Apple Harvest 2010
A few years go, shortly after starting my current job, I noticed an apple tree near my work - it was in a ditch, on some industrial property, easily accessible from the parking lot of a strip mall. I’ve eaten the apples from the tree before and they are quite good (of the apple varieties I know, they are most similar to Royal Gala). For Thanksgiving I made pies from them, and they turned out pretty well - so I decided I would make an attempt to preserve some of them for use through the year.
So, yesterday I left work a little early so that I’d have some sunlight to work with, and in under half an hour I picked all of the apples I could reach from the ground, which filled very close to 4 grocery bags - a fair bit of apples!
I washed the apples (they over-filled my kitchen sink!) and used my recently-purchased slicer and core-er (which worked alright, though not quite as well as I’d hoped) to turn them into reasonable sized chunks (each piece is essentially 1/8 of an apple), which I temporarily kept in cold water with some lemon juice to prevent browning. After draining, I froze some on shallow trays and then put in bags; I packed some in zip-loc bags with very light, lemon-juice-enhanced syrup; and I sliced the rest a little smaller, made it into pie filling and froze in pie plates (thus making pie-shaped blocks of frozen filling that can be un-moulded and put, still frozen, into fresh pie pastry).
It was a fair bit of work, but in a few hours I put away a lot of apples for the winter! There are still a lot of apples left on the tree, and I think I am going to go out as soon as possible with my ladder and pick everything I can reach with that. I think I’ll make some apple sauce, maybe try some apple juice, and more pies - maybe frozen already in crusts this time.
Now I just gotta find time to do that…
B.
So, yesterday I left work a little early so that I’d have some sunlight to work with, and in under half an hour I picked all of the apples I could reach from the ground, which filled very close to 4 grocery bags - a fair bit of apples!
I washed the apples (they over-filled my kitchen sink!) and used my recently-purchased slicer and core-er (which worked alright, though not quite as well as I’d hoped) to turn them into reasonable sized chunks (each piece is essentially 1/8 of an apple), which I temporarily kept in cold water with some lemon juice to prevent browning. After draining, I froze some on shallow trays and then put in bags; I packed some in zip-loc bags with very light, lemon-juice-enhanced syrup; and I sliced the rest a little smaller, made it into pie filling and froze in pie plates (thus making pie-shaped blocks of frozen filling that can be un-moulded and put, still frozen, into fresh pie pastry).
It was a fair bit of work, but in a few hours I put away a lot of apples for the winter! There are still a lot of apples left on the tree, and I think I am going to go out as soon as possible with my ladder and pick everything I can reach with that. I think I’ll make some apple sauce, maybe try some apple juice, and more pies - maybe frozen already in crusts this time.
Now I just gotta find time to do that…
B.