Apples, apples, and more apples! We recently had an apple truck lose it’s load in our town, this has actually happened 3 times in the 3 years we’ve lived here twice with apples and once with potatoes.  As a result the company decided to write off the load as an insurance claim and then they distributed TRUCK LOADS of apples to local churches, food banks, etc.  After all was said and done our church still had about 2,000 lbs of apples left so my daughter brought home two 40lbs boxes plus a few extra bags.  They were begging the congregation to take them!

At first we used the traditional method of making apple sauce (chop, boil, then use the food mill).  Well that’s the traditional method that I know of.  However we quickly learned that it took a whole bunch of apples to make a single quart of applesauce.  Also my food mill was a piece of junk and it took way too long to process the cooked apples.  What we ended up doing was genius, if I do say so myself.  Basically we used the apple/peeler/corer and canned the apples in small slices with plain water. We were able to get 3 to 4 apples in a jar this way.  Before we did this to the whole bunch of apples I wanted to test my theory. I waited for a jar to cool and then strained out the water and dumped the rest of the apples into my food processor, added 1 tsp of sugar and a little cinnamon.  Turned that puppy on and in just a couple of minutes we had DELICIOUS apple sauce! Everyone was thrilled.  I don’t think it necessarily takes less apples but the amount of work and mess was much more tolerable and we don’t have to commit to applesauce for the rest of our lives.  We can use the apple in a variety of ways when we choose to.

We were also blessed to get screamin’ hot deal on this food dehydrator several years back (just $75 off a Facebook group!) So we also dehydrated a good portion of the apples, delicious I tell you! I’m inspired to get this dehydrator out more often, I’ll admit it’s too often that fruit, especially bananas spoil in our house and I could have prevented some of the loss by dehydrating the fruit before it’s tossed out to the chickens. Not that it’s a total waste but I’d prefer the kids eat the bananas first.

Do you have any favorite apple recipes?  Have you canned apples before?  Other than applesauce this was a first for me as far as apples go.  I’m always so intimidated by canning but every time I am reminded how simple it really is, I will absolutely be doing this more when our garden starts producing again!