Cheap and Dirty

I drive by a local vet's office on a pretty regular basis and like many offices on that road, it is in what used to be a regular house.   Out front are three apple trees and this year they were just loaded with apples, to the point of the branches breaking. 

So one day, I stopped into the office and asked if I could pick their apples. 
"Go ahead" was their response. 

It took less than a half hour to fill a bushel basket with the two kinds...one very small but sweet and not crabby at all, the other kind larger, with a blush of red on one side.  Since the trees hadn't been sprayed or treated at all, the apples were blotchy and not super appealing to eat as they were, but when chopped simply and stewed, they made wonderful apple sauce.  About ten quarts of applesauce in fact.

With the second kind of apples, I made applesauce initially, but I had an idea stowed in my head from somewhere to make it into apple butter, which my husband is very fond of.  I filled my 5 quart crock pot with the applesauce, added sugar and spices and let it cook down into a beautiful batch of thick, dark apple butter, which we had on crackers on Sunday night and again on english muffins for breakfast today.  It took hours of cooking, but it was totally worth it.

I have very little patience for labor intensive food preservation, but this was just what Charleigh likes to call, "Easy peasy, lemon squeezy."