Ta-da! The canning report.

I am so proud. After twelve hours of slicing, grinding, straining, and simmering, I am now in possession of 7 quarts of applesauce and 12 pints of apple butter. I am also minus an entire weekend and the sufferer of one major breakdown. (The breakdown, by the way, was caused by having only 7 quarts and 12 pints at the end of the weekend. That's it?!) Brian kindly handled the quartering of almost all the apples, many of which had been invaded by a chubby pink worm that had tunneled through the center to eat the seeds and leave the innards to rot. We encountered a few of them who, as you can imagine, met their demise soon after. Removing the damaged portions of the apples made an otherwise simple operation more trying, but Brian forgave me because he was assigned to operate the grinder/strainer attachment on my mixer during the next step, which -- judging by his enthusiasm -- was a very satisfying job. He is to be thanked for keeping an eye on the apple “guts” coming out of the end of the strainer to make sure that they went into the “guts” bowl and not the applesauce bowl. He was particularly diligent about this, letting out a yelp of alarm and pointing to the offending piece until I responded to his satisfaction. If there are any “guts” in the applesauce, I am the one who is to blame.

In the midst of it all, I also managed a trip to the farmers' market on Sunday morning and froze the many heads of corn and a couple pounds of yellow beans that I bought. Apparently this was far too much activity for one weekend, because I woke up this morning with a miserable head cold. So much for reveling in my success. I'm off to find that box of tissues.

Pics above: Apple butter, they say, but at this point it looked more like apple flavored sugar to me (top left), the final product, yet to be rinsed off but with all seals intact (top right), cheering the Chargers on from the kitchen with local beer in hand (bottom right), and the kitty Ella very bored with the proceedings (bottom left).