Apple Butter

6:00 AM

We put apple butter on just about every bread product we can. I use it in place of syrup on pancakes and french toast. We put it on PB&J's, biscuits and toast.

The apple tree in our back yard is a Gala apple. We got so many apples this year. I find Corrine under the tree happily munching away. (And of course if Corrine is eating so must Henley so he follows her until he can take the apple away from her).

Last week I picked a basket of apples and dehydrated them.

This week Bryan picked two brown paper bags full of apples. In one bag, the apples were not perfect. Those were the ones I used for applesauce. Bryan was going to dehydrate the other bag of non blemished apples, but ran out of time. So I cooked those down for applesauce as well. I canned six jars of applesauce.

Today I made apple butter from the second batch of applesauce. I usually follow this recipe from Pick Your Own. OK, I don't actually follow it, I use it as a guideline. The apple butter I made today has cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves in it. I also used about a quarter cup sugar. No measurements, really, spice it up to your own taste. Mix the whole mess and bake. It doesn't need a lid, the juice from the apple sauce needs to cook off and the sauce needs to thicken up. I do like the crock pot version from PYO, but I didn't have time, so I baked it. Bake at 350. I set the timer and stirred it every 30 minutes. It ended up baking for 3 hours. I jarred it and put in the water bath for 10 minutes.

This is what I started with...