These Two Hands

Fall is for apples, right? Well, even sick as I’ve been, I couldn’t give up homemade applesauce! I had made sure to pick up a half bushel of sauce apples at the pick-your-own farm way back in October when we went for pumpkins. If you’re wondering why I haven’t blogged yet about all that delicious applesauce I made, well…

…it’s because I burned the heck out of it.

Yes, I managed to burn one of the easiest things it is possible to make. And not just burn, but completely scorch. Utterly ruin beyond hope of redemption. There was a 1/4 inch of charcoal on the bottom of my 2 gallon pot that took me four days and countless hours of scrubbing with steel wool, a metal spoon edge, and abrasives to get off… and there are still black marks all over it. Needless to say, the whole 2 gallons went to feed the compost.

I gave the whole thing up for this year. I had really wanted Jonathans, after all, and they were nowhere to be found. I’d been searching for them all Fall. Jonagolds, while not quite the same, would have been close enough… but I couldn’t find them either. I had settled for Macintoshes at the PYO farm because it was what they had, but with some disappointment.

But I saw Jonagolds for sale this past weekend. Finally! – here they were out of the blue. I just couldn’t resist a second try. They are unfortunately neither local nor organic, and come from Costco. So I paused…. then bought a bushel.

All chopped up, they filled nearly four gallons.

But after four hours of simmering – with plenty of water and stirring this time! – they cooked way down.

Five flats of apples – about 12 apples per flat – made 14 big jars of applesauce. Some are quarts, some pint-and-a-half jars… near enough to call it about 3.5 gallons of applesauce, which only needed a cup and a half of sugar to sweeten it. (And a few tablespoons of boiled cider syrup for extra appley-ness, too… that’s my secret ingredient).

I didn’t get the house tidied for the bread baking workshop I’m leading tomorrow, and I didn’t get to play outside much, and I’m utterly exhausted nonetheless… but I do feel good about myself. There’s just something about seeing all your hours’ worth of work tucked neatly into jars, ready for the months ahead, that’s eminently satisfying. I’ve missed that feeling.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Crafts, food, homesteading, preserving, seasonal eating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.