Thank Goodness for Free Food
I picked a bagful at my aunts. We filled the two smaller baskets in the photo from a tree in an abandoned lot down the street from our house. We harvested some more last night at Matt's brother's house and made a connection to harvest some more tomorrow from a really nice looking tree on my bicycle route to work.
Applesauce is one of the things that we can completely supply ourselves. I like that. We use it a lot in baking instead of oil, which I cannot produce at present. We still have 14 quarts of apple sauce and 3 quarts of apple pie filling left from last year at this point. While we made it through the year I think we'll still be upping the amount preserved so we can freely give them as gifts as well as eat to our heart's content. Also, Matt wants to make apple butter and lots, lots, lots more apple cider, too.
Thank goodness for free food. Money may not grow on trees, but food does....and in the end its pretty much the same thing.
Those look good. Actually, free always looks great. How do you make your apple pie filling to can?
ReplyDeleteWe have a Back-to-Basics corer/slicer that we use to core and cut them and then we use the recipe from the Ball Blue Canning Book. We've tried light and medium syrup as well as both sugar and honey sweetener. To be honest, I thought they were all about the same. Thus my preference is for light syrup made with honey as it is lowest sugar and most local. We then use a water bath (again following the Blue Book) to seal the jars.
DeleteAWESOME! Scott and I were talking about how nice it would be to can apple pie filling so I could whip up pies even faster this winter... perhaps we will be fortunate enough to make a trip to the NC Mountains for some fresh off the tree apples. HAPPY SAUCE AND CIDER MAKING!
ReplyDeleteI hope you do get the chance! I doubt I'd ever make pies if it weren't so easy as just popping open the jar!
DeleteOH YUM! APPLE CIDER AND HOME MADE DONUTS!
ReplyDeleteOoooh! We SHOULD make doughnuts! Good idea!
DeleteI would never have thought of using apple sauce instead of oil in baking!
ReplyDeleteIt was one of those real cooking lightbulbs for me. Why didn't I think of that?!
DeleteWe've had great, great success with this ratio:
If the recipe calls for 1/2 cup oil we replace it with 1/3 cup applesauce. Some people replace it one to one, but I've never tried it. I'm sorry that I am not clever enough to convert it to metric (I tried and got confused...why haven't we just switched to what the rest of the world uses!), but do try it out sometime if you've got easier access to sustainable applesauce than you do oils.