Apple Season

Word of warning: my kitchen, at this point, is not for the faint of heart!  The important parts of the kitchen WERE disinfected but in general, the house is small, the eat in kitchen is smaller still, everyone is home “helping” in one form or another and we had a lot of apples.  Perhaps I should NOT mention that because of these conditions and all of the apples taking over that all meals eaten on this day had to be prepared either outside or  ahead of time as well as eaten outside.  And dinner was in a crockpot under the kitchen table on the floor which is actually where I served it from as people got out of the tub that night and brought me their bowls to go outside with.  Also our dishwasher had gotten full before the day was over and could not be run since it is a "portable" and sits in the middle of the kitchen taking over the sink & water and also sits in front of the only countertop I have so there were dirty dishes stacked in the microwave, in front of the microwave and on the table outside.  No, not for the faint of heart!
This is the first year I can ever remember not going to a farm to pick my own apples.  It wasn’t for lack of trying.  I take it seriously enough that five years ago we drove to Cleveland to pick apples and met up with our Upstate New York family for a wonderful day.  This year there simply weren’t fruit farms with U-pick apples in three states as we investigated.  Too many apple crops had been lost.  So we turned to the Farm Market who could at least supply us with some fresh apples.  After speaking with them the guy said that he was having trouble finding a supplier himself but to call back in a few days.  When we did he said he’d found some apples but while he usually has suppliers for two months, this year he only had suppliers for two weeks “so come in on Thursday”.  Apples cost twice as much as they did last year but are still a relatively cheap fruit even at that.  $30 a bushel.  We bought two bushels of Jonathans.  There aren’t that many choices in purchasing or picking apples around here like there are in Upstate New York or even compared to Michigan.  Also, I will never take our apple picking tradition for granted again.

So two bushels of apples sat in my kitchen all week and we kept opening the box up to pull them out for lunches, snacks, baking, breakfast and even to serve at dinner time.  Rick joked that we should always buy a bushel box of apples every time we buy them.  These are soooo much tastier.  They are so much cheaper!  Haley decided they were completely different apples from what you buy at the regular store and she’s right.  Finally Saturday, canning day, arrived.  Sandy was the first one in the kitchen to “help” as she heard us begin to wash the apples and sorted between them, pulling out the best looking ones for the fruit drawer.

Sandy still loves the water.  We washed so many of our beautiful apples until we had a great pile of them to work with.

We made some apple slices first.  I like to have some jars of these on hand for pies, crisps and muffins.  The cores were all treated and tossed in a bubbling pot to make applesauce with.


Here is some of the best tasting applesauce ever as it drips from the mill.  It has a pinkish hue to it due to the type of apple we are using.  Comparison later.

My older children had a serious homework load that weekend but my younger ones enjoyed helping where they could.
 
Nathan is a strong little thing poking that apple onto the prongs at the flower end all by himself, cranking for the coring and peeling action and then separating his cores, peels and slices into the different bowls for treating.  That was the first weekend of apples.

We had eaten so many apples and love apples so much that we decided to go back one more time for just one bushel of MacIntosh apples.  By this time they were up two more dollars a bushel from just the week before because what there was left of the meager crop had been damaged over the past week by hail storms.  These apples are a little bit bigger and where the Jonathans have a pinkish hue these apples are bright white on the inside.

Tristan found his favorite kitchen job EVER with the “mashy thing” as he fed apples through the food mill and made pot after pot after pot of sauce to bring to a boil on the stove top before bottling it.

Sandy showed up every time it was time we got enough room to wash more apples.

Beautiful apples.  I still remember my parents showing me the “star” found in the middle of the apple.  I was so impressed I brought one into my kindergarten class to show them.  More slices for more applesauce.

Since we love apple snacks so much, especially paired with craisins, I pulled some apples out of our pile and Rick mixed the ingredients together to coat the apples and then arranged them in the dehydrator.  These are so yummy and just a little goes a long way.

When they were ready and cooled they were also jarred.  Don’t be fooled.  These few jars actually contain a LOT of apples.
 
You have to be careful not to eat too many of them.  And on the right you can compare the pinkish applesauce of the Jonathan one week prior to the light colored applesauce of the Mac’s. 

When all was said and done, this marking our final big canning job of the year, we did not have a single quart jar left in the whole house.  The last bottles we used were a few pint jars that had already been emptied of their contents from earlier in the year. 
In the end, besides what we ate fresh or baked with during the week, this was our yield:
2 bushels of Jonathan Apples = 7 quarts of slices and 25 quarts of applesauce.
1 bushel of MacIntosh  Apples = 13 1/2 quarts of applesauce and 2 quarts of dehydrated apple snacks.  This sounds like a lot of applesauce but shared among seven our family downs a whole quart every time we open a jar and serve it. 
Side note; the last of our garden zucchini gave us 12 cups of shreds and slices and our pumpkin, after scooping out the seeds, gave us 5 1/2 cups of puree’.