The Last of This Year's Canning

I am officially done canning! Hooray! Don't get me wrong, I enjoy doing it, but once I'm done, it is wonderful to have nothing to do when I get home but read a book, scrapbook, or do anything besides can.
My last canning venture was applesauce. I deliberated between apple pie filling and applesauce. I decided on applesauce because more often than not, I choose to make grape pie. (By the way, I made a pie out of one of the "burnt" pie fillings, and it tasted great! Woohoo!)
We picked our apples from the same field where we picked pears. The farmer who's allowing us to do it simply waved at us while we were climbing in the tree like little kids...I love country people. The majority of the apple tree was over a particularly mucky part of the pasture, so we chose to pick the apples in the tree rather than shake them down. We got about 2 bushels of apples.
To start, I washed the apples even though they weren't sprayed and we were planning to peel them. Otherwise, the little bits of dirt on the apples get everywhere. Then we used this awesome little machine: the Apple Parer, Peeler, Slicer, and Corer:

I love this machine. My mom used one when I was growing up, and it was such a treat to turn the handle and watch the apple transform into fun, springy circles. It's genius. I should have taken a picture of how the apple is in little circles, literally like a spring. You can kind of see the slices in this picture.

As the bowl filled up, I transferred the apple "springs" to a crock pot, where they would stay for about 2 hours to cook on high. This isn't necessary, but we threw in a little bit of brown sugar and cinnamon. Yum, yum. I love waiting for the apples to cook, because the smell of apple cinnamon pervades the air, and our apartment smelled like a bakery within an hour.
Once the apples bake down, they look something like this:

It doesn't look appetizing, I know, but it is good. You can eat it like this. The apples are in little chunks, although soft, so the texture isn't quite what you'd buy at the store, but the flavor is vastly superior.
I like the smooth texture, so I took it a step further. I put the apple sauce through a food mill. This is a different kind of food mill than the one I used for grapes.
The bottom of this "pot" has little holes in it. A blade goes across the bottom, pushing the apple sauce through. As the apples push through, they are forced into a uniform texture, giving you the applesauce texture you're used to. Here's another view of the food mill that shows a little more of it's mechanics:

Anyway, after this step, it's easy! You simply throw the apple sauce in jars, and can them up (25 minutes to process)! I ended up with about 12 jars of applesauce, and man is it good! I should save it, but I've already started on one of the jars, and it won't last long. Yum yum yum!
Now that I'm done canning for the year, there's nothing to do but sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labors, while picking up a few projects I haven't touched in some time. I've got some serious scrap booking to do (I'm about a year behind), and I want to pick up the guitar again. I also need to do some sewing, and as promised, I'm dying to start that rag rug I mentioned in an earlier post. We'll see what comes next! At any rate, I am excited to do something new for a change.