Additional Adventures in Canning – Applesauce!

During the week I was in Vancouver Autumn came to Cumberland.  The leaves are turning colours (and in some cases, falling already!) the air smells of wood smoke and somehow the sunshine doesn’t seem so hot.

Also during the week I was in Vancouver, the apples on my trees have ripened and are ready for me to do stuff with. Last night I baked an apple crisp. I have no vanilla ice cream in the house (and can’t bring myself to try it with chocolate ice cream, no matter how much I love chocolate) but it was darn fine anyhow!

Today I started processing apples. I headed in to Wal-Mart & picked up three dozen wide mouth pint jars, some extra snap lids and I also found a quart-jar canner that I put into my shopping cart. 

Supplies

Home, I had another cuppa coffee and some more cuddle time with Jasmine. Around noon I went outside and picked a bucket of apples and got started. I should point out that, while I have now taken a bunch of apples off the tree, there are still TONS there, ready, waiting and continuing to ripen.

LOADS still on the tree!

Using my handy-dandy corer/peeler/slicer (which frankly takes off too much of the apple flesh in my opinion) I filled my G I A N T cook-pot with apple.  Two tablespoons of cinnamon and a little water added (there is no sugar in anything I processed today) onto the stove it went. About forty minutes of processing is what was needed to get the apple into a chunky mush (there was a LOT of it) and when it was ready to process into canning jars I got started.

After 10 minutes and a stir.

Once the applesauce was ready, using my funnel, I filled the jars nearly to the rim – first batch into the pot to be processed (twenty-five minutes) I gave myself about ten minutes to putter around, clean up what mess I had made and then get the next batch of either jars ready for processing.

Processing underway!

AGH! I didn’t quite have enough applesauce to fill the other eight jars earmarked for today’s batch of applesauce… so I have thirteen pint jars of chunky applesauce with cinnamon, one pint of chunky applesauce with pear wedges and two more pints of canned pears. I only had a small amount of pears left from before, and so being able to process some of them along with the applesauce today was nice.

Listening to the lids pop!

Tomorrow I think I will maybe try out applesauce with lemon, plum and ginger.  I figure if it’s a total fail the worst thing I have is something I can sweeten with honey and pour on ice cream! I have plum sauce I processed last year when I moved into the house (and used lemon in it) – all I need to do is get my hands on some fresh ginger.

With love across the waters,