Apple Mania

So the kids had fun going to the apple orchard with Sony last week.  I wanted apples to make and freeze some applesauce.  We had so much applesauce I turned half of it into apple butter.  Plus we discovered that boiling the apples down for the sauce left us with a nice yummy pink apple juice with lots of pectin.  So I wondered for a while what to do with this juice, the kids of course were all for drinking it, but we had almost a gallon of the stuff after a whole bushel of apples. Since they never drank the 1/2 gallon of cider we had I figured I needed to find another use for it.

I stumbled across a recipe for apple jelly on the internet and guess what it starts out with - boiling the apples down for their juice.  I had enough to make 2 batches so I decided to go for it. Since I have never canned anything outside my mothers house this was a first for me.  So I bought the pectin and the jar grabber and the magnetic lid lifter (its very fun to play with as Pierce discovered).  I mixed it all up and used 1/4 of the sugar called for (man hopmemade jelly is almost all sugar!) and did all the other stuff needed (water bath, boiled lids etc).  The scary part was wondering if it would gel or not, it gelled a little ona  cold spoon but seems pretty runny but I was out of pectin and hoping for the best.  There were 11 jars and one partial jar that I stuck in the fridge and I was never more excited to see it turn to jelly in the fridge.  Woot!  I did it :)  So anyone who wants apple jelly for Christmas let me know - I spiced it up to so it is yummy.

Taking ibuprofen seems to allow me to feel good enough to do a little bit more.  Taking tomorrow off just in case so I do not overdo it but it was great to be able to make 2 loaves of no-knead sourdough and a batch of apple jelly all in the past 2 days.  Of course the bread is REALLY easy and takes about 5 minutes of work, so not sure that counts so much.  Ah I love baking and cooking and doing things myself...