The Urban Farmer's Almanac

Alicia has been making applesauce like crazy with the bags of apples that we brought home from Wenatchee back in October, and we have probably 20 or 25 quarts so far. I kept saying that I was going to make some apple pie filling since we just used up our last batch, but it’s been busy. Finally last night the Venn diagram of motivation and time overlapped, and I canned 10 quarts of pie filling. It looks like a good batch this time around; I followed this recipe (mostly, and despite the Comic Sans). Blanching the apples after they were peeled and sliced seems like it helped keep the whole production from oxidizing too much, though I had to run the sauce through the blender to de-lump it before pouring it in the cans.

A week or two ago, I also made some apple jelly with rosemary, which is an amazing combination of flavors. Rosemary usually overpowers things, but with the apple, the flavors are perfect together. We received a jar of this jelly from someone a few years ago and loved it, but I can’t figure out who it was. If you’re out there, reveal yourself! At any rate, it is tasty, tasty jelly, and it’s all Hannah wants on her toast for the time being. Just take any apple jelly recipe, and add a sprig of fresh rosemary after filling the jars, right before you put the lid on; the rosemary flavor infuses the whole jar.

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The little crabapples out in front of the run-down church next door are ready to go, so Robbie and I filled up a basketful yesterday. The sauce they make is really tart, but the batch we froze last year was perfect as a base for pie filling, adding either apples or rhubarb. The first batch today made 7 pints of applesauce, and I have the rest prepped to cook down tomorrow, hopefully for another 5 or 6 pints. That should get us through to next year in pretty good shape. Though pies have become my go-to potluck dish, so I think we’ll also do some apple pie filling this fall.

I got a little artsy with the photos this time, just to warn you. Here’s to steamy August nights in the kitchen.

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We tagged along with our friends Clay and Michaelynn on their annual “Cider Weekend” at their friends’ orchard in out in Wenatchee this weekend. It’s a gathering that’s been happening since they were all in college, where the orchards are gleaned after they’ve been picked, cider is pressed, taco soup is consumed, and all manner of farm fun is had. Our kids ran wild through the apple trees all day, got pushed on the huge swing, and ate more apples than I thought possible in the course of an afternoon. Plus, do I need to say anything more than “apple baseball”?

The main event was the cider pressing, and after a morning of picking apples, we got to work processing them into juice with the Ringsrud family’s fancy cider press. The previous weekend, we had our annual cider pressing here in Seattle, and in hindsight, it was a quaint affair compared to the raw power of this machine, squeezing nearly every last drop out of the apples it pulverized. In a couple hours we pressed more cider than everyone could even take with them.

To top it all off, the family has recently kicked their artisan hard cider business into gear, producing some fantastic bottles from the apples they grow in their orchard. Look for Snowdrift Cider… you won’t regret it. I think Whole Foods is carrying it in the Seattle area.

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There are a few apple trees on our block that are very peculiar – they grow tiny little apples, about an 3/4″ in diameter. I picked one off a tree as we were walking by the other day, and I was surprised at the strong tart flavor. It got me thinking that maybe they would be good for something. I considered pressing them for cider, but that seemed like a lot of work to get enough for any volume. Apple jelly perhaps?

We had some free time this afternoon, so I dragged the kids out to the sidewalk to help me. Which meant that Hannah kept relocating the bucket and Robbie kept climbing up the mini ladder right behind me. I managed to fill their beach bucket about 2/3 full of the tiny apples, and then we came home and decided to make apple sauce.

I cut the blossom end off each apple (supposing it might help them cook more readily) and then added a little bit of water to the pot. They cooked up in about 15 minutes, and then we ran them through the food mill. It was a surprisingly efficient process – the food mill removed the skin and cores, but most of the volume went through with the sauce.

It was super tart, so I added about a cup of sugar. The best part about it was the pretty pink color it came out. There is so much skin on all those little apples, that the red pigment dyes the final product a nice bright hue. Some for the fridge, some for the freezer, and I’ve got my eyes on those other trees of tiny apples.

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One again we found ourselves with a barrel of apples to process this year.  The blessing (and curse) of apples is that they can actually sit around for awhile.  This means that its easy to put off getting to them and begin to stress out and/or avoid them. Once we faced this procrastination we decided to do some canned apple pie filling, which we’ve done several times before.  We’ve always enjoyed it and used it fairly quick, but we also seem to be a little cursed by it.  Last time we did it we had problems ranging from broken jars to not enough head space.  This year that pattern continued.  We were using some very old canning jars and had two crack in the water, which of course leads to a huge mess of apple pie filing and broken glass in boiling water.  I don’t really know why this happened since generally in my canning experience its fairly rare.  Additionally our apple peeler/corer/slicer broke unrepairably.  After this we decided to switch to applesauce for the rest of the apples, which is easy enough.  Unfortunately, one of us (he shall remain nameless), forgot that you can’t really process the jars while the applesauce is cold (i.e. straight from the fridge) which led to even more jar breakage.  Overall we did manage to successfully can 6 quarts of pie filing and 4 pints of applesauce, but I have a feeling that next year I am going to procrastinate even more when it comes to processing any apples we acquire.

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