I didn’t need an alarm clock this morning to know that I better get up and get something done with the day. I originally had plans to go on a wine tour with some of the girls, but decided that I better get work done around the house and also something done with the apples in our backyard.
Our over achieving apple trees
First things first, start the laundry. OK, I confess, I really like doing laundry and when I’m in the house I try to find something to wash. Is that weird? Oh, well if it is weird, it’s comforting to hear the washer going for me and I’m thinking I’m too old to change now.
Next – make sure that I get everything ready for canning apples. I went down to my stash in the cellar to get the water bath kettle and the other stuff. After I got everything upstairs it looked like I was going to be set. The kettle must have been my Mother in law’s because it seemed not to be as rusty and beat up as mine. Well, score right? This is how my kitchen looked just before I got started.
All ready to go!
My goal was to make not only apply pie/dessert filling, but also some apple sauce. With the over abundance of apples that our trees produced this year, this shouldn’t be an issue. I have an old apple peeler that I use and I am so grateful to have it. I know that there is a challenge that people are doing on Facebook these days on what 3 things they are grateful for every day and do you know what I would say that mine would be today? First my apple peeler (it’s a given right?) The second would be my dishwasher. I think I did 4 loads of dishes today! I use it not only for dirty dishes, but also it has a sanitize on it for jars. And the last one? Well for Daryl of course. He got the tractor and bucket out for me in between doing his farming stuff and I picked some of the ‘good’ apples from the middle of the trees that I couldn’t reach with the ladder. 
OK, let’s get back to these apples that I was cooking up today. I used up 2 bags of apples for the pie/dessert filling and even though it doesn’t really look like I have much at the end, the apples are just packed in the jars and it’ll taste really good around February I bet! Now for the apple sauce. This meant another bag of apples and looking on line for a recipe. I combined two recipes that I found and I was in business. First to quarter the apples and start them cooking in my dutch oven. 
Then the one recipe calls out for brown sugar and lemon juice. Neither one of these ingredients sound bad – so in they go.
It called out for 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar and 3 Tbsp of lemon juice, but it didn’t say how many apples that you were supposed to use. After I put in the brown sugar, I compared it to the picture on the web and it didn’t quite look the same. So what the heck and in went more brown sugar. After it cooked for quite awhile, I put it in my food processor to get the rest of the apple chunks smooth. Now I have a confession. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten apple sauce before. I know that this seems almost impossible right? If I did eat it, I sure don’t remember it. So I thought today is a good day to start and I gave it a taste. And you know what? It wasn’t bad at all! Maybe it was the amount of brown sugar that went into it, but it wasn’t bad. I guess you can still learn a few things when you’re in your 50’s right? 🙂 Into the water bath the jars go and I realized earlier that this wasn’t my ‘normal’ kettle and it must have been my mother in laws. How I knew for sure was because it was smaller than mine. Now this doesn’t make much sense why they all wouldn’t be the same size right? Well I had to put so much water in it to just cover the tops of the quart jars that man oh man I had a water mess by the stove when it started to boil. And with mine, I always have room to spare. No big deal, but with the apple sauce a much better plan was to use smaller jars. Now you can see why I was so grateful for the dishwasher right? After a long day of being in the kitchen, I was finally done. I was a little disappointed that I only had 20 jars sitting on the counter, but then I also always set my expectations a little too high when it comes to canning.
Here is my end result