…is applesauce!  (And you thought that I was finally going to have a serious blog for once.  Gotcha!)  The weekend before Thanksgiving, I was at the Farmers’ Market and found a really great deal on apples – about $.33 per pound.  But to get that price, I had to buy half a bushel – and I didn’t want only one kind of apples.  So I ended up buying a bushel of apples – 1/2 a bushel of Stayman apples and 1/2 a bushel of Jonagolds.  That’s about 40 pounds of apples!!! But for only $13!!  So they hung out in our basement until about a week ago, when I realized that I’d better get going with them or I would start to lose them.  So I  embarked on what turned out to be a really mammoth project (and thankfully Nik joined in too)!

Here I am, peeling and cutting while talking to Lisa and telling her that my brain was OK!  (This was the night after my neurologist’s appointment.)  (It’s a little blurry because I was working so quickly!  )

There are my new best friends – a apple slicer/corer and a vegetable peeler.  I may never use a paring knife on an apple again!  Nik was very proficient with these two as well.  He blazed through a bunch of apples while I was making dinner!

 I really thought I took a picture of all the apples when I bought them but I guess I didn’t.  So you’ll just have to use your imagination.  Imagine two of these baskets, full of apples.

Here we are mid-project – I like that you can see three varying states of the cooking applesauce!

And here we are, 40 pounds of apples, which now fit into two pans.  Amazing!

On Saturday, I simmered one of the pots for about five more hours, added spices and a little bit of sugar, and turned it into apple butter.  So that pot shrank down by about half again.  And in the process, I managed to get apple everywhere – all over our floor and even almost up to the ceiling!  Applesauce really is crazy when it’s boiling.  It’s hard to keep it from shooting everywhere.

So after hours and hours and 40 pounds of apples, I ended up with 7 jars of apple butter and 2 1/2 quarts of applesauce.  We served some applesauce as an appetizer to Nik’s mom last night and it was so good!!  Totally worth all the work.  I think that Tina and I are going to try to make a lot next year.  I just have to remember to get some canning jars and supplies before they’re not available in the store any more!

And to make a long post even longer, here’s a couple pictures that Nik took of our first and only snowfall of the year!