August 21, 2008

crab apples

it was such a wonderful day yesterday and our neighbor invited us to pick crab apples! there was no time left to write.....
but today is an other day and here are the photos. we had fun as well as fighting over who get's to pick where in the tree etc!
i ended up preparing those little apples for about 1hour, a lot of work for 10 glasses of jam but it was delightful. i gladly did it and had good company in my kids and neighbors.

walking up the street each with some kind of wicker basket on their head...

the picking itself was more of a fight who get's to pick where in the tree and as we were in lack of a ladder, we used step stools and empty up side down trash barrels...

loaded with apples, those sour little fruits! the kids loved to eat them. for myself, i was not tempted at all to wait until a bit later, when they were becoming jam...

the "jaming" was fun, 10 cups of paired and cut apples in a big pot, i added 5 cups of sugar, as i somehow did not realize that usually it's as much sugar as fruit, but ran out of sugar in the house... so i added an other cup of raw agave nectar, two cups of water and about 3/4 of a cup lemon juice. it started to smell so wonderful and looked gorgeous! the apples were not really falling apart as i expected, so i used the blender, but just for a little bit. i like when there is still real fruit visible in jam.
after about 30 minutes of rolling boil i filled the wonderful jam into jars, and we already started the first jar for breakfast. yummmmm!

1 comment:

Laura said...

Wow.. crab apples.. now there are some old school memories. When I was little we had a crab apple tree in our front yard. So when they would all fall and be all over the lawn my dad would pay my brother and I a penny a crab apple to pick them up and get rid of them.
I think that when he started he had no idea just how many there were. He shelled out a little more cash than he was expecting to that day.