Applesauce

A month ago I got together with my grandma and we made and canned a whole bunch of applesauce.  My little cousin helped a little when he got home from school.

This was a 6-hour-applesauce-making extravaganza. 

Ingredients to make applesauce: apples, a little bit of sugar, and lots of work.

We had 2 bushels of apples.  

This is a HALF bushel

The apples all had to be washed.  Then we quartered the apples, cut out the core/stem area/seeds, cut the apple into smaller slices.  

All the "reject" pieces

These slices went into a pot with a little bit of water and then onto the stove where they cooked until they were mushy.  

Then the apples had to go through a food mill.  This is where the applesauce gets its pinkish color- the red peels of the apples don’t go through the food mill but the red gets ground out enough to give the applesauce a hint of pink.  

Then we added a little bit of sugar (about ¾ of a cup to 1 cup).  Then the hot applesauce went into the jars.  And then the jars went into the canner to be processed.  Then the jars came out to cool.  This whole process was repeated countless times and often multiple parts of this process were going on at once.

I think we ended up with 63 pints of applesauce. Here's just SOME of what we made.

Cucumbers!

I enjoy cucumbers.  I obviously wouldn’t grow them if I didn’t like them.  If you grow cucumbers, you have to know how to be creative in order to use them (or you have to have friends and neighbors that you can give cucumbers to),  because there always seems to be lots and lots of cucumbers. 

So, here I would like to share all the things that I have done with cucumbers so you too may enjoy cucumbers

I started out just eating the cucumbers cut up on salads.  Then I put cucumber slices on sandwiches with other veggies. 

Then I made a cucumber salad. 

To make the cucumber salad, slice up a cucumber along with about ½ cup of sliced onion.  In into the cucumber and onion about ¼ cup each of mayo and sour cream.  Add a little salt and pepper to taste and some dried or fresh dill.

Then I made taziki sauce.  

This one is a little more complex, but I have made it quite often so it is becoming easier.  Buy a big container (32 ounces, I think) of plain yogurt.  Take a colander and line in with a coffee filter.  Dump the yogurt into the coffee filter lined colander with a bowl underneath.  Liquid will drip out of the yogurt- let it drain over night or for a while.  Now the yogurt is thicker.  Add to the yogurt a shredded cucumber, ½ cup finely chopped onion, 2-3 cloves minced garlic, fresh or dried dill, and salt and pepper to taste.  You can use this as a dip with pita chips or pita bread.  Put some on a sandwich or in a pita or wrap.

I sliced up half a cucumber and sprinkled some salt and lemon juice on the slices.  It might sound a little strange, but it is a very tasty and refreshing cucumber creation.

Then I made pickles, which is going to have to be a post all by itself.