Fall Harvest

There is only one thing to do when your dad's apple trees go wild and produce hundreds of apples! Bake, bake, and bake some more! Quinn has been baking apple pies, apple crisp, cinnamon apple slices, etc. It has all been very delicious! Dad's apples have the best combination of sweet and tart flavors! Perfect for baking!

I picked two plastic grocery bags of apples and looked up many recipes. I finally decided to make some apple butter. I haven't had it in years and I thought Pacen would enjoy it. It turned out pretty good if I do say so myself. :) I have a caramel apple pie recipe I want to try, but I'll have to wait until I am able to pick more apples (I better hurry because it will be freezing soon).

APPLE BUTTER

Apples (enough to overfill a 4 quart crock pot)
1/2 cup vinegar
3 cups white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground cloves

Peel, core, and slice the apples. Add vinegar and cook on low for 18 hours (10 hours on high if your crock pot cooks fast). Stir occasionally. Add white sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, and cloves. Stir thoroughly. Put into blender and blend until smooth. Put back in crock pot and cook four more hours. Seal in jars. Makes almost 6 pint jars.

This was just about half of the apples I used. Yeah, they look kind of rough but that's from a hail storm.

See the apples on the side? That's what the whole batch looked like before blending it. I was nervous for a while that it was ruined.

"Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye." ~Henry David Thoreau