took half a crate of FREE peaches home!

Once I got them home I panicked a bit.  Whatever I was going to decide to do with them had to be that day and fast before the fruit flies and rot quickly set in.  I searched the internet and found some great freezing tips on http://www.pickyourown.org/ but the task still seemed overwhelming.  So, I called my dear neighbour and friend, Sarah, to see if she could help.  She came right over and showed me how to do everything.

We put a few at a time into a boiling pot of water for about 30 seconds, then quickly transferred them into an ice bath for peeling.  After peeling we laid them out on a parchment lined cookie sheet and placed them in a freezer.  Once frozen, we transferred them to freezer bags. 

We could've added some juice or sugar syrup to the peaches prior to freezing them but decided not to.  These aren't going to last that long.  We also put some in jars that we planned on using in the next couple days.  In the end we ended up with about 3 jars each and 2 freezer bags full of peaches - all for free!

I wish I could've taken mroe photos of our work but we had to move quickly as a big storm was rolling in fast.  Outside looked like this within moments of her driving home to bring all our peach scraps to her chickens.

Look at how far my poor trees are bent over on the left. 

The temperature drop was 20 degrees within minutes.

I hope you'll be inspired to take a second look at imperfect produce and recognize that it's still useable and worth a try.  Hey, you might even get it for free!

Enjoy!