Apples, Apples Everywhere

We have 2 prolific apple trees in our back yard. I believe that this years crop is the biggest yet in our 17 fall seasons in this house.

The Hubby decided while I was still out of town last week, that these apples needed to be picked.  So there were about 2 bushels waiting in the garage when I returned from Utah/Colorado last week.

Monday night we bottled apple sauce. Thursday night we bottled applesauce. Then on Saturday The Hubby picked another couple of bushels and we bottled apple pie filling. We also made 7 apple crisps.

Don't you just love the topping on these things? Lots of brown sugar, butter, oats, a little flour. What's not to love?

We used a handy dandy tool for this task. It's the Apple, peeler, corer, slicer gadget.  It is slick!

In addition to these apple items, we also have a lot of eggplant, and tomatoes right now. So... we made eggplant parmigiana (with romano cheese in place of the parmigian.) And of course ratatouille.
Yum.
The only thing not from our garden in the ratatouille was some dried mushrooms. We ate that with steak yesterday. We'll eat the casserole of eggplant romano today.

Also in our repretua of bottled items was some strawberry/fig jam. My friend Laurie gave me some figs and I picked a few small ones from our new fig tree, and I combined them with frozen strawberry puree in my freezer.

I think my favorite part of the canning was using the grill stove outside.
I was complaining about the heat inside the house that is required to can in the middle of the summer, and lamenting about my old friend Carol and her use of an outside unit so she didn't destroy her stove inside. I showed the Hubby my demented turning key for our back left unit on the stove and pointed out to him that it was because of a past overheating due to the canning pot.

The Hubby said, "Let's try it on the grill. We hardly ever use the stove burners out there anyway."

It worked out perfectly, and when the bottles were finished processing, we just set them under the hood of the grill to cool down, and we went to bed.
Again, PERFECT.