A tisket, a tasket

We were blessed by a beautiful basket full of apples!
Nothing smells quite as yummy as a basket full of apples!
Our friend has a few apple trees so we were blessed with a mixture of crab apples, granny smith and gala apples.
It was really important to me that all of the apples were all used but I also wanted to make sure that we used ingredients that I already had on hand so, after spending a night trying to figure what I was going to do with them all I decided to get cracking.


Apples don't last long (especially around my kids!) and I wanted to make sure that we didn't waste any of them.
Applesauce makes such a wonderful substitute for oil in many baking recipes so that was the first thing I made.
Then I ran out of jars and only used 80 crab apples to make the applesauce...there were 5 jars in total.
I still had a ton of apples left so I used the remaining 8 cups of sliced apples to make the pies.
The smell was heavenly but for next year I need to invest in a good apple corer.
I am sure I would have been done hours earlier than I was if I didn't have to wash/peel/core/slice all the apples.
We have only had the pies out of the oven for a few hours now and so far we have already devoured 1/2 of one!
Next time I think I will try my hand at apple cider.
That reminds me of warm fall nights....
Which is right around the corner...the leaves are already changing and it gets dark around 9 now.
Time sure flies when you are having fun!