Apples

Sunday evening the family (that's my daughter, son-in-law and four grand children) returned from Helsinki and came to my place for pancakes. They brought me about 20 kilos of apples (about 40 pouunds for those of you not on the metric scale) and a kilo of sugar. Monday I armed myself with my two biggest cooking pots, a bucket and a knife.

The dogs took a vigile on either side of me hoping for some fall out as I began quartering and coring the apples. Finnish apples are not big like the commercial ones generally seen in stores. They are what would be considered "small". These are what the purists would know as "heritage" apples, even though they were once widely grown in Finland I have not seen this type, "punakaneli" (red cinnamon), on the commercial market as trees to plant.

Anyhow I sat and quartered and cored apples all morning, tossing quarters alternately into either pot. Yes, the dogs got "some" but much less than they hoped for and they eventually left me to my task. When the smaller of the two large pots was full I concentrated on filling the larger pot. I managed to knick my finger with the knife and paused to hold my hand over my head until it stopped bleeding - no blood in the apples. Finally the bigger pot was full and I could think about cooking the apples - I still have apples to quarter and core.

I juiced four lemons adding juice from two to each pot. and turned on the heat. Then I grated a knob of ginger for the smaller pot and shook a liberal amount of cinnamon in the larger pot and added about a cup of sugar to each pot and waited. When they were boiling I stirred and finally took my potato masher and used it in the pots to hurry the process. Later I could turn off the heat and took the dogs for a walk.

When I returned I ladled the apple sauce into clean jars. Fortunately I had just enough big jars to manage this amount of apple sauce. Nine jars. I didn't need to take out the army of pesto jars that are waiting occupation (I have about 30 of them). There was about two "cups" of apple sauce left over in the big pot and I used that in an applesauce cake - slight modifications to the recipe in the Joy of Cooking. For dinner the dogs each had a big handfull of apple cores - they think it is wonderful, seeds, stems and all.

So that's what I've been up to. Today I have been "flicking" wool, tomorrow I'll be carding it and I fully anticipate spinning it next week. More on that later.

Smiles,
Susanne