Ruby red white peaches!

I pulled the last bit of peaches off my white peach tree the other day and there wasn't quite enough to make a batch of peach butter and jelly is just not one of my things.  I mean if I'm going to have to peel them anyway I don't want to just toss away the flesh and keep only the juice.  It's a fiber, whole fruit thing, I know.  So I just peeled, pitted, quartered and packed into jars with an extra light syrup.  25 minutes in the water bath and viola, 7 pints of ruby red syrup with peaches.  They look cool don't they?

And before you ask, yes, they will eventually settle to the bottom, same for the apples in the previous entry, it takes a few days.
I also made 12 more half pints of banana butter today.  Apparently it's a big hit for peanut butter sandwiches around here and has become a "when are you making more" thing.  This time though I made a very large batch and it took forever to cook down.  As a result it browned a little more than the last batch.  But that's ok, it tastes the same.

Banana Butter

Was at the grocery store and found a nice big bag of reduced price bananas that were starting to turn brown, still good, but needed to be eaten or used straight away.  At 15 cents cheaper than normal, the price was decent.  I have several banana jam recipes but they are all overly complex and I don't have half the ingredents so I did a search and came across this one.

banana preserves!
so we had four bananas that were going bad and were into the banana-bread range, but we had no flour or eggs, so i found this recipe instead:

banana preserves:
4 bananas
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 1/2 c sugar
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice / few shakes of cinnamon, ginger and cloves

mash up the bananas with the lemon juice
put the mash into a pan and bring to a boil, stirring so it doesn's splatter all over and kill you
once it thins out and breaks down some, throw in the sugar and the spice and bring back to a careful, non-killing boil
reduce heat and stir for 15 to 20 minutes while it simmers and thickens
jar up and seal (i do the boil-the-jar-while-everything's-cooking method)
made two moderately-sized random jar fulls
ate the last tablespoon or so on toast and it makes the regular bread taste like banana bread

oh, and i threw in the last maybe half-teaspoon of light rum which really didn't change the flavor at all, but maybe brandy or sherry would be a nice addition.

First off, I love the humor in the recipe and the simplicity is great!  I didn't add the rum though.  I tripled the banana count but only used 3 cups of sugar (seriously, why does everything have to be so ridiculously sweet?) and 6 tablespoons of lemon juice.  Once it started cooking down I took out my hand blender and pureed it. Let it cook down by half and it was sheeting off a spoon.  Processed 10 minutes.
Landed myself 7 half pints.