I'm afraid I haven't written much lately, but I sure have been preserving up a storm. I now have about 300 jars of pickles, jams and jellies. In fact I have so many, my husband was forced to clean out a cold room in the basement where he is going to set up shelves to hold my stash. Right now I have about 80 jars of canned tomatoes lining the wall of my dining room, and about 200 jars on the lintels above the windows of my cottage and they really can't stay there. So far I've made pickled asparagus, fiddleheads, cauliflower, gardiniera, dill pickles, green beans, bread and butter pickles. I've made crab apple jelly, quince jelly and grape jelly and made jam out of tomatoes, peaches, strawberries and pears. I've made Thousand Island relish, caponata, a ripe tomato pickle relish and the recipe I'm going to share today, Peach Pear Relish.

I got this delicious recipe from my good friend Catherine Alton on our lake. You can use it like any other relish on sandwiches and burgers, or you can use it as salsa. It's fantastic with cheese, and would work well with a baked brie. When we made it for the first time last year, we took the bit that wouldn't fill a jar and put it over nachos and cheddar cheese and it disappeared in moments. Catherine doesn't remember where the recipe is from, but thinks it's probably from a magazine from the 1970's.The recipe makes a lot, close to 10 jars, so feel free to halve it if you don't feel like hours of chopping. I just got my kids to do it. This was so good that we decided to put some of it into 1 cup sized jars to give away as presents.

I had a fair amount of water to remove from this batch, much more than I remember taking off last year. I saved it and used it as a base for some spicy vegetable soup which was delicious.

INGREDIENTS