Yet more adventures in canning with the three musketeers

[hlmauera]

Saturday was another day of canning for Marian, Trudi and me. Our goal was to pickle 40 pounds of beets for Marian and Trudi and making applesauce for Marian and me out of our three 5-gallon buckets of gravensteins. We had three different plans for applesauce. Marian took care of one bucket by coring them without pealing, then cooking them down, and rubbing them through the colander. One batch was made by cooking the apples in the crockpot with three cinnamon sticks for most of the day. The last batch was made by cooking the apples in the microwave. The three methods resulted in three very different apple sauces, although none of them needed sugar.










On the left you see the pink sauce from the unpeeled apples and on the right is the microwaved applesauce.





The applesauce on the left is the sauce from the crockpot and the microwaved applesauce is on the right again.



Microwaving the frozen apples, one gallon bag at a time.





Mashing the apples.



The microwave really brought out the water so we strained some of it out. It made a very dense applesauce that tended to boil out of the jars in the canner.





Strained off apple juice.

While the apples were cooking, we peeled and chopped the beets.



We only got 10 pounds of beets pickled because Marian ran out of jars but we also ran out of time. Still Trudi got 7 quarts canned. You can also see that Marian has been making meat candy (jerky). Trudi helped cut it up and put it in quart jars.