Last weekend, my husband and I had the opportunity to visit one of the local orchards and get, you guessed it, apples! I had originally planned to get about 25 pounds or 2.5 pecks but after some careful consideration I decided it would be best to rein my aspirations in a bit. 25 pounds is a lot of apples. We did end up getting about 15 pounds though; 5 lbs. of Honeycrisp, 5 lbs of Melrose, and 5 lbs of Jonnalicious.
So what, you might ask, would one do with 15 pounds of apples. And my answer is making two of my favorite apples treats: Apple Butter and Apple Chips! The husband and I have been munching on the apples throughout the week but there are still plenty to go around.
I got some handy-dandy new tools to help me out with these two recipes as well. First, I got a mandolin for the apple chips. I want the slices to be paper thin so that the chips will be super crunchy. Yesterday, I got the mandolin out of the box to test it out and it works wonderfully! I was a bit cautious at first because you can really hurt yourself if you don’t use it properly. Let me just say, I saw what happened on Masterchef a few years ago.
Involuntarily shivers…
Anyways, I am glad I invested in this tool because it is going to be so useful down the road. There are so many food items to use it on. Potatoes, turnips, squash, zucchini, tomatoes, and the list goes on! You can even turn the blade over and julienne veggies. Yum!
Next up is the immersion blinder. No more transferring soups to the blinder for me! That is such a hassle and it just creates more mess. I am going to be cooking my apple butter over night in my Crockpot. Tomorrow morning (or probably afternoon) I’ll blend the butter in the Crockpot and then finish cooking it for another hour or hour and a half.
I have a 6 quart Crockpot that I am going to try and cram as many apples into as possible. Because who knows, maybe in the morning I’ll want to spoon some apples onto my oatmeal. 🙂
That’s all for now…gotta peel a few apples.
Thanks for reading! Be on the lookout next week for recipes for apple chips and apple butter!
The Sharp House 