Rain and hail kept us indoors for a while this afternoon when we could have been working outside getting ready for our hayride tomorrow. But we are so thankful for it to be sopping wet outside finally! And I am taking a breather for a few minutes, doing office work in between downloading and uploading pictures...A few minutes of blogging is a way for me to unwind in between picking apples, cleaning up the place, teaching school (Rose is sitting beside me so I can help her with her spelling), planning for the hayride evening with maybe 50 or 60 or more people tomorrow, and making chicken soup for supper.
Now to the apple butter:
We were very grateful to find an apple tree in town whose owners offered to split the apples with us if we would pick them. We got a few bushels of very nice yellow delicious apples.
To make apple butter, first you have to make apple sauce, and this Victorio strainer I bought recently made the job so quick! So far this year we've canned 110 or more quarts of applesauce.
Sorting apples! We made all the bruised or bad ones into applesauce and saved the good ones for eating. Timmy claimed he ate ten apples in one day! It was so nice to tell the children they could have all they wanted for a few days! After that, we had to put a limit on!
My sister Iva always has great ideas about cooking. She told me about a very simple way of making apple butter in crockpots. We used two. We filled them to an inch from the top with applesauce and let them bubble at lowest setting for about 24 hrs.
You can see how dark the apple butter got. Rose and Carrie are putting it into jars.
We couldn't decide if we best liked this view of some of the finished product...
Or this one from a higher angle with a prettier background.. So I am putting in both pictures!
Rosie was sick with a headache yesterday, but not too sick to pretend she was making announcements during the hayride, with a microphone the little boys made from tinkertoys! No end of creativity around here!
This last photo is one I snapped at Grandma's flower garden where we went to pick apples yesterday. Thanks to Grandma and pa for lots of apples for Uncle Kenn to press tomorrow for cider at our hay ride. And I always love to look at Grandma's beautiful flowers.
Must go from blogging to slogging--either in mud outside or the common ordinary work of each day--but with a thankful heart! Thank You Lord for the beauty around us, for cameras to catch it, for minds to remember it, for hearts to love it and You, the Creator!
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