Making Applesauce

A couple days ago Greg and I picked a bunch of apples off a tree on the side of the road. There were so many! If I had a ladder I could have gotten to a lot more. Anyway, now I'm making applesauce!



I spent many hours peeling apples yesterday. I started at about 4:30pm, and cleaned things up around 11pm. Greg helped for about 45 minutes while I made dinner. I just got myself set up in front of the T.V. with all the apples and a cutting board and box for garbage and got to work. This picture is about 3 hours into it...I didn't know that Greg was taking the picture. (Wednesday night)



I'm probably going to dream about peeling apples now. When I was picking blackberries at mom's house I would see bushes with clumps of berries hanging down whenever I closed my eyes. Now I see tiny green bruised apples. I still have about 1/4 of the box left to peel today. It sure would be nice to have one of those peeler corer slicer things. I was wondering if it would even work though, for these tiny apples. They might be too small for it to do the job very well.



It's kind of tricky with the slicer we have. The tube that gets cut out for the core is so big compared to the apple. It would be just right for the big apples you get at the store, but it takes a lot of good apple with it.



Either way, the apples were all free, and the sauce is so good. It's worth it.

(A couple days later)
I'm getting back to this post because I finally finished the applesauce! A friend let us borrow his apple corer/slicer/peeler and we picked some more apples at his house. Greg used that new tool to cut up all the rest of the apples while I got to work food processing them into smaller pieces and cooking it into applesauce. (I left some chunks though--it's better a little chunky instead of like soup.) As it started looking like applesauce, I added some sugar, a little brown sugar, lots of cinnamon, a little lemon juice, and a couple quick shakes of ground cloves. This applesauce turned out really good! It smelled like apple cider while it was cooking. The final count was 16 quarts, which might be just enough to last the rest of the week. Well, it will last longer than that if I use my will power, but this is good stuff!

I'm learning to sew!

I've had a sewing machine since before I got married, but I haven't known how to use it. The plan was that Summer and I would buy sewing machines, and then have sewing lessons from Mom...



Well, I ended up being too busy dating this really great guy, and then we got married and moved away.



I only had one sewing lesson with Mom. We threaded the bobbin and threaded the needle. I also did a few test runs to see how to make it do different kinds of stitches, and that's pretty much it! So when we moved into this place and I saw the ugly horrid dirty broken blinds (or place where the blinds were) I decided I would just have to replace them all with curtains.




Now I'm on a quest to learn how to sew. I was kind of afraid to start by myself, thinking I might do something really bad and break the machine or the needle...But after some encouragement from Wendy, I decided to just go for it. Greg is pretty good at sewing too, so I felt better that he was around and could help me figure some things out.



I was glad the thread was already in the machine and on the bobbin. It just happened that it matched the material for my first set of curtains, so I got started pretty fast. I will have to change the thread for the next set of curtains though. The rest that I make will all be more of a creamy white color. We decided to just make bla boring curtains that match anything, since this is a rental and we will be leaving them here. I'm excited to make better curtains that I really like for our next home. (Hopefully that won't be a rental.)



I wanted to do this post when I finished the first set of curtains, so I could show you the finished product, but I will have to just post that picture later. I'm going to Girl's Camp tomorrow for a week, and then when I get back I will go visit my parents for another week...so it will probably be awhile before I get back to work at the sewing table now.

(p.s. Sorry that last picture is sideways...I didn't notice until just now, but I really have to pack for Girl's camp, and I don't feel like going back to fix it.)

(p.s. again...Do you like my plants in the background? The bigger one is the zebra plant, and there's a cactus and a peperomia too. I don't know what the other one is called.)