Well I think Jewel helped me can these last week, maybe Friday. The days run together. I didn't get them put away until yesterday though. Sometimes life is like that, you know? When Levi & Echo are at the lake with their adorable kiddos, the beans just have to wait.
Dad and Josh have been digging potatoes for a couple weeks now, and this is it. And oh my, don't they look good?
I've been low on canning jars, so yesterday was the day Jewel & Josh brought these down from the red shed attic for me. It was quite a hot dirty job but not nearly as hot as last week which is why I waited until this week. I actually ran out of jars on Saturday so had to freeze the last few quarts of applesauce then...my freezers are pretty full though so I'm glad for these jars to finish out the summer.
I had great help washing them all.
And carrying all them downstairs to dry.
Actually I did the washing, and Jewel & Josh did the carrying. All those steps, oh my. I was bushed by the time we were done and I didn't even do the steps - to the red shed attic or to the basement. Thankful for their youthful energy! And for you big siblings reading this who think the younger kids don't work nearly as hard as you did when you were their ages.... well think again. They work plenty hard. They have to - I couldn't do it without them!
Then last evening Dad & I picked a few more peaches after we walked. Was very glad to send these to Echo as I'm rather peached out. I've kind of switched to apple mode, if you can't tell...
Today's morning project was putting all the clean jars away (which was preceded by re-organizing the storage room so I could move some basement kitchen things into there so I could empty some basement kitchen shelves for jars...);
then, after getting Jewel from work and doing a couple of Morton errands, we made another mess of chunky cinnamon applesauce.
This stuff is really good. Kind of like a crustless apple pie.
I had never heard of such a dish until after one of our babies was born and someone (I forget who) brought us a couple jars with a meal. It was maybe Joann S. but I'm not sure on that. At any rate, it's been a staple around here ever since, at least when we have an abundance of apples like we do this year.
Rather than ricing the cooked apples to get the skins off, this recipe consists of cooking the apples without skins and then adding some sugar and cinnamon. That's it!
So today, we started with two dishpans of apples; this did a 16quart kettle which was about 3/4 full of apple chunks. I added a couple cups of water, and got 'er cooking awhile. When they got all saucy and bubbly, I added a couple cups of sugar and a tablespoon of cinnamon and mixed well. And that's it!
This yielded about 10 quarts, which was 7 jars for my pressure canner, 1 container for the freezer, and a nice big bowl, probably 2 quarts, for fresh.
And that was a busy but blessed day.
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