Preserving the Harvest

Some sweet friends of ours gave us a WM bag full of Keifer pears and a big Ziploc bag of pared apples - both from their backyard trees. Today I finally got around to putting them up. We made applesauce, pear sauce and some pear juice (nectar). Hannah and Abigail helped - some - mostly Abbo ate bits of fruit and draped herself with the peelings, so I spent a lot of time chasing her out of the kitchen.

First we peeled and cored the apples with the apple machine. Its fun to use and saves much time. It probably wastes a little bit more of the flesh than a good paring knife would, but the fun is worth it, and it got them to help. We dunked the sliced apples in a water/lemon juice bath.

Then we cooked the apples down with about 3" of water in the pot. I actually used a mixture of about half backyard apples and half Gala apples, on sale at Kroger this week. But it was so sweet that I didn't need any sugar - again, trying to cut out sugar where I can in our diets.

Our yield for the apples was only 4 pints....so I did pears, too. I used a scant 2/3 cup of sugar for the whole pot:

I drug out my immersion mixer, only to find out that it was broken. It is so handy for stuff, yet it wouldn't spin no matter how much I coaxed it. (HINT, HINT: CHRISTMAS IDEA!!) So the applesauce is chunky - I used the blender to mix up the pears since they tend to be grainy. That's also why I used sugar - to overcome any objections that might arise at suppertime :)

Process for 20 minutes:

And the end product:

I'd say that I put the peels and the cores out in the back yard under the pear tree for the deer, but since its after September 30, the peels and cores are for the rabbits, skunks and squirrels. And crows. And opossums. Some type of animal will be feasting down there tonight!