Well apples and pears usually are the bulk of my canning, especially
with cinnamon applesauce. But this year the pears are few, for them
seem to be biennal in production capacity. One year huge, next year
sparse.

The apples are large production this year however, due to hores, llama
and alpaca, I am having to compete for apples. I normally just pick up
fallen apples on the ground, but these animals are cleaning me out
before I get there. And the horse especially. The horse seems to know
what trees are apple trees and makes them the priority rounds of the day.

But there is good news about apple canning. I will have more than enough
apples to can. The bad news is that 75 percent is going to have to be
crabapples. Not much fun in prepping crab apples. But one thing good
about crabapples is that the color of their skin can tell you if ripe
enough.

As for the regular apples, I pick the fallen to the ground ones and
depending on their color I either wait till ripened or cann immediately.
I am adding currants and chokecherry juice to the apples so it is quite
a delicious mix.

All organic.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

One night of canning I had extra apples and was about to do some
tomatoes with onions for spaghetti sauce
I add a pinch of chili peppers also, but was always frustrated by the
yellow color of the spaghetti sauce and
could not figure out how tomato paste is so red. Do they actually
process tomatoes fully ripe or overripe to
get that red color? Or maybe I just use most of the tomato whereas the
processors use only the red parts?

Anyway, I thought of a way to overcome my lack of red color. I simply
add chokecherry juice. Did this
tonight and the color is a nice red although still not matching tomato
paste.

Also another problem with my spaghetti sauce is that it is too
liquidy. I like to see more pulp. So I
added some apples and crushed them in the heat so that the constitency
is more of a sauce than
a liquid.

Overall I am happy with my end result although it is nothing compared
to the spaghetti sauce in
my youth made by a woman who was expert in spaghetti sauce.

I keep experimenting until I find something that may be a winner. But
until then I have to add a
small can of V-8 juice to make my spaghetti sauce good enough.

Also, maybe there should be a sci.cooking, or perhaps
sci.chem.cooking.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies