Pictures of Applesauce being made

All weekend I have been making ketchup, applesauce, and pizza sauce. I thought I would show in pics how applesauce is made from beginning to end. This was how the kids and I spent our Saturday. Dad had to work so I was able to enlist Peter's help too. If Dad would have been home Peter would have had to help him with the winters wood. But as it was both kids and I worked 7 hours to make 45 quarts of applesauce and two batches of ketchup. After spending 2 hours with Tink picking the apples on Thursday and canning on Friday here I am on Saturday back at the sink cutting apples. I cut 167 pounds of apples. My tennis elbow screamed in rebellion but the work went on.

The apples are cut and put in stock pots to boil into sauce.

The peelings and trimmings pile up! Poor Peter took load after load of tomato peels, onion peels, and apple peels out to the walnut tree to be composted. He ran his little legs off doing errands for me all day.

The kids ran all the sauce and the tomatoes through the Squeezo strainer for me. I didn't have to run one single batch through myself. Here you can see the motor and pulley my husband hooked to the Squeezo so I wouldn't have to stand there all day and turn the handle. The kids had to really work together on this project and they actually managed with very little fighting. Any real arguments happened when one or the other got splashed with hot sauce and of course, it was always the other ones fault! But for the most part they worked together very well the entire day. I was quite pleased with their help! (Yes, Tink is canning in her pajamas. Sensory kids hate clothes!)

Peter brought all the jars in from the shed and rinsed them....

....while Tink filled them with the sauce. I peeled the apples and cooked them and carried the hot and heavy pots to the table for the kids to run through the strainer. I didn't have to deal with the sauce again until it was time to put the lids on! Tink and Peter made the sauce, measured the sugar and cinnamon and did it all. I put the lids on because I didn't want to risk them not sealing from Tink leaving applesauce on the rims.

After I screwed the lids on Tink put them into the canner. Peter watched this process. I wouldn't let him do it because of the hot water. When it came time to take the jars out I did that so no one would get burned!

After a long hard day of working together we finally have the finished product!

Today I made pizza sauce and I still have tomatoes ripening on the table and in the garden. I actually need more salsa too but I'm going to wait to see how many tomatoes I get.

Canning is incredibly hard work but fewer things are more rewarding in the end! I'm done now with the applesauce but I still have to cut apples for apple pie filling. Then it's finishing the tomato products and I'm done. I hope to be totally finished by the end of this week so I can concentrate on getting ready to go to Eastern Oregon for a family reunion. I don't want to mess with canning at all after I get home. It's time to concentrate on the holidays then!

So here I am facing a new week, a week that puts me on the final leg of this years canning season. I'm ready to move on but grateful for the harvest and for the shelves and freezers groaning with the summers bounty.