Thursday, September 13, 2018

Canning Day


A few weeks ago, I posted an invite on Instagram and Facebook for a canning workshop at my house! I have had requests to learn how to can and when I didn't need to do as much for us this year {my kids are getting tired of homemade applesauce, sad! And we still have some from last year} I decided this would be a great time to follow through and host a canning day. Plus this has been like a dream party I wanted to host!

We picked enough apples during our recent trip to the orchard for this canning day and as a group we made applesauce, apple butter and apple pie filling! We tasted everything and ate apple pie too! YUM!


Letter board quote inspiration here. I made French Apple pie using pie filling and wanted to make double so made a rectangular pie instead. Extra pie crust was put to good use as fun letters spelling out some of our favorite ways of eating apples!

I thought about listing out varieties of apples or different characteristics - but this won out in the end and I love how it turned out! Of course, we had vanilla ice cream with ours too!

Canning day started with lunch - meat and potato pie and salad bar. Pie for dessert and then tastings of warm fresh applesauce and hot apple butter on biscuits from the Magnolia Magazine Summer 2017.


Apples made a natural choice for decorating since I had so many on hand! Plus they fit our theme perfectly! Hello Fall printable here.







I moved a second table into our Dining Room so we had extra workspace!



Getting things ready the night before:








Ok, let's talk Apple Butter for a minute - I've always made it on the stove top but knowing my burner space was going to be at a premium with so many things going in one day I knew I needed a different plan. So I tried Crock Pot apple butter and it was a great success! Would totally do this again!

I kind of did a hybrid recipe because I started out by making a batch of applesauce and putting it in my fridge - it's a long story but I was having trouble with my food mill and was extremely tired and sorta grouchy and decided to just set it aside until the morning. But as the evening went on, I knew I needed to do something to get that ready for the next day or it wouldn't be finished in time for canning day.

Next I put this recipe in the Crock Pot and left it on all night. I filled it to the brim with apples and spices and man did my house smell amazing! In the morning I added the applesauce and another recipe of spices and sugars and then used my immersion blender to whiz it all together. At this point, I off set the lid of the Crock Pot so it got quite a bit of air and left it for a few hours while we went to Samuel's Football game.

When we got home, I took the lid off entirely and left it for a few more hours. Wow, it was good. So good. As in I am going to be making a lot of biscuits in the coming days it was so good.





Each guest went home with a set of recipe cards for all the apple foods we made together, printable recipe cards here.




I had envisioned using the tags in the same post and fabric scraps to decorate our jars, but we ran out of time!



It was such a fun day! What is your favorite way to eat apples?!













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3 comments:

Elise Reagan said...

Sounds like an amazing day!!!! I SO wish we lived closer!

Elise

Kimberlee Powell said...

What recipes for applesauce and apple pie filling did you use? What did you do differently for the apple butter recipe? This all looks amazing by the way - I bet your house smelled heavenly!

Monica Wilkinson said...

Hi Kimberlee: oh yes, it did smell amazing!! Thanks friend.

My recipe for applesauce is:
fill a dutch oven with quartered apples {peel and core if you don't have a food mill}
add one cup water and cook until apples are soft
process through a food mill to remove peels and seeds or use food processor or blender until desired consistency

Recipe for apple pie filling is in this post:
http://thehomespunheart.blogspot.com/2007/09/everything-apples.html

As for apple butter, my recipe I've used in the past is in the above post as well. This time I did it in the Crock Pot rather than on the stove top to free up a burner! As far as following the Crock Pot recipe, I put the apples in and let them cook overnight. Used an immersion blender to puree and doubled by adding a batch of applesauce into that and adding more spices. Hope that helps!

Monica