It's raining apples!

Apples, apples, apples

SIL and I decided to go pick apples with our families and then make applesauce and some apple pies.

On a gorgeous Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, we decided to head to the apple farm and started filling bags up with apples.  Once we’d done 4 bags, we decided that that just wasn’t enough apples.  So we got another 2 bags and filled them up.  Then we went to get our apples weighed since that’s how they charge you and we had…81 lbs of apples!

Hmmmm, we bought a lot!

Yes, the sinks are full and 3 cookies trays are piled full too.

What do you think?  That is 81 lbs of apples washed and ready to be peeled and sliced.  Good thing I own a food processor for the slicing part but we still had to peel the things.

Well 6 hours later, we decided that next year we’d get a food mill or something so we didn’t have to peel millions and millions of apples!  I thought my hands were going to fall off!

We made the first batch of applesauce.  Then I decided to use my immersion blender to chop up the apples.  It worked great except that the sauce wasn’t so much a sauce anymore but a thick liquid.  So next we decided to cook the apples for 30 minutes like the internet said and mash them with a potato masher.  That was hard work!  We ended up with a lot of apple chunks that were not quite mashed away, but the consistency of the applesauce was much, much better.  We combined both batches so that the first batch was more edible.  The last batch we made we cooked for about 45 minutes and stirred it about every 10 minutes and it mashed into perfect applesauce.  SUCCESS!!! 

Imagine it's not sideways since it's Friday and all my brain cells are dead so I can't figure out how to flip it right side up.

Here is all our applesauce.  It’s quite dark because of the cinnamon we used in it and we decided to use brown sugar instead of white since I don’t cook much with white sugar.  Pretty, eh? (Yes, I say “Eh?”…French Canadian here)

Yummy canned applesauce!

We got to working on making the pies.  I mixed the dough and made balls and my SIL was rolling out the dough and putting it on the pie tins.  Of course, I only decided to taste the dough on my 3 batch and found out that it was WAY too salty so I had to cut the salt in half for the rest of the recipes.  Hopefully they’ll still taste good since we were using a new dough recipe and a new apple pie recipe (the internet is a great place). 

We managed to get all 8 pies done fairly quickly, but by this time SIL and I were sick of seeing apples!

Forgot to take a picture of the pies and crisps before we wrapped them up. 
I'll take one when we cook them up!

So we threw the rest of the apples into a bowl and I made some apple crisps from a super easy recipe my mother had given me.

We still had some apples left, but we decided that we would feed them to the nephews and Dre because we couldn’t bear looking at another apple.

Sideways photo alert...
We filled an entire lawn bag with apple peels & cores!

Dre was great and peeled and cut apples all day long with us.  He did the dishes several times so the giant tower of dishes didn’t crash down unto our pies and so we had clean dishes to use.  Good thing he helped or SIL and I would probably still be peeling apples!

I think by next year we'll be ready to do this again:-)