Apple Butter: Don't Try This at Home

The weekend before last we took a trip to Connecticut to go Apple Picking at Silverman's Farm and Orchard. We had a great time picking apples, playing with pumpkins, enjoying a picnic and sliding down bales of hay. Every child in Connecticut under the age of 5 was there, and there were so many pregnant women walking around you'd think the state was in the middle of another baby boom. Thing 1 ate almost an entire feedbag of kettle corn by himself. Everyone had a great time.

Since then we have been enjoying our apples daily, and we have been sharing them with everyone who comes by. But there was one thing that Mommy still wanted to make. Apple Butter.

I was very inspired after I read this post from a Table of Promise reader. Doesn't that look amazing. I admire Katie Jo's tenacity in peeling and chopping, but my thumbs hurt just reading her post! There has to be an easier way.... Most Apple Butter recipes call for, you guessed it, serious amounts of sugar. Also all the recipes I could find called for the apples to be peeled. I know that apples are a fruit that carries most of it's fiber and nutrition in the peel. When the kids eat them I don't peel them, I just wash them liberally. I did find a couple of recipes on the Internet that didn't peel the apples. But you had to go in after all the cooking and fish the skins out. So not fun.

So I decided that I would take my 14 apples, quarter them, core them and run them through the grater attachment of my food processor. At least then the pieces of skin would be small enough that they wouldn't bother you and you could still enjoy all the nutrition, right? I did all of this at 8pm and got the crock pot ready to go by 9pm. I added a cup of water, a couple tablespoons of lemon juice and a cup of sugar. I didn't have anymore sugar (but I was being stubborn and adding only a quarter of the sugar called for in the basic recipe) and I didn't have any apple juice. But I was (over) confident! I knew I could do this.

I popped all my ingredients into the crock pot that night and put it on 10 hours-low cooking. I set my alarm to go off at 2 AM so that I could make sure that there was enough water and no burning. In the middle of the night, everything looked fine.

At 5:30 AM I could tell that the apples needed more cooking. The mix looked like dark brown apple sauce, but still kind of grainy. I set it for another 6 hours of cooking and told the babysitter to unplug the crockpot during lunch, which she did.

When I came home, it was definitely done. But the butter was still kind of watery, and the apple skin pieces were tough, minuscule bits that stood out even more against the soft flesh of the cooked apples. I suppose I could have strained them out, but the pieces were cut so small that that seemed impossible. I froze some, and stored the rest in a quart sized jar. The butter/ sauce tasted okay, but it was NOT terribly sweet. It all tasted like applesauce that I went to ALOT of effort to cook. I have been using it in oatmeal, where the bit of apple skin are not so noticeable. So I have full faith that we will eat it. It will not go to waste. But the whole project was terribly misguided. It is as though I have grown a little too big for my britches.

When will I just learn? I don't have to win a Nobel Prize for Canning and Preserving. I could have made a pie with all the sugar I wanted. I didn't have to go try and save the world with some nutrient dense condiment. Next time, I won't think so much about it, and I will just make some good food and I pledge to get off my high horse and follow someone else's recipe.

Don't try this at home. There is a reason why there are no recipes on the Internet for Apple Butter with the skins left on.

Hot Pepper-Apple Jelly

So I said on Wednesday that I had three weeks worth of peppers, and I really didn't want to throw them away, because that is kind of against the purpose of a CSA, right? Try new things and learn to love vegetables that are in season? But I hate peppers. I always have. I still remember a salad my father made when I was 5 years old with green bell peppers from his garden. YUK! I never ate another pepper.

Today I am an adult and I can tolerate peppers a little better. And I have discovered that I like chiles, just not so much bell peppers. But the summer always produces more than I have the stomach for. I got a thought this week though, Hot Pepper Jelly. This is a very southern thing, because we love to douse everything with sugar and stick it in a jar that can last all winter. Of course as I have mentioned before, I hate all the recipes for canning jams and jellies that I find on the internet because they all have 3-4 times more sugar than they need and they always stupidly include manufactured pectin. Yuk. So, I made up my own recipe. And yes, I brashly contend that it will be safe for consumption after it sits in a properly sealed mason jar for a few months. And if not, I guess I will find out in January!
Hot Pepper-Apple Jelly (Jam really...)
2 Apples with their skins on
Several Chilies or Peppers, Bell, Jalapeno, Cubanelles (thanks TQ), Hungarian Hot, etc
1 Cup of Apple Cider Vinegar
1 Cup of Water
1 Cup of Sugar (I actually used about one and a quarter...but I didn't need that extra bit, I just wanted to empty the bag).

First off I put the cored apples and the seeded and cored peppers through the shredder attachment of my food processor. I was going for a jelly that had a uniform consistency, I wanted the little bits to be small.
Then I dumped all the bits into my three quart saucepan and added the water, cider vinegar and sugar. And I boiled the mixture for about an hour or an hour and a half, until it became very thick and syrupy. Then I filled my glass jars leaving a little head room and processed them in a good old fashion water bath for 15 minutes.

There was enough leftover to store in a tupperware and DH and I had some as a snack before dinner. You know what? I tasted the mix while it was cooking and it was quite spicy. But by the time it got all cooked and done, it wasn't spicy at all. But what an interesting flavor combination, sweet, savory, sour and a tiny bit spicy. Nearly every website I found recipes on recommended cream cheese and crackers. But EVERY cream cheese in the grocery store contained Locust Bean Gum, and the brands named after that city in Pennsylvania had alot more unidentifiable stuff in it than I cared for. So I got a little container of Quark, a light cream cheese meets creme fraiche (it was cheaper too!). And I used our 100% whole wheat crackers and some quark and some pepper jelly. It was really awesome. Tomorrow I am going to put this stuff on a turkey sandwich with munster cheese. Anybody have any other good ideas for it? I have two jars of it put up. That is more than enough for us for now! I might not swap out my CSA peppers any longer. This is a sweet vegetable redemption.