Appling

I can't think of a better way to describe the spending of about 2 hours of the day elbows-deep in APPLES: Appling. That's what I did today. Huge amounts of thanks to my husband who entertained and worked our children raking acorns, bathed them, and read devotions. Verity was sitting patiently in her rocking chair for me to come say goodnight as soon as I was done putting the apple peeler into hot, soapy water. And as soon as I came out, there was Matt, just come in from another delivery to the compost heap, and washing my apple peeler. I filled 4 and a half gallon bags of processed apples.

Phew.

This is what we started with. Fifteen pounds of several varieties of apples, fresh-picked from Pome on the Range, by the eight hands that belong to our family. It took us about 2 hours to pick them all, and Matt's strong-arm to carry them to the car (along with the pumpkin). The kids were stellar at staying occupied, having fun, and actually being useful at the orchard. It was heaven!
But then, the fruit flies. Oh, the fruit flies! I'm not one for rushing my projects and while I knew the apples wouldn't last long, I didn't expect to have to peel and slice them already. I like a little pressure on myself to get a project done. Fruit flies taking over my home = PRESSURE. So I got to work this morning.
This is about half of the total produce we brought home, and the remains for my second shift this evening.

Get a load of this apple!

Just to give you an idea, here he is next to a grocery-store sized apple that
we would normally eat. Wowsa.

Just when I thought I couldn't get anymore barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen (which, incidentally, I was), I looked over to see how much more I had left to do. Lots.

(And yes, that is my ice cream sandwich to spur me on and give me the strength to finish.)

I love this one. I think it was my favorite. I remember actually picking him. He came off a winesap tree and we didn't get many of his kind, but he was beautiful.

Ahh, processed apples. I foresee pies...butter...jam...sauce...bread...muffins...

The gory mess in the end. This is the fourth bowl of peels to compost. I wish we could have kept them for some kind of processing, but so many of them we so eaten up (I only came across one live worm and had to pitch only two bad apples!), that it would have taken another day to sort good peel from bad peel. But with all those cores anyway, we might have own veritable orchard next spring pop up in compost! Wouldn't that be lovely?