Canning Applesauce

Oh Goodness, I don't even have time write this blog post and here I am.

I was supposed to get my bigs up about 20 minutes ago, but just wanted to throw a little something onto my poor, neglected blog.

We got home from our Disneyland trip 11 days ago and I have been ridiculously busy.  I have canned something like 160 or 170 pounds of apples, frozen 20ish pounds of concord grapes, scrubbed my fridge (hooray!), rearranged my living room, went to our first American Heritage Girls meeting, and had two full weeks of homeschool curriculum including 14 weekly classes at co-op and our Classical Conversations program.  I am beat!  Like, seriously exhausted.  And I have a 10-year-old slumber party to plan for next weekend, 50 pounds of pears still sitting in my kitchen, a brown grocery bag of plums to process, and a nursery that is still a huge mess.  REALLY trying to focus on progress instead of what isn't done yet.

Here's our first batch of apples: The 44ish pounds I bought before our 2 week jaunt out of town and a few Honeycrisp I found on clearance as soon as we got home.

The Saturday morning we were making applesauce with these, a good friend dropped off another 30ish pounds so we just kept going.

 Finished, all the apples made 36 quarts.

And these 88 pounds were still waiting . . .

I had thought to do them on Sunday, but I was so swollen on Sunday from the marathon Saturday I just couldn't make myself do it again.

Instead we did about 30 pounds on Monday.  My older girls finished up a couple of pots before bed while I dashed off to accountability.  This is what I found when I got home: "Dear Mom, It over flode. We clend it up."  How's that for sweetness?  They did a good job cleaning up, too.  I only found a big blob under the mixer, but they got the rest.

We did a little bit more on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then we started boiling jars.  These 88 pounds of organic galas made another 35 quarts.  I didn't imagine we'd split the apples so evenly, but the volume came out almost exactly in half.  Weird.

I had a few interesting things happen with the second round.  I broke a jar (bottom cracked and fell out) which usually happens at least once a year.  I had two seals buckle upward - see photo - and that was new for me.  Any thoughts?  And I had some jars that leaked out sauce while they boiled, but eventually sealed.  Did I just not tighten down enough?  I don't know.

I wish I could write more, but I have to get kiddos up or I'll pay for it the rest of the day.  Maybe I'll be able to post about the grapes & fridge another day.  We'll see.  

Love, Katie