How 'bout Them Apples

Finally there are no apples in my house. Whew!! But it took fierce determination and a lot of time, patience, and recipe help from some friends.

So just how many apples met their match? Well, I couldn't rightly tell you except to say that I bought 40 pounds of gala apples from my CSA - which gets them from an organic orchard near Charlottesville. Yep, I needed to debit my account quickly and large purchases like apples are the easiest way to do it.

At first I started out making applesauce and apple butter. I love both of these but Comfort and Joy won't eat either one so I don't make but so much. Some of the applesauce got repurposed into applesauce bread which I then took to a variety of social functions - a party, church, and used for a small group meeting at our house. I'm pretty sure this would freeze well but I haven't tried it yet.

But I still had a LOT of apples. So I made more apple butter and I cut several dozen into slices and flash froze them to store in the freezer for use in our Thanksgiving Apple Pie. I learned last year that a one gallon Ziplock bag of apples works for my recipe.

And yet there were more apples. I put out a call to some friends on an email loop and someone suggested apple cider and I thought they had lost their ever lovin' mind. Then I did some research - mosty confined to a quick Swagbucks search and learned that while you could invest in a press and yada, yada there was way to make apple cider in your kitchen with just items that I had on hand.

I will say that the cider doesn't taste like store bought, or even what you might get at a fair, likely because I only had one type of apple. I'll also tell you that I used the remaining 30 apples and ended up with 1.5L of apple cider. It was a great way to use up the apples and I'm glad that I have a new skill but if you're really interested in doing this you're going to need a LOT of apples. And invest in the cider press. Using the food processor worked for a small batch but if I were going to do this often I might think about something more efficient.

That's our apple adventure from this past month. Do you have interesting ways to get through bountiful produce at your house?