Happy Apple Day!

When we moved into our current house a few years ago, we discovered that the man who built the house had planted all sorts of fruit trees.  We have two pear trees, two grape vines, we had a peach tree until someone ran into it with the lawnmower, two tart cherry trees and six apple trees.

This my friends, is a fancy composite image of our six apple trees.  Except it seems I missed the apple tree in the first one and took a picture of the grape vine instead.

Admittedly, we've never done much with them.  The poor dears have been left to grow as if in the wild with no pruning or anything to discourage bugs.  Last year with the drought we didn't get much fruit, but this year we have an overload!  You wouldn't know to look at them that we've had several different families out to pick apples.  One tree is literally falling apart.

That whole big branch on the side there just broke off!

My father decided that we couldn't have people come and pick all the apples and not do anything with them ourselves, so yesterday he went out and picked somewhere along the lines of 50 pounds of apples and today we turned 21 pounds of them into applesauce.

Hurray for apple-peeler-corer-slicers!

We ended up with four jars of regular applesauce and 5 jars of cinnamon - all in all it took us about 3 1/2-4 hours which isn't bad.  

In addition to the applesauce, we made up some chunky cinnamon apple 'stuff', for lack of a better term, to have with our oatmeal tomorrow morning.

Then, because it is after all the first day of autumn as well as the birthday of Bilbo and Frodo, I made a cake.

An apple pie cake, to be exact.   It's a new recipe, but it seems like it'll be delicious!

In the midst of all our productivity, my mom managed to get a burn on her arm from boiling applesauce, my sister accidentally knocked the blender off the counter and broke it (after we were all done, thankfully!) and I knocked over the sugar container and got about three cups of it all over the floor.  But hey, everyone was in a good mood for the whole afternoon so I consider it to be a successful day.

I think the only fitting way to finish up Apple Day is to have a bottle of Red's Apple Ale with... whatever dinner is.  (The meat was bad, so as of right now we don't have dinner.  We'll figure something out.)

Anyone care to join me?