Apple Picking and the yummy consequences!

After an amazing Summer together we fell into a very VERY busy September back at work and school and it took until October 13th for us to spend an afternoon together.  It was (almost) a beautiful Autumn day so we headed up to a local apple orchard for some apple picking!

A really great day out but then of course we had to get to work making use of all those apples!

Ideas we wanted to make were apple sauce, some kind of apple and cranberry chutney (we still had lots of cranberries left over from a trip to Bala, Muskoka earlier in the year) and of course an apple crisp!

Another new project for us was canning - so thank you Canadian Tire for our supplies.  Armed with lots of empty jars we were ready to go!

We were very surprised with the pink colour of the apple sauce!  Taste was great so no complaints!

Next was apple and cranberry chutney.  We had a little trouble finding a recipe that we liked all parts of.  We didn't only want a cranberry sauce to spoon over turkey, we definitely wanted to seal them in the jars as we wanted to give some as Christmas presents!  Also a lot of recipes were a bit 'spicy' for us.  I don't like cinnamon or a heavy clove or nutmeg flavour so we tried to avoid that.  In the end we found this recipe here from BBC's Good Food website.  We loved it all so off to work we got!

The hardest part was keeping these secret until Christmas!!

All of our canning complete there was the mandatory apple crumble to make (maybe definitely doubled the crumble part of the recipe - thanks Mum for that recipe!) but boo we forgot to take photos of that, sorry!

And then with a few of the leftover apples I tried out a recipe I found on Pinterest but originally came from this blog here.  Armed with our mandolin (again, thank you generous wedding gifts for supplying us with endless kitchen utensils!) I got slicing.  A little sprinkling of sugar (no cinnamon please) and baked them all afternoon.  They were ADDICTIVE!  Like seriously addictive.  Just a shame they take so long to cook meant you couldn't just cook them when you got the craving - but perhaps my teeth thank me for that.  

We'll definitely make these again!

So a rather long post but after such a great day out and lots of projects following it I just had to!  Enjoy Autumn!