Criss Cross Applesauce

One of our yearly endeavors is to make and can applesauce. Usually, we load up our share of jars, lids, and rings and head to my parents' house. This year, with the addition of Elliott, my mom suggested that she would come to us. It certainly simplified things on our end, since nap schedules were easier to keep.

With three adults to work our way through about two bushels of apples, the job went quite smoothly, even if the last canner of jars didn't go on until after 8:00 pm.

Apples after they cooked down and were soft...

Running them through the squeezo...

Cranky (haha) Keith...

Our share of the applesauce was 21 quarts in jars, plus another quart or so in the freezer and some baby food. My mom took home 10 pints.

One of the reasons the process took so long (besides taking care of the kiddos) was that we had a variety of apples types and in trying to keep the flavor consistent, we wanted to run all the apples through the squeezo and mix the batches before canning it. We did end up doing one canner before all the apples were through, simply because we were out of room in the pots and on the counter and needed to make some space to keep working. The one variety was so very pink, while others made more of a yellow sauce, so mixing them all together helped to make everything a nice pinkish color. Mixing the varieties, with their different levels of tartness, also allowed us to skip adding any sugar. Other years we have added a bit, maybe about a cup of sugar per 8-10 quart batch, but we all agreed we didn't need to this time. And the baby food that I froze in ice cube trays is without sugar as well. I spooned that out of the first batch through the squeezo, knowing I didn't want sugar added but not knowing yet that none of it would get sugar this year.

We have a drawer full of apples in the fridge but we haven't been able to help ourselves – we've already dipped into our supply of applesauce.