Apples Galore!

Last Monday was my birthday. John and I thought it would be fun to take the kiddos to a local orchard to pick apples. It was the epitome of a perfect fall day! It was fun to walk through the orchard sampling all the different kinds of apples. I had no idea the different varieties of apples tasted so different! We'd walk up and down the rows of trees sampling the goods, find a type we liked, pick a bunch and then move on to the next variety. Grocery shopping for produce would be a lot easier if you could sample as you shopped . . . don't you think?

A bushel of apples is a lot of apples. Even though Gabe happily will munch on several a day we knew we had to do something with all the apples we picked. So we started canning apple pie filling. This was the first time John and I have ever canned, so it was a learning experience. We processed three batches of pie filling and by the last batch I think we finally figured out what we were doing. Next year it should be a breeze. If you could have seen us though, I'm sure it would have been quite comical. Up to our ears in apples, John telling me how his mom used to do it and telling me how crappy the design of our ApplePeelerCorerSlicer is. Me with a fever of 101 reading the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book while getting advice on the phone from my mom. Let me just quote Marie Ramone here, "To make the perfect meatball the secret ingredient is the love, without the love it's just a ball of meat." For Family Night on Monday we made apple crisp with our pie filling and it tasted so good, I think it must have been the love!

As a side note, THANKS to everyone for their birthday wishes and gifts. With the gift of green that I was given by many of you we purchased a carpet cleaner. John went to the store and chose it, brought it home for me, and he even cleaned the carpets for me! I had a lovely birthday thank you all.