Ahhh… the holidays… it really puts me in the mood to piddle around in the kitchen. Here in Florida it can be hard to get into the holiday mood. The weather doesn’t cooperate in the least. However, now that Thanksgiving has been “had” and I’m stuffed with good food, and its ok to play Chrismtas music without being condemned… well, I think I’m finally getting into full swing. It started last week with my adventure making apple butter for the first time. It turned out pretty well, and I actually canned it too! (I am not going to include the canning in my post though, since I’m not entirely sure I didn’t get it right by accident. If you want to learn more about that, then I suggest you do your own research. There are plenty of good sites online that have great tutorials.
Ok, so apple butter… this is what you’ll need:
about 5 lbs of apples
a pearing knife (for peeling)
an apple corer/slicer (optional)
1/2 cup brown sugar (do a taste test – depending on the apples, and your personal preference, you may need more or less)
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp salt
I decided to use my crock pot, since that makes the proccess a little simpler (And if there is a way to make it simpler, you better believe I’m going to try it!) I rounded up about 5lbs of apples, maybe a little more. It was a mixture of granny smith, gala and red delicious… I even threw in a pear. I cored, pealed and chopped all of them. That took me a while but not quite as long as I thought. I think it was about 45 mintues before I was done with the chopping. I used one of those apple corer-slicer things, which was a big help. In the end I had quite a mound of peels and cores, and two large zip-lock bags of apple slices. I put them in the bags so they wouldn’t turn brown while I chopped the entire batch. I dumped all the chopped apples into the crockpot and mixed the spices and 1/4 cup of sugar. Then I sprinkled that mixture over the top of the apples, stirring a few times to make sure that all the flavor would be evenly dispersed. Then I turned my crock pot on high for one hour. At the end of that hour I stirred it again and set it on low for 10 hours. After about 7 hours, I stirred it all again, adding about 1/4 of a cup of sugar, and let it continue to cook. At this point it was all mushy, and the more I stirred with a wire whisk, the smoother the consistency became. I stirred mine pretty well, since I like my apple butter as smooth as possible. And there you have it! Easy enough, to end up with a big batch of goodness!
Gabby wants to see if she can claim a jar! These look great! Great post!
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