Applesauce!

Last fall, we just moved into our new house. I was in my third trimester of our last pregnancy. We still had unpacked boxes everywhere. Our oldest had just started kindergarten. But, most importantly, it was apple season. And because we finally had the kitchen space, Matt was anxious to make his famous applesauce. So, off we went for our annual trip to an orchard a couple of hours away to get the perfect apple type to make sauce. We then bought 14 bushels!! Let me just tell you--that’s a lot of apples.


So for the next couple of days we cleaned, cut, cranked and cooked apples. It took forever. My bulging belly kept me from being able to lean over the sink for too long. My swelling feet kept me from being able to stand and cut for too long. My aching back and general tiredness kept me from being any kind of help for too long. Never the less, Matt got all the applesauce made. I am really not sure how much he made but we had one entire chest freezer devoted solely to applesauce.

Yeah, that’s right--had. We had one chest freezer full. No, we didn’t sell it all. Nor did we get to eat it all. We didn’t give it all away or make Christmas presents out of it. As luck would have it we had a power outage. When the power came back on the freezer didn’t. Based on the lumps of hairy mold in the containers we guess that the surge was about 2-3 weeks before we found the horrible mess.

It broke my heart to see all that food being thrown in the garbage. Not only are we out the money we spent at the orchard. We are out those precious hours spent on making the sauce. Hours I could have been resting and not on my feet. Hours that we could have spent unpacking. Hours we could have spent with Caleb better preparing him for school.  Hours we could have spent doing several other activities. But we are also out of all of those plastic containers to put more applesauce in this year.

So if you have any empty cottage cheese, sour cream, yogurt or similar plastic containers we need them. Lots of them. We are planning on making even more sauce this year. You know we will. We always do. No matter if we just moved or started school or are about ready to have a baby.