First Frost

The first frost descended upon us.  At 6pm I saw the forecast for freezing temperatures.  With only an hour of daylight left, we all went out to the garden and started picking.  We picked every pepper and cucumber and then got as many tomatoes as we could before it got too dark.

This morning we had buckets all over the garage. We dropped everything to pay attention to these vegetables.  I've learned that sitting in buckets in the garage does nothing to improve vegetables. 

The tomatoes were separated into ripe, almost ripe, and green.  They will continue to ripen in the house.  The ripe cherry tomatoes went to the table. Next week those orange ones will probably be ready, and maybe another week for the green ones. 

The canning tomatoes were also separated.  The ripe ones went into the blender and crock pot, just filling it.  After a full day of reducing, they'll be canned.  The rest will go when they are ready.

Even the peppers got separated.  The red ones will go into the dehydrator while we wait for the green ones to finish ripening.

In the midst of it all, we kept the apples going.  A friend lent us her food strainer.  She said it handles peels so we wanted to try it.  We sliced the apples up with a corer/wedger and filled the stock pot. I think it only took 15 minutes to wash, shove the thing down, and throw the apples into the pot.  After almost two hours of stewing, we ran them through this food mill.  Out one side came beautiful applesauce and pulp came out the other side.  My daughters took turns cranking the handle and I was shocked when it was done in less than 10 minutes.  Wow!

With the frost, we are full into harvest, but we have also started back to homeschooling.  God's abundance is mighty.  We laborers will try to keep up.

Apples: Day 3

It was another day full of apples and today will be too.  My daughters took turns with the apple peeler/corer.  When the apples are crisp it works like a charm, 30 seconds from whole apple to sliced up perfectly.  But every day the apples sit in the garage, even though it's cool, they get softer.  Then we have to do them by hand.

These applesauce days are developing a pattern.  Wash, peel/core, and throw into the pot.  We keep going until the pot's full.   It makes some muscle to stir it.

Some of the apples are going into the freezer.  After dipping them in water with lemon juice and salt, we lay the apples out on cookie sheets.  By morning they are frozen solid; we break the pieces up and move them into bags. 

Some of the apples are going into apple butter.  We put over two gallons of applesauce in the crock pot, added spices, and then let it simmer all day.  It sure is an easy way to cook it down.

At the end of the day, we started in on some eating.  Applesauce and cottage cheese are one of our favorites, especially when it's Christina cottage cheese.  Last summer we made several batches of cottage cheese and stored them in the freezer.  Today the first came out to thaw.  Oh yeah, it's worth it.

Aching Applesauce

Three batches of applesauce left us with 23 quarts to show for our efforts.  Applesauce takes a long time to make, or at least compared to just dumping fruit in jars and canning.  The apples have to be cored and peeled, then cooked, then run through the food mill, and then it's finally ready to can or freeze. 

In the past we've done applesauce from Jonathan's and Rome's and added some sugar.  This year we did Jonathan's and Jonagold's.  It's flavorful and needed no extra sugar.  I think it's a winner!

This weekend my daughters are making apple pies for a girl scout fund raiser.  We have Jonathan's Jonagold's, and Gala's but I don't know which makes a better pie.  So we did a pie tasting.  We did Gala's in one pie and a mix of Jonathan and Jonagold in the other.  After everyone tasted, neither one came out the clear winner.  Some like one and some liked the other.  Truthfully, they were both pretty good. 

Our day start started at 9am and we collapsed by dinner time.  My arms ached.  My legs ached.  My back ached.  And today we do it again.  Of our 14 boxes of apples, we only got through 2-1/2.  Today we'll do applesauce again, but I think we'll take the extra step of making apple butter.  I'm going to try using the crock pot. 

Time to get started...

Making Applesauce

We had seven bushels of apples in the garage needing attention.  We got through about two-and-a-half of them yesterday making applesauce.  It was a long day — from 9am to 7:30pm with no break.  Even in my working life, I canned applesauce because the flavor is so much better, but it is a lot of work.

We have lots of Cameo apples because that's what they had at the U-Pick place, but they are bland.  We added McIntosh for flavor.

Everybody pitched in — washing apples and running the apple-peeler-corer and food mill.  We sliced up enough apples to fill the four-gallon stock pot and cooked the apples down.  It took about 30 minutes to bring them up to a boil and another 30 to cook down, stirring every two or three minutes. 

After running the cooked apples through the food mill, we filled quart jars with sauce.  The jars boiled in the water-both canner for 25 minutes.  Each batch made seven quarts.  The left-over pulp went into freezer containers for applesauce cake.

After four batches, at about 4:30pm, we had 28 quarts of applesauce and 9 containers of apple pulp.

As she was spinning the handle, one of the twins asked me how people made applesauce before food mills. I had no idea, but I suggested that back then they didn't can in jars either, so everything was different. It got me to thinking about the lives of women who had to do these hug jobs by themselves over a wood stove. I had two or three people helping all day and it was still overwhelming.  It's old fashioned and quaint to us, but I'm so grateful for food mills.

Still able to stand, we made one more batch for apple butter.  After running it through the food mill, I added cinnamon, cloves and allspice and cooked it down for another two hours, stirring every two minutes. The smell of spices and apples in the house was a preview of the holidays.  Tomorrow we'll have some on toast.

Before breaking things down and cleaning up, the twins offered to make pie crust if we'd do some more for apple pie.  It was an easy offer to accept.  At the end of the day with aching legs, back, and arms, two beautiful pies came out of the oven.  One of the twins jumped up to do the serving and I had a piece of pie presented to me on the prettiest place she could find.

These were apples from our area, but not grown on our land.  Next year will be different.  We planted fruit trees that have grown a lot already.  Each of the four apple trees are expected to produce 3-5 bushels when they mature in the next year or two.  Whereas now we are dealing with seven bushels, then we'll have a dozen or more.  I'll put more in the root cellar for fresh eating in the winter.  We'll build a bigger dehydrator and dry more.  I guess we'll have more apple canning days.

But this morning, as jars cool on the counter and containers sit in the freezer, we're not working on apples.   We ate my favorite breakfast, a recipe from my favorite cookbook that requires applesauce — Baked Oatmeal from Simply in Season.  The kids were quiet while it quickly disappeared.  Today I will do Pilates to loosen up my back, attempt some power-rest, and schedule the next canning day.  There are over four bushels out there still.