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Do you know why October is my very favorite Month?

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I’ve always been a fall girl, a northern girl, a Yankee.  My favorite fruit is the apple, my favorite tree the sugar maple, and I live for fall foliage.  I like when the weather turns, the nights turn cool, and you put the extra blankets on your bed.  I love when school starts: new backpacks and notepaper and new pens.

October is when Halloween happens: perhaps the best holiday in the US calendar, where you can anything you want to be and you aren’t teased for it.  I love crunching on roasted pumpkin seeds and eating all the types of gourds that come into season now: spaghetti squash, butternut, pumpkin, yum!

Fall is when I pull out my hand knit or crochet socks, sweaters and blankets, and get to cuddle into them.

I start thinking about October sometime at the end of August, and spend most of September trying to persuade people it’s almost October.

This last weekend we went apple picking – already the second venture out of the season.  The first week we spent most of the time making apple sauce, this week we are making apple butter.

an apple, shiny on the tree
This is the fifth fall that we’ve been processing apples (I’ve been doing it many years before then, with my family), and we’ve got it down to a science.  Apples are merely quartered and put into the pot whole, and boiled.  When we run the soft apples through the food mill, the stems, woody bits, and seeds are worked out.

For the apples we dry in the dehydrator we have this nifty machine, pictured above.  Sometimes I’ll just do an extra few apples because it’s so much fun to crank it. 

When we are really going at the applesauce making, we have all four burners going, and nearly every big stockpot in the house.  Pictured above, we have the three burners boiling the apples and the one burner boiling the already canned applesauce.  It’s a good thing the weather is turning cool, because the kitchen gets quite hot!
For me, the smell of apples cooking, and the smell of allspice, cloves and cinnamon altogether embodies fall.
Do you love Fall? Do you have some favorite fall traditions?  I’d love to hear about it on twitter or facebook.

Apple Butter and Orchards

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It seems that apple picking, apple butter, apple sauce, and canning are in the air.  In my blog reader alone I had sever people telling of their weekend orchard adventures.  But most eerie was Laura Nelkin talking about making apple butter just as I came back from stirring my own in the crockpot.

Our recipes are a little different, but the idea is the same – taking the fruits of the harvest and preserving them for the year to come.

My family lives in the Hudson Valley area of New York, and before that, we came from Massachusetts, where when I went to school, learning about Johnny Appleseed was part of the preschool, 1st and 2nd grade curriculum (it might have also had something to do with the fact that he was born in Leominster, MA, where I lived when I was young).  Apple picking is nearly a cultural thing in both those parts.  On apple picking days the four of us children would eat a light breakfast (As my mother knew we’d be eating apples in the orchard until we were practically sick) and then go picking.  In a good orchard picking wouldn’t take very long, so then we’d go run in the maize maze, eat cider doughnuts and become awful hellions.  The ride home would be sticky-faced children that had subsided into an exhausted post-applepicking haze.

Those types of memories stay with you, and when I found out Michael had never went apple picking it was clear that had to change.  He had to be educated – seeing as he thought apples were “okay” and he’d really only had red delicious and granny smith (both of which are really not representative of the best of apples).

We now go picking each year.

Last year we went picking and accidentally got just over 100 lbs of apples.  We were processing for DAYS.

This year we were much more reasonable – 50 lbs for canning, 10 lbs for eating.  It’s going to be a fun next few days.

Our Apple Butter Recipe:
To make 8 cups of apple butter:

Core and quarter 48 apples, skins on.
Boil until they can be poked with a fork.
Run through food mill, skins on (if using red apples, it gives the sauce a lovely pink color).  We normally run it through the coarse setting, and then again through the finest setting.
Add desired amount of sugar (approx 2 cps) and apple pie spice (well, actually, Michael has his own mix, but seeing as it’s won prizes at the Montgomery County Fair, he’s not sharing, even with me)
Put in crockpot and cook on high, stirring every 1/2 hour to full hour.  Cook all day, until it’s reduced by 1/2.
Can it in mason jars.

Enjoy all year.

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