Adventures in canning + printable jar labels

The folks at SweetPreservation.com are aiming to make canning cool for a new generation. They invited me to be a "canbassador" again this year, sending over a generous box of Washington state stone fruits. After my first low-budget but highly-successful canning effort last year, I was happy to try again. Though I still refuse to buy a giant pot and special tongs. And I couldn't find any pectin at the grocery store, so I went for recipes that use just fruit and sugar.

This year I made plum jam using this easy recipe, altered to a 1:1 ratio of plums and sugar as suggested in the comments. I chopped the plums up with a kitchen knife. The resulting jam is a little runnier than I'd have liked, but very yummy. The only mishap occurred when my back was turned and the pot of plums boiled over, creating a delicious lake of plum syrup on my stovetop. Oh well. I needed to clean it anyway.

I made peach butter, too, with this crock pot method. The house smelled like a country gift shop all day. I halved the recipe to fit in my pot and omitted the cloves, but the peach butter is still a little too spiced for my taste. Next time I'm ditching the allspice, too. The consistency turned out perfectly, and the method for skinning the peaches worked like a charm.

I also whipped up a printable freebie for some jar labels. The circles are 2" in diameter when printed at 100%, sized to fit on the lids of small jam jars. You can also punch a hole in the top and tie them to a jar with baker's twine. Download a PDF right here, then print out the page and write on the labels.

Check out SweetPreservation.com for more free printables and recipes!