Project Apple

The project for Saturday was dealing with all of the apples.....SO MANY Apples!!! Everyone in town is talking about what they are doing with their Apples. When I was in the grocery store buying lemon juice I ran into other people buying lemon juice too....for THEIR Apples. By the time I'd checked out I had ran into no less than 4 other people that were talking about their Apples! We just aren't used to having so many...it was just a great year for Apples.

What a great problem to have!! We aren't really applesauce people here at our house, so I decided to make apple pie filling. Now, when I grew up we froze our apple pie filling, but I don't have a lot of freezer space available right now and there were a lot of empty quart jars in my cupboard, so I decided to can it.

Problem: most of the canning recipes call for "clear jel". I discovered that no one in town has heard of it, and none of the stores carry it.

Solution: do it the old-fashioned way, with corn starch.

First, I took the blade off of my apple peeler and peeled the apples. Apparently the slices turn out too thin for canning.

Then, I cored and sliced them into chunks by hand.

Some of the apples were little...

 But most of them were really nice sized.

Everything went really smoothly.....but it took all day, and the kitchen was a mess!

Beautiful.

Simply, beautiful.

 And everyone approved the results....

And, as all good canning projects go, it was quite late when I finally called it quits for the night.

Project Apples complete.