SHHHHH!!!! It's sleeping!!!!

No, I'm not talking about the baby...I'm talking about the canning stove!

See how peaceful it looks just resting so comfortably! Now, please, please, read this post very, very quietly and DO NOT wake it up! It took me so long to get it to finally go to sleep!

I bought two bushels of apples last week that my good friend Jennifer so generously delivered to our door. Since then I have been peeling, coreing, slicing, drying and canning apples. And eating. The kids are getting tired of the same old answer to their pleas of "Can I have a snack?" "The apples are in the garage...help yourself!"

Here's the process, so wonderfully documented in pictures by my eldest boy:

First, put the apple on the wonderful peeler, corer, slicer thingy.

Then, spin it a few times.
And finally, put them on the trays for drying.
A few hours later we have wonderful, delicious dried apples! (I don't have a picture because we ate them too fast...17 apples consumed by 4 people in one weekend). After two or three dryers-full that got eaten as fast as they were made, I got smart and started putting them directly into bags into the freezer to save for the winter. Or at least until next week.

I used the same process (minus the drying) to cut up the apples and then canned them with some sugary, cinamonny yummy sauce to use later in pies, crisps, on top of ice cream, whatever.

I ended up with 14 quarts of apple pie filling and now I am officially DONE canning until next year! Whew!

Here is some of the summer's bounty saved up for the winter days.

And here is the freezer:Some of what we have stored are:

• Apples (sauce, pie filling, dried)
• Blueberries (frozen, dried)
• Strawberries (frozen)
• Mulberries (frozen)
• Rhubarb (frozen)
• Pesto
• Corn
• Tomatoes (dried, sauce, whole, diced, mild salsa, cilantro salsa, and Shannon's Smokin' Salsa, bruchetta)
• Pickles (dill, quick sweet, 14 day sweet, bread and butter)
• Beets (pickled)
• Green beans (an entire story in itself)
• Peaches (jam, sliced)
• Apricots (jam, sliced)
• Peppers (frozen)
• Red beans (still dry)

OK, so I just exhausted myself thinking about all that work. I'm just hoping that canning stove takes a really, really long nap! I'm sure I'll be looking forward to seeing it again next summer!