Apples... finally

Remember all those apples that were weighing heavily on my mind? Well, I cancelled school this morning and we all pitched in to do something with them.

Step one was to sort through all the apples we had already picked to see what shape they were in. The really good ones went in the apple pie filling group and the ones which were more marginal went into the applesauce pile because we could cut out the bad spots. I'm happy (and relieved) to report that we only had to pitch a couple of apples. While we were doing this, L. had gone out with the picker to see how many apples she could get off the trees. There were quite a few. Then Y., K., and H. did a huge amount of work to get the apple pie filling apples cored and peeled and sliced. We ended up with ten pints of caramel apple pie filling. One didn't seal, so we had apple crisp for dessert to use it up.

We then paused for a late lunch where I treated everyone with fast food in payment for their hard work. The afternoon was applesauce. G. and L. quartered the apples and cut out any bad spots and then ran them all through the food mill on the KitchenAid to get out the seeds, skin, and core.

We ended up with 9 1/2 quarts of sauce. So far it looks as though everything is sealing. Y. would be more than happy to eat anything that doesn't seal.

This makes me happy to have done. I still have a couple of baskets of apples to get through, but it will just be sauce which is a lot less labor intensive, so doesn't feel quite so daunting. I'm hoping for at least seven more quarts. 

Everyone was extremely helpful and pleasant about the whole endeavor and they were a huge amount of help. I couldn't have processed this much by myself. I had warned them the night before so they could prepare themselves.

It was also a day of doing nearly constant dish washing. This is a normal occurrence on canning days, but even more so today because... wait for it.... our dishwasher stopped working a couple of days ago. Just when I thought was had a set of functional appliances. I think it's still under warranty, but I haven't had a chance to dig through the filing cabinet to see if this is true.