Strawberry Jam Packed Family
When I was growing up, one of the activities we used to do as a family was pick strawberries. We’d load up in our car or van and drive to a U-Pick strawberry farm. We would each start with a 4-quart basket and go at it. By the time we were done, we would have between 10-12 4 quart baskets billowing with luscious, brilliant red, juicy, sweet strawberries and a belly-full beside. It was awesome despite the red stains on our clothes as we traveled home.
That was just the beginning of the adventure though. My mom would then hull all 40-48 quarts of strawberries! She would do most of the hulling. I helped, but I got a pittance done compared to her. She was amazing and still is. After we hulled the strawberries, we mashed them. Some of them were turned into strawberry shortcake. Most of them were mixed with bucketloads of sugar and pectin and turned into strawberry jam. My mother’s strawberry jam was the best around.
While, like my mom, I usually make strawberry jam – not NEARLY as much as she did. I do some, but the reason I don’t do more is that it is SO labor intensive. Yes, I get both of my girls hulling with me and it does go faster, but I have a jam-like substance which is SO MUCH easier to make and tastes ALMOST as good – sometimes as good or better depending on the fruit that I get that year.
So would you like to know what I make that is so absolutely simple and easy to make but tastes great on peanut butter sandwiches?
I make APPLE BUTTER!
Why is apple butter so much easier? Three reasons.
Reason One for Making Apple Butter:
I have a nifty gizmo called an apple peeler, corer, slicer. As its name suggests, it peels, cores, and slices the apples all in one motion! You pull the arm back, stick the apple on the prongs, and turn the handle. When you’re done, you have a continuous loop of apple. You slice that in half and you have apple slices in no time flat! It’s really simple and amazing.
Reason Two for Making Apple Butter:
Another reason that it takes almost no time at to make apple butter compared to strawberry jam is that I don’t stand over a stove stirring the apples to make sure they don’t burn. I use my crockpots – all three at once. The girls and I will peel, core, and slice three crockpots full of apples. Once they are full, I turn them on low and let them go for 24-36 hours. The apples will turn nice and brown and get mushy.
Reason Three for Making Apple Butter:
To make sure that they are well mashed, I use my immersion blender. These three tools cut down my active cooking time by what seems like a ‘gazillion’ percent.
Now when it comes to apple butter, I prefer to keep it simple. We don’t do any sweetener in our apple butter. I am kinda strange and use cinnamon and nutmeg essential oils in our apple butter, and IMHO it is to die for.
If you follow the steps above, you already have brown, spoonable, deliciousness known as apple butter. If you are only filling half a crockpot with apples, you can put that in a jar (or two) and keep that jar in the refrigerator for up to a month.
But keeping a year’s worth of groceries in my basement, I water bath can apple butter. The problem is that you can’t put it in a canning jar and just set it on the shelf. If you want more than just what you can keep in your refrigerator for 4-6 weeks, you need to water bath can your apple butter. Canning, however, is another complete series of posts, so I won’t be going into it here.
You can find some great information on canning in Ball’s Blue Book. Until then, you can make your own delicious apple butter for your fridge.
