When I was peeling and cutting up all of those peaches, I saved the skins. I also saved the bits that I cut out from the center that had pit bits on them. These have been sitting in the fridge waiting for me to reclaim my kitchen from the last peach project.
Today, I put that whole bowl full of peach stuff in my largest stock pot on the stove, covered it in water and let it gently boil until I had peach juice. Then I used cheese cloth to stain out all of the big chunks.
I'm actually not sure how much sugar I added to the juice. While at the peach shed, I also bought a jar of peach syrup. OMG it was sweet. Holy crap. I couldn't taste the peach at all, it hit the taste buds and the only things running through my mind were - SWEET! NEED WATER! GAH! Pretty much just like that. So I used a cup of it in the spiced peaches, and the rest of it (probably about a cup) in the honey.
The theory is that this will thicken as it cooks down, and maybe if I'd have just added sugar it would have. This did not. I went from the stock pot being 3/4 full to less than a 1/4 full and it was still really runny. So I added a package of pectin. Still runny. *sigh* Fine. Be runny. I packed it in the jars and put them in the water bath (wiping down the rims before adding the lids, of course) and it's still not thick. The package insert in the pectin said that sometimes it takes up to two weeks for jam to thicken, so I guess it's not impossible that it'll thicken in the jar...?
At any rate, this concludes this year's adventures in peach preserving. We'll see if I ever do this to myself again. This will partly depend on whether anything I've put up is actually edible... Right now, looking in my cupboard at the jam, the spiced peaches, and the honey, I'm feeling very capable and proud of myself!
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