The Great Apple Extravaganza!

Growing up, I remember vividly making applesauce.  It is a little bit of extra work, but you cannot beat the flavor of "real" applesauce!  So we set out with my mom to Catoctin Mountain Orchard. 

Browsing the store, we came across this.  Each of these boxes is filled with "2nds" apples - Apples that are not fit to be sold at full price.  Each box is $6.00.  Mom bought them ALL!  There is NOTHING wrong with these apples.  We cut into all of them and really only found a few brown spots, 90% were perfect and needed no extra attention, and all were delicious!!  As far as we are concerned, these apples were fit to be bought at full price...but we're not complaining!!

We cut up all the apples and for one of the batches we cored all of the apples.  (This step is not necessary and this was the only batch we did this on.  This is the only picture I took of this part of the process though.)

3 pots full to the brim of apples - and this was only part of 1 box!!!!

I truly wish we could transfer the smell of my house to this blog.  It was amazing.  I opened the front door to share it with the neighbors :) 

My mom always puts a dash of sugar in the pot after the apples cook down (less than a 1/4 cup sugar per pot) and then we start straining!

We traveled back in time to locate this little gem.  We have been making applesauce with this thing since bell-bottoms were just hitting the market.  Isn't it beautiful?  It's a Victorio food Strainer - Model No. 200!  I just saw that Amazon.com is currently selling Model No. 250...  Is that any indicator of how long my mom has had this thing?!

Now comes my favorite part! Throw the cooked apple mixture with core & peel and everything into the top and start turned the crank.

The picture on the right shows all the apple peel and core coming out.  We double-strain that stuff just to make sure we got all the good stuff.

So, here's our apple round-up.  With just TWO boxes of apples, we were able to make the following:

Apple Cider Chicken - We used some Apple Cider from Catoctin Mountain farms and served it with some rice.  This tops my list as my favorite recipe EVER! 

These are 3 of the SIX pots we made of applesauce. 

We bagged it up in ziploc sandwich bags and threw them in freezer bags.  Not the classiest storage method, but this will all be gone before the freezer can do any damage!  And, what is that dish Leo is feasting on??

Apple Crisp - This recipe is to DIE for!! 

Plus one little dish of apple/cranberry compote my mom made.

All this and we STILL have 2 more boxes of apples to tackle!!!!