Washing Wheat

Grandpa & Grandma Stucky came this morning to wash some wheat. Lillie and Titus LOVE helping them with it!
Lillie thought she was big stuff running the water into the barrel.

Fun memories with the great grandparents!

Grapes

My mom has a beautiful flower garden at her house! Dad and Mom added a Concord grape vine a few years ago (I actually have no idea how long ago!) and it has grown so much! This year I got to get the harvest of grapes!
There were so many grapes for just one plant!

They are kind of growing in with an ever green tree. Lillie was going to help pick them but it was too "pokey" for her=)


The picture above is the bowl I filled as I washed them and picked them off the stems. It seemed to take forever! And it is a giant bowl!

And this picture above is the grapes left on the stems that I haven't cleaned up yet.

I looked through several grape jam or grape jelly recipes and it seemed to me that it would be easier to make jam instead of jelly.
So I separated the skins from the grapes (which is actually way easy just time consuming), then pureed the skins with some sugar, added more sugar and a little lemon juice and the grapes (with seeds in them) and cooked them all up for awhile.
Then strained them (by pushing through a sieve with a spatula) to get the seeds out and the bigger skin chunks. Then cooked it some more to thicken it up and bam- homemade grape jam! Of course then I used a hot water bath to seal up the filled jars.

I actually figured out with the second batch that I didn't need to separate the skins and grapes-just puree everything and the seeds were hard enough that they stayed together, so I could proceed just as before. Just much less time involved!

This is what I got from my first day's labor=) That was only two batches. I didn't have a very good stock of jars because I didn't really have any idea how much it would make. I probably still have about 3 or more batches worth of grapes left. And all that from one grape vine! Amazing! And oh so yummy!!

Applesauce

My sister Krista and I made LOTS of applesauce the other day. She was kind of tired of freezing/canning things because she has been doing a lot of that lately. But it was fun for me. I have never made applesauce before!
Here she is stirring the apples up that are cooking.

After they are cooked you put them through this nifty little gadget she has for her kitchen aid. It pushes all the 'good stuff' out through the hole in the cylinder and out the bottom into a bowl. Then it pushes all the 'waste' (and let me tell ya, it really looks like waste, haha, pretty funny) out that hole on the end and into another bowl. Kinda snazzy.

Here's the cooked apples. With her handy gadget we only had to quarter the apples and take the stem off and then put them into a couple inches of water and bowl for awhile. Then we just scooped it all into the applesauce maker attachment. Krista uses it for all sorts of different fruits and vegetables too. She made her own pumpkin and made fresh pumpkin pie and froze a lot of it too. This attachment got all the stringy-ness out of the fresh pumpkin! Awesome!

Here is the counter where she was washing and I was cutting the apples. She also got the idea of using these tubs from her friend Ruth. They were really handy and just the right size. She used them when she picked the apples and then she emptied them into the sink to wash them, then put clean water in them and we put the cut apples into the water until we were ready for them to cook. We only had 2 pots so we couldn't cook all that many at a time. Krista had started washing the apples before I got there but I was there for probably 4 hours or so and we got, I think, 56 pints frozen. I should have taken a picture of all the applesauce on the table when we were done.

It was a lot of fun though! The kids just kind of played while we worked and were perfect little angels, didn't make any messes, no fussing or anything. HA! Just kidding. Actually Krista came back upstairs, after going down to tell them it was time for lunch, and said she was pretty sure the basement had never ever been that messy before. And Titus even pushed his little cousin Caden over onto the floor. And while Zethan was laying on his blanket in the kitchen, Titus decided to pull him around on it... But they keep our lives interesting=) We wouldn't trade them for anything in the world=)

Happy Applesauce eating!