Pear season

What's that saying?  "You can take the girl out of the country but you can't take the country out of the girl!"  I suspect that Carolyn is an example of some of that. You see, she heard about some fresh pears that someone was selling and decided she just had to have some old fashioned, honest-to-goodness, bottled pears for our pantry.

This box was completely full of pears.  As you can see, even the pears at the bottom are in great shape.  There were almost no defects or bruises.

Edward and his boys were over this morning to give Tiffany a chance to rest and hopefully knock out the cold that is trying to lay her up.  We stuck the boys in the back yard and pressed Edward into service.

We couldn't find our recipe for the lye bath we've always used to peel the pears with.  Finally after Carolyn had made half a dozen calls to friends and relatives  (including our family's graduate chemist) who might have some secrets, I found some recipes on the Internet.   In the above picture Edward is bathing the pears in the hot lye solution then moving them to the sink for a cold water rinse and slipping off the peel by hand.

Here Carolyn is taking the freshly peeled pears, cutting them in half, and coring them.  Then, either she or Edward would slide the pear halves into the bottle, fill the bottle with light syrup, then steam bath the bottles in groups of 7 for half an hour.  

Carolyn really likes dried fruit so she diverted the final four quarts worth of pears.  Instead of the bottles, these pears were soaked in a acid preservitive solution then spread onto the trays of our dehydrator.  

Out of that bushel box we got 14 quarts of bottled pears and 4 quarts equivalent dehydrated pears.