One more step on the road to becoming a REAL Mormon family

Remember my little wish to make applesauce? The kids were out of school a week ago Friday and earlier that week I'd gotten an email from the orchard saying that with all the winds we've had here in Kansas lately, they had lots of beautiful windfall apples available for people to come and pick for $9.50 a bag.

They weren't giving them away, but the kids were still interested in picking apples and making applesauce, so we bundled up and went. We all held it together for the hour and half or so that we were there. The kids weren't happy that they HAD to pick up the apples from the ground and not from the trees, and it didn't matter how many times I tried to explain how to systemically go through the apples on the ground, I had two worker bees and two who wanted to be but easily got distracted.



We picked 6 bags of apples ... about 3 bushels. One of the bags went to my friend April and the rest we turned in to applesauce.



I borrowed a food strainer/sauce maker from my friend Julie and Friday night we started cooking and saucing apples. My gadget loving husband who was the crank turner on the food strainer/sauce maker went in search for the equivalent KitchenAid attachment Saturday and came home with one. It's quite nice, although I think the manual version is a bit more efficient, it spits out only waste and no sauce with it, while the attachment spits out applesauce with the peel/core/seeds.

It took most of two Saturdays, but thanks to GR and all the kids working really hard together, we got all the apples sauced and bottled by Saturday afternoon!



When it was all said and done, we ended up with 16 quarts and three pints of bottled applesauce (we would have had one more quart, but the bottle broke in the hot water bath - what a huge mess). The kids love the homemade applesauce, and I love the fact that I know exactly what's in it ... pure apples and nothing else!. We could have easily had another 4-6 quarts if we'd been able to bottle the applesauce faster. Over the last week, the kids have eaten at least that much applesauce!



I don't think anyone was more excited about making homemade applesauce than GR. There's no way we would have gotten all those apples cooked and smashed and sauced and bottled if he hadn't been so supportive of the entire project. Growing up he watched his good friend Rob's mom bottle and can everything - they were and are his example of a real LDS family. So for him, making our own applesauce, in addition to trying to do a better job at having family prayer and family scripture study and real family home evenings where we actually have a lesson and not just playing games, is just one more little thing we're doing to try and become a real LDS family.