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Snack Girl Meets Little House on the Prairie with an Overabundance of Apples

September 28, 2015   25 Comments

Do you know how your husband convinces you to buy a house and neglects to tell you that there are 14 apple trees in the backyard?

Too Many Apples

I know, right! Happens all the time.

We have been living in this house for five years and every year we get a few apples. This year? Oh dear.

Here is another shot.

First of all, if you live anywhere near me in Amherst, MA please come and pick some apples. They are quite tasty.

I have been trying to deal with the onslaught and it isn’t easy. These trees produced all this FOOD and I feel that I must attempt to store and eat as many as my family can stand. Since these are not Twinkie trees – we can literally stuff ourselves with this healthy fruit.

To make apple pie, apple bread, or apple crisp, you must core and peel the apples. Anyone love to peel?

My friend, Carole, gave me one of these a couple of years ago and it works well.

I started asking around and found that I can freeze apples for later use – and for smoothies (which sounds good to me).

First, you slice them and put them in a bowl with about a gallon of water and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.

Then, you put them on a tray and freeze them. The end of the process is to put them in freezer bags.

You have to freeze them this way or you get a large frozen unusable clump of apples. I was told they will stay good in the freezer for a year.

I am also going to attempt canning slices and my husband is making applesauce. We will be eating applesauce until 2020. ☺

I found this wonderful book on apples (see below) and am ready to try a bunch of different apple recipes – salads, savory, and (of course) desserts.

Have you ever had an overabundance of a fruit or vegetable in your garden? How did you deal with it?

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25 Comments:

Do you have a food dehydrator? Apple chips would be great in yor kids lunch boxes or for a quick healthy snack.

Lisa, You sure have a lot of apples..LOL..Reminds me of my grandmother's house we had had tons of wild bluberry bushes growing up so my cousin and I would just just stuff ourselves with blueberries.

I bought this tray that you can use in the mircowave and dry your own chips and pitas on plus it works for fruit also, I believe I got it at BED BATH n Beyond. It works very well.Just thought I would pass this info along to you.

Lisa, there are now charity organizations that come out to people's houses to pick unneeded fruit and veg to donate it to the hungry. Here is a company in my area. Maybe you can call a local food pantry or google and find something similar in your area? It looks like you have way too many apples to eat yourself! http://www.villageharvest.org/harvestingdirectory

Lisa, you should be able to store the apples whole for use/to eat later in the year. You need a cool dry place to keep them and store only unbruised undamaged fruit. I suspect you can find storage info from a trusty internet source. I think you can use chests of drawers for this lined with paper.

I wish i had that problem lol. The lack of a yard with fruit trees is a downside to living in the city.

Everyone in our area (southern VT)with apple trees is getting a bumper crop this year. Pear trees too.

Apple nachos!

Yum! Apple butter sounds like a good idea, too. Thanks for sharing the tip about freezing them - I wouldn't have thought of that, but it's a great idea.

Aww, brings me back to my Grandma. She would always let me use the peeler. it was so much fun.I don't have a dehydrator, so I just use my oven or my Nuwave Oven.

That apple pealer/corer is a life saver! We are freezing applesauce (sugar free) and making crock pot applebutter with our abundant apples!

Sounds like an apple party is in order for you! BYOB(basket for apples!) :-) Canned applesauce and apple butter...I've had success with this low sugar apple butter recipe: http://its-fitting.com/2013/11/crockpot-apple-butter/#_a5y_… I froze it in smaller containers...I'm not a canner. :-)

do not overlook the power of apples in soup. They can help bitter-tasting greens be yummier in a soup, or help with an overabundance of radishes, also in soup. You wouldn't use very many apples that way, but one apple chopped up in a pot of soup works great as a way of stretching or sweetening other ingredients. They work particularly well with onions, too.

You should totally make friends with your kids' teachers, too, and send in a basket now and then. Other folks who might need apples, well, postal workers, repair folks, delivery drivers, local food banks and homeless shelters..

When faced with an abundance of blackberries and peaches many, many years ago I learned how to can. Such a production. But I found that making and freezing pie filling (using a recipe from the Alice's Restaurant Cookbook!) was the way to go. Could freeze bags flat and stack, or pack bags into square containers, freeze, then remove the bags and stack. I think with apples you could core, slice, and toss in a bag with a bit of lemon juice and call it good - bring them out as needed for whatever you want. Personally, I'd leave the skin on - I never peel any fruit I'm cooking with.

Hi there

Soooo envious of those apple trees!! Id never move from sitting and enjoying them from under one of those trees!!

I know that this is wayYy off topic, but I was wondering if, when you have some time, you could post any advice / recipes for bitter gourd?

Thanks for the great recipes !!

How about an apple stand next to the road.

Offer them cheap and the whole neighborhood will come and buy them.

Did you know you can freeze applesauce as well?

Have you tried making apple butter with some of your apple sauce? Very easy with a slow cooker. Can even be made with artificial sweetener if needed.

Lisa, so funny I just called my son and asked him to order the Victorio ( we have a different one that just peels) because he gets free shipping. We have a lot of apples this year too. Does this book have recipes for canning too? Thanks Pat S

Apple butter is good too.

We had a bumper crop of cucumbers a couple years ago. I made 2 kinds of pickles. We also ate raw cucumbers at least once a day. Eventually, my 4yo started eating cucumbers!

We are almost out of pickles from last year. I hope we can still buy the pickling cucumbers.

To go along with the suggestion of freezing apples for pie: mix up the flour, sugar, and cinnamon with the apples. Then, freeze that in a pie plate! When it's frozen, take it out of the plate and put it in a bag. When you're ready to have pie, you just put the whole block, frozen, into the crust, because it's already the right shape. I add like 30 mins extra to the baking and it comes out great!

I made an apple-onion slaw (2 apples, 1 onion) to go on pork tacos a few weeks ago. It was delicious, sweet, and refreshing; perfect counterbalance to spicy pork. Oh, and I used my food processor too, so minimal chopping.

We have an abundance of zuchinnie this year. I used a mandolin to make zuchinni noodles and freeze them for soups and stir fries. After Taki g from the freezer and squeeze lightly to remove the excess water.

I have an abundance of blueberries,blackberries and cherries that I made into pie filling using splenda and tapioca and canned. We don't make many pies but it's a good desert with cool whip and a crumbled cookie. Also, we slice up the zuchinni very thin and dehydrate for chips with fun flavors. We made wine with concorde grapes and raisins with the table grapes. Wow, wat a year! Oh, we made sweet relish with our cucumbers and canned 60 qts of tomatoes.

Apples everywhere now what? I know in our house the abundance of fall means fresh apples daily but there are always more than we can eat.

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