Do you love this beautiful autumn weather as much as I do? We have had cool daytime temperatures but COLD nights. The hope for today is that LHT and I will get all of the apples on our five trees picked before they all end up on the ground--food for worms. Julie and I have bottled juice, I have made apple butter and have dried apples. I like the dried fruit and the apple butter is for me. I have always LOVED it. When I was a little girl, I liked it on my toast and I still do. Now, however, I usually eat it with toasted English muffins.
When we were visiting David, one of the Saturdays we went to a Mountain Man Rendezvous at Bagnell Dam. There was a fellow making apple butter in a big pot over an open fire. My mouth started watering right then but he wasn't selling any. He was just making it for personal use. I decided I would like to make some this year. I chose to make it in a big pot on my electric range in my clean kitchen. The smell was just as good and the taste is wonderful. I have eaten almost a half-pint all by myself in the past two weeks. The only problem is that it has lots of sugar in it. I am still staying at 135 pounds so I think I must not be eating too much.
The recipe calls for two quarts of cooked apple pulp. That was a good thing for me, because I used the remaining apple pulp from making the apple juice. It was just apple pulp because all of the juice was in the bottles of juice.
Here is my recipe.
2 quarts of cooked apple pulp
4 cups sugar
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp Allspice
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp Nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground Cloves
Peel and quarter apples. (I didn't peel them and I cannot tell the difference.) Since the apple pulp was the byproduct of the apple juice, I did not have to cook the apples. (Julie and I chose to make apple nectar which means that you cook the quartered apples and then juice them in your juicer.) That meant that I just had to return the apple pulp to the cooking pot, add the other ingredients, and stir with a long-handled wooden spoon until the mixture heated. Then I put it in hot jars, sealed the jars and cooked them in a hot water bath for 10 minutes. I was lucky; every jar sealed.
I love the poem by Robert Frost, After Apple Picking. I don't know how to post it here, so you will have to refer to the published family newsletter: "I Heard It Through the Trauntvein."
I had to laugh at the end of the day last Thursday. Julie and I were bottling juice and it was UEA. That meant that all of AnnMarie's family was here. Alyssa helped quarter and seed the apples, Megan helped by baby sitting the younger kids, and Kyle alternated between helping and making a slingshot. Matthew said he wanted to go out and help grandpa. I said OK but I rolled my eyes. I thought, "Wow, I bet he is some help." LHT was trying to build a woodshed and, earlier, he had us out in back lifting a part of the roof in place. Well, come to find out at day's end (sorry, no photos), that he really had been a great help. He held boards, used the drill, held the little washers on for grandpa, who, as you know, shakes because of familial tremor. Wonderment! I never fail to marvel how the younger kids love to help their grandpa.
Jim and LHT have been working to extract the season's honey. Yesterday they were very proud of the work they did. LHT only had three bee-stings on his left hand so he was doing very well.
