Monday, October 26, 2009

Apples From Roanoke

This past weekend we traveled to Roanoke, VA to visit my mom and dad. We had hoped the trees would be showing off their brilliant colors...



and we were not disappointed. Each day, they seemed more colorful than the day before.



The drive home ended up being the best view of the weekend.



Joshua took this picture. Kinda cool, isn't it?



On Friday the plan was to go to an orchard and pick our own apples. We had a hard time finding an orchard near by that still had apples left on the trees. And since it was a little drizzly we decided to go to an orchard and buy apples already picked.

not as much fun, but we still got apples!

And boy, did we get some apples! The orchard we ended up at had apples for about $0.50 per pound. So we bought 1/2 a bushel of Brae-burn apples and 1/2 a bushel of Golden Delicious apples.

what can I say, we eat a lot of apples!

Beyond eating and juicing them, I had a few more ideas of how to use all those apples...



I found this blog where the lady cooked in her crock pot everyday for a year. One of her recipes is homemade applesauce. Cooked in the crock pot of course! You can find it here.

First, we cored and cut our apples...

The quick way

...
I love this cutter from Pampered Chef!



We then put the cut apples in the crock pot with a little water.



While Seth took his turn cutting apples...



Noah rolled the lemon around on the floor to loosen the juice.



He rolled... and rolled... and rolled it.

sometimes you just have to put a little elbow grease into it, ya know!




Next Seth cut the lemon...



and squeezed it in on top of the apples. We also added some vanilla extract and cinnamon.



This is what it looked like after about 3 hours.



After another hour or so and a quick run through the Vita mixer this is what we ended up with from 12 apples.



I'm not sure I will ever be able to eat store bought applesauce again!

well okay, I guess when I have to pay $2 per pound for apples I will buy store bought... it's not soooo bad!




But until then I'll be goin' to town on all this yummy homemade goodness!

2 comments:

Karen said...

We still have apples that we need to use!! I am going to try the apple sauce!

The Ryals said...

Anonymous, Please do not post any more comments, and if you have me on your blog list please delete my blog from it.