Friends of ours gave us a large bag of peaches from their tree – it has been really busy this past week, and I finally had the opportunity to make use of the peaches.  I didn’t have too much time to spend, but I also didn’t want the peaches to go to waste – making a syrup to use in iced tea and lemonade seemed like a perfect idea.

Ingredients

• 2 cups water
• 2″ piece of fresh ginger, grated
• 1/2 cup honey
• 2 to 3 pounds of peaches

1. In a large pot, bring the water to a boil.
2. Add in ginger and allow to simmer until the ginger is fragrant.
3. Add in honey, so it is well mixed. I don’t know about you, but I always have jars of honey around where there are small amounts left at the bottom – I have a bad habit of opening up a new jar when I don’t have time to scrape off the remains from an old jar. I used this opportunity to clean out a bunch of honey jars.
4. Wash the peaches – pierce the flesh with a knife in a couple of places and add into water mixture.
5. Simmer on low heat for about 30 minutes or until peaches separate from the pits easily.
6. Run the mixture through the finest grate on in your food mill. If you don’t have a food mill, you could always run the mixture through a fine wire strainer and blend the finished product.
7. Store in a pretty jar (ok, this is optional – but I conveniently had a pretty jar just for this purpose).

I’ve brewed some black tea to use with this syrup for a refreshing glass of iced tea this afternoon. I opted to make the syrup quite strong so I could use a decent amount of ice without watering down the flavour. I’m sure it would taste just as good with some lemonade – perhaps its time to visit my neighbour to get some fabulous Meyer lemons from her tree :).