Apples!!

Yesterday, Jewel, Ang and I spent the day canning.  About 10 hours of the day anyway!!  Needless to say, after an 8 mile long run, canning all day was super exhausting.  That said, it was also well worth it.  I'm going to have to carve out yet another shelf in the pantry - YAY!!!  When all was said and done, we ended up with 27 quarts of apple pie filling (2 quarts make a pie, 1 makes an apple crumble for 4), 27 half pints of apple butter and 31 pints of apple sauce.  

As you saw earlier, I picked up 120 pounds of apples on Thursday.  Friday, Jewel arrived at my house around 7 and we proceeded to peel, core and slice enough apples to fill three crockpots.  We let the apple butter crock overnight on low.  In the morning, we pureed them all with the stick blender and then cranked them up to high for a couple of hours while we met our Saturday Run Group for a run (for me) and a brisk walk (for Jewel).  This turned out to be a great time saver and the perfect method for a delicious apple butter.  

For the applesauce, we simply cored the apples before boiling them with some water until they were nice and softened.  From there, we ran them through a food mill and cooked them for 5 more minutes before canning and processing them.  

There is something to be said for having the right tools for the job.  For this batch of canning, I was thankful to Ty for setting up our outside processing pot again which managed to double our processing space and which was in use as heavily as the indoor pot for about half of the day.  I'm SUPER thankful to the Millers for both the apple peeler/corer/slicer machine and the food mill.  The day would have been a lot longer and more labor intensive without those ingenious tools!