Apples

Porter's favorite spot to play - swinging in the apple tree

We think it may be from our unusually warm winter/spring with no late frost after the apple blossoms came, but whatever the reason, we have had an amazing quantity of apples this year. And many/most of them have just fallen off the tree, to be scooped up and thrown away for 2 cents a piece... (next year we will finally do some preventative work in the Spring to hopefully have fewer worms in the Fall)

One afternoon I was finding that a lot of the lawn apples were actually not too bad. And I even spent some time picking some apples from the tree. Then we had the question of what to do with all these apples, since you can only have so many apple pies (and actually once each Fall is about good for me).

So I made a big  batch of applesauce, and left the skins on which made it a beautiful pink color. Without sugar added, the kids don't love it but it's perfect for baking. Or I can always add sugar when we serve it and then it's delicious too.

And I made a few trays of dried apple chips. I realized when they were finished that maybe I'd sliced them too thinly or dried them too crisply, because the edges are actually kind of sharp! But still a fun little snack.

And the best discovery of all (because I still had lots of apples left after those efforts) was frozen apples. We've been having smoothies a lot lately and I recently tried throwing apple slices in which was pretty good. So I tried freezing them for smoothies and they worked perfectly. I just chopped them up (I found the quickest way was to just chop off the sides around the core - it probably wastes more apple, but since these were all apples that would have otherwise been sent to the green bin, I didn't mind). Then I dipped them in some pineapple juice/water, spread them on a cookie sheet to freeze, then packaged them up in ziplocs and we're set. Smoothie-ready apples for the next few months!

Our smoothie recipe lately:

1 handful of frozen apples
1 orange
1 peach
1 banana (frozen or not)
a few handfuls of spinach
1/2 cup or so of yogurt
milk (1/2 - 1 cup?)

I'll sometimes add in or substitute whatever else we have on hand (pineapple, berries, kale, mango, carrots, sometimes maracuja concentrate... )

And I love it!