Pepperoncini and peach raspberry conserve

I am continuing on with my preserving craze with two items tonight: pickled pepperoncini and peach raspberry conserve. If there are two preserves that are more different, I can't think of any.

Pepperoncini

If I picked a peck of pickled peppers, I guess I get three pint jars. (OK, I don't know what a peck is.)

This one started last night - I cut and soaked almost two quarts of banana peppers in a salt water solution suggested by the recipe. I got the banana peppers from Susie's Garden Patch and my mom and dad's garden. You soak them overnight like so:


That's a pattypan squash on top, although after this photo was taken, I decided that it would be a bad idea to soak a squash in water overnight. I found a more suitable weight.

After you rinse them, you heat a brine and heat the jars, then pack the jars and pour in the brine. The brine consisted of water, vinegar, horseradish, and garlic.


These might not look like much now, but they will pack a punch. They were quite pungent when I was rinsing them - so pungent, in fact, that Dave and I started choking and coughing. Here's hoping they mellow out a bit by the time we bust them open.

Peach raspberry conserve

This is another one from my preserving book, and a particularly appetizing one at that. Basically a conserve is like a jam, but with larger pieces of fruit. I found the idea fascinating, but I wasn't sure which conserve to start with.

Then, lo and behold, three pounds of peaches appeared at my front door. (In case you're wondering, yes, this can only happen to me.) Apparently my neighbor's coworker has a peach tree and needed to get rid of some peaches. Hmm, OK! Whatever you say, peach fairy!

I cut them up, bought some farmers' market raspberries, and macerated the whole thing in sugar. This brings a huge amount of liquid out of the fruit, and you can see this soupy, delicious-looking mess here:


You boil this with some pectin and lemon juice, although I'm not sure I boiled it long enough. Fingers crossed that this firms up.

You can see that the fruit kind of floats up, but I'm sure it would be fine if you stir it after you open it. (Assuming it gels.)


I got seven small jelly jars out of this batch, as well as one pint jar and a Tupperware container full of it. Let's just say that this is going on some ice cream later this month... Oh, and I guess I'll give one to my peach fairy.