Apples to apple jelly ~ a quick course

Autumn is here isn't it?!  Where has the time gone.  Wasn't it just last week when we were in birthday mode around here?  We have three September birthdays which makes the month of going back to school, that much more fun and hectic.  As I opened our last jar of apple jelly from my pantry recently, made two years ago, I knew what we were going to do with our apples this year.  Make more jelly!



I looked back through my blog and realized I have never explained how I make apple jelly.  There is a quick post about it here, but no mention of how I made it.  So today we are.  I've done it two different ways.  The old way was to peel and cut the apples and boil them, drain the juice (you need 6 cups of juice), then add 1/4 cup of sugar with a pack of Sure-jell pectin, bring to a boil, then add the remainder of the sugar (about 6.75 cups).





This year I came up with a new way.  I first juiced the raw apples with my Breville Juicer (lots of instagram photos floating around of that brilliant machine!).  All the apples in that pic rendered 6 cups of juice.  What I love about juicing the apples, is that it is pure apple juice, not watered down from cooking the applies, and its quick, no peeling involved!  The juice then goes into a pot, brought to a boil, then the same process of 1/4 cup of sugar and box of Sure-Jell pectin is added.  Once that comes to a boil, I added the 6 3/4 cups of sugar (7 in all).  After checking the gel consistency, I ended up adding almost the whole second box of pectin to get it the way I like my jelly, not too firm, and not runny.  Then I scooped it into sterilized jars, and sealed them.  This batch tasted a tad too sweet for me, so I'm making another batch using 5 cups of sugar to see if I like it better.  Either way, they will both be delicious, fresh from the farm to my kitchen to be stored and opened and enjoyed for many seasons to come.



{The two jars with white tops went straight into the fridge to be eaten this week with my family, they are not properly sealed for storage.}

apple picking ::

Last weekend, we ventured to our local apple orchard for our annual Elliott family apple gathering adventure. It was a different year for us. We decided to pick Golden Delicious first, and quickly realized that the only way to take any of these home was to pick very selectively the good ones . . . from the ground! The trees were empty!

We walked to another section of the orchard, there were apples, but way up high. So we were given a nice long branch from another family and knocked down apples from the trees, catching them as they rolled down the hill into a lower row. Then we inherited an apple picker - nice long pole with prongs and a bag at the end. In all the years we've gone apple picking at this orchard, we have never had to use an apple picker. But slowly but surely we filled up our basket a couple of times before we trekked off to buy apple donuts, one of the many highlights of our trip to the orchard that we look forward to each year.

Going apple picking has been our family tradition since Jonmichael was a baby. I still remember taking him to the orchard just weeks old in my sling, as I did Lena too since they were both late September babies. This was Rosemary’s first apple picking trip, so for me it's like looking through a baby book full of memories of trips past and how much the kids have grown since having our first in 2001.

We'll be back next year for sure - looking forward to more surprises and another great year to look back on!

apple picking weekend ~

We had a fabulous time apple picking this weekend ~ lots of jelly and applesauce to be made and canned today.
















The kids ate apple after apple. We picked Braeburns (very sweet), Winesap (not very sweet), Golden Delicious (the best tasting but they were really high up in the trees and hard to reach), Fugi (everyone's favorite). We've never seen the orchard so full of trees.