Act 29: Apples Galore

Last weekend I went to visit my sister, who's living in Freeport, IL.  We decided to dedicate Saturday to apple picking and cooking.  I've been to orchards before but never did the pick-your-own thing.  Just bought apples and cider in the store there.  This time we had plans to try a couple different applesauce recipes so we needed plenty of apples.  We bought a 1/2 bushel bag and filled up it.  Final count: 49 apples!

We got them home, got out the recipes, and got to work.  Have you ever peeled and chopped up 49 apples?  It's pretty much exhausting!  We took turns at the different jobs but it was a lot of work. 

We made three different applesauce recipes.  The first was good but way too sweet.  The second was the same recipe but my sister wanted to try using Splenda instead of real sugar.  We also cut the sugar a little because the first one was so sweet.  I though the Splenda gave it a bitter aftertaste.  Not a fan.  Then again, my experiences with Splenda have not been great in the past.  The last recipe we made was my favorite.  It was more cinnamon-y and had just the right about of sweetness.  The only downfall of that one was that the recipe said to let the cooked apples cool before mashing them which made it a lot harder.  I'm going to ignore that instruction next time.  I did learn after I got the stuff home that mixing the too sweet applesauce with the cinnamon-y one evens it out pretty well.  A good way not to let any of it go to waste.

We had plenty of apples left so we also made apple-pecan bars (mildly successful) and an apple cheesecake-type thing.  That one was pretty good.

After all was said and done, we had 9 apples left for just eating.  And they were Northern Spy apples. I hadn't heard of this variety before, but they are incredibly tasty!  So after 5 hours of baking, this was what we ended up with.

Looks tasty, huh? :-)