Thursday, August 28, 2008

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!

7 comments:

Holly said...

I just realized I didn't put any pictures of me smiling with the applesauce. It really wasn't that bad...my one picture looks kind of miserable, but if you have that cool tool it goes really fast!

Granma Faye said...

Oh, good job, Holly! Lots of work, though. You'll just love having that applesauce this winter--if it lasts that long. :) It's a good feeling having the full jars sitting on the counter cooling. So nice you could get the apples for free and eventually got to borrow that corer/peeler. It is a very nice time saver, and, really essential if you're going to be processing alot of apples. I can smell them cooking, now. Yum! ♥

Anonymous said...

Wow. That's a lotta work. But your applesauce is so good!

Summer said...

I have the same red corer! :)
Glad you are done with the apples. what a chore!

Unknown said...

WOW! good job, I loved the grumpy picture, b/c that's how I would look the whole time:)

Ali said...

YUM. I love applesauce. That looks so good. You truly will see the fruits of all that labor. It sounds like a LOT of work. It's fun to see the leather couch you talked about- those DO look really nice! And for free?? well, I guess you sacrificed some banana nut muffins. :) THat's a cute story.

Summer said...

Holly, I just learned about the applesauce maker. It's around 38 dollars and all you have to do is boil the apples whole and then put them in the maker and it peels it, core it and sauces it for you!! I think I might get one. Shari bought one so I'm going to see how she likes it.