Picked all the apples off the tree this morning. I've been wanting to do apple pie filling for a while (it's been about four years since we've done any). Hubby likes to eat it on waffles. Unfortunately, my recipe uses cornstarch, and I've since found out that's a no-no in water bath canning. While it hasn't killed us yet, I figured, why take the chance?
So today I just canned apple slices in light syrup (when it comes time for waffles, I'll thicken and spice them). And I made juice out of some of the peels and cores, and made jelly from that. Took about six hours from start to finish, and I ended up with 13 quarts of apples and six half-pints of jelly. Could have had a lot more jelly, but I just flat out ran out of energy! So that'll do for now. I have just enough apples left to make a big crisp, so I'll do that tomorrow.
Now, you're probably thinking that isn't a lot for six hours worth of work. But, I figure that's close to $100 worth of canned apple pie filling and store-bought jelly, so that seems like a good trade-off to me. If the apples that grew on our tree were normal size, I could use my peeler/corer/slicer and make things go a lot faster, but we have these monstrosities that are about three or four times the size of a normal apple. So I have to cut them in wedges and peel them with a knife. So it takes a little longer. But, I watched some good movies while I worked!
All in all, it wasn't a big apple crop this year, but at least we'll be eating them for a while!
2 comments:
That is a fabulous harvest!
Much better than my one bag of frozen blackberries.
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