Apple-y Goodness

All of my gardener friends tell me that one must wait until after the first frost to harvest apples. That frost/freeze makes them even sweeter.

But what does one do when the weather changes abruptly from fall to W-I-N-T-E-R???? Well, this ONE prayed very hard that the snow would hold off so I could harvest my apples on Monday AND, hopefully, have my trees "naked" before it snows. (I really don't want to lose branches because I have snow on leafy trees!) Apparently I wasn't the only one praying! The forecast was for snow Saturday and Sunday. Thank goodness we didn't get any. BUT we did finally get that freeze!

So this morning I was out picking apples! Back when I was picking peaches I scored a gugalin of fruit boxes down at Ream's! I love to have a standard size box for my fruit (or anything for that matter)! I filled up the back of my little Bug-hauler!! I was absolutely amazed when we filled up every single box I had (14 in all!) and there are still apples on the tree. (of course, you have to be a monkey to get to them. So that counts me out!)

As anyone who has fruit trees knows- getting the fruit off the tree is just the beginning of the work. We sorted as we picked so any apples that had birdie-pecks, blemishes, or got dropped went into one box (that turned into 2 boxes) and the other boxes are the "good" ones. I knew that I would need to take care of the "questionable" fruit today or it would start to go bad. I ended up putting up 10 quarts of apple pie filling and 12 quarts of applesauce.

I love the fun kitchen gadgets that make this process so easy. I have my Vitorio Juicer that puts sauce down one shoot and peels, seeds, etc. out the end. But my favorite, hands-down, is my Pampered Chef corer-peeler-slicer! It really speeds up the job!

I just love the smell of apple-y goodness wafting in the kitchen!! Today I got to enjoy that smell... but with 12 more boxes of apples in the garage I have the feeling that I will be smelling that apple-y goodness for a couple of weeks!