Hello! I've been spending long days in a very hot kitchen, how about you?! I try not to get horribly jealous of friends on holidays, in the long summer holidays, you know? Who post lovely photos of kids doing lots of fun things and going places and "chillaxing" as Tilly – just seven – says. 

Around here we try to stop for icecream, and trips to the beach, and chillaxing, and we try not to beat ourselves up about working and lobbing kids around and juggling play dates and deliveries. 

And every now and then I'll grab an hour and do something I want to do. Which today was a bit of peach action. 

A local farming friend drives to Araluen every January and picks up boxes of peaches and nectarines for his wife to preserve. She's an older lady, who shared lots of wisdom about preserving with me when I first moved back here. They asked if I wanted some fruit, I said YES PLEASE!

And so I put up some peaches. It's possibly way more fun than it sounds, and seriously, those glorious golden jars of summertime on the shelves in my pantry just make me happy. There's an earnestness about preserving, a feeling of won't-run-out or ok-if-the-zombie-apocalype-comes. We can lock the door and eat through the pantry shelves before we're zombied. If that's even a verb. 

I highly recommend it. I'm not going to pretend I'm some awesome canning expert and give out specific recipes here. There are way more experienced people to do that. I love We Sure Can, Ashley English and Preserving Summer's Bounty. 

Peaches are pretty easy though. Sterilize some jars, drop fruit into boiling water, peel skins off, quarter, pack them into jars and pour boiling sugar syrup over the top. Screw on your lids and process in a hot water bath (I use my stock pot with a cake rack in the bottom) for twenty minutes. 

Golden jars of sunshine. 

I got a bit excited reading Jackie French who makes you feel you could grow anything – plant an apple core! – and planted some seeds of the beautiful peaches. Word is around here you can't grow peaches, the fruit fly is too bad.

I'm sure that's probably the case, but the memory of peaches on the trees in the backyard here when I was very little (the old trees were all pulled out about twenty five years ago now) and that perfect fruit we've been munching on? …

Hope your week is peachy. 

xxx