Can-Fest 2007

Here is a picture of the "couple of buckets" of apples and pears that my dad sent me.
Isn't this squirrel cute? He's eating an apple.....wait a second! Those are MY APPLES!! Theiving squirrels...
My super-trooper canning slave...I mean, assistant, Marcus.
Apples and Pears and canning lids...oh my!
Our first batch of pearsauce....it was so fun, we were so naive...Marcus is starting to feel the effects of all canning, no sleeping.
Believe it or not, this is after we had cleaned up a little....this mess, by the way, was courtesy of Brian and his not stirring fast enough.

Part of our spoils....

More of our spoils...

More apples????!!!

Marcus came up to visit us this week and brought up a "couple of buckets" of apples and pears for me to can from my dad. We spent two solid days boiling applesauce and pear sauce, thinking that this was the easiest way to get rid of all of them. Then we spent three hours using the rest of the stock to make sliced canned pears and apple pie filling. Ugh. If we'd known how easy those were....there would have been no applesauce or pearsauce to begin with! Marcus and Brian and I have many burns and wounds to show for our work, but it sure doesn't seem like we got enough canned goods to balance them out. We did, however, make several varieties of apple and pearsauce, all sugar free to be used as baby food for little Benjamin...and some for Garrett and Wyatt and Madison, too. We made pear flavor, apple flavor, apple-pear, pear-raspberry, apple-blueberry, and apple-cinnamon. Mmmm....except I don't think I'll be sampling any of it any time soon!