Apple butter and apple sauce with my Squeezo

I've always wanted a Squeezo. They're just so usefully cool. I wasn't enthused about paying a couple hundred dollars though. And I don't know what garage sales everyone else seems to go to, but I have never seen one at a yard sale, let alone one for $5 (the same holds true for American Harvester pressure canners - nope, don't see those cheap either). 

Anyway, Chris was browsing around eBay and found this beauty, made a bid or two, and ended up with it for $70 including shipping. It even came with the original booklet. Pretty neat.

Apple season finally rolled around and I got out my equipment. Handy pictorial in the booklet for assembly instructions meant it went together quickly and easily.

Ready and waiting

I used the Ball Blue book recipe for apple butter. Cooked the quartered apples in apple cider for 25 minutes and then fed them through the food mill - skins, seeds, and all.

No need to peel or anything else

With a bit of pressure and speed on the handle (I was turning too slowly at first) out came sauce on one side, bad bits on the other.

Separating perfectly

Then I started cooking down the apple butter. Um, yeah, I'd never made apple butter before and didn't realize just how long that would take. I actually started it in my regular stock pot then figured out that I needed more surface evaporation and switched to the dutch oven. Next time I'll do it in the crockpot (uncovered) and let it cook down all morning.

Slowly evaporating

The apple butter finally cooked down enough and I waterbath canned it. The bit of extra that wouldn't fit in the jars got used immediately on toasted homemade bread. Oooh, really good.

Next up was canning apple sauce. Again, used the Ball Blue book and was surprised to see that you don't need to use a pressure canner to do apple sauce. Well, that makes things easier, doesn't it?

My biggest stock pot

I steamed a half bushel of apples for 15 minutes and then fed them through the Squeezo.

A lot of apples

One nifty thing about the Squeezo? You feed the trimmings back through the hopper and process them again. You don't get an extreme amount of extra pulp but certainly enough to make it worth doing. The apple sauce came out great and that completed my canning for the season. Next year I'll do tomato sauce too. Yum!

Dying white stuff blue

Chris wanted to try to bleach art on a shirt. Do we did some internet searches, found a recipe for DIY bleach-pens, and made some up. When we used it on some old clothes however it didn't do a darn thing. Not sure if the bleach was old (can bleach get old?) or if the shirts were beautifully colorfast. So we figured, why not dye some shirts and then bleach them, right?

I picked up some RIT dye and we got to work.

Mixing the dye

Interesting tie-dye effects

I had a cute PJ set with embroidery on it that I wanted to do something interesting to. So I tied it up in an unusual pattern and got to dipping.

Come out really cool

All together we dyed 8 t-shirts and 1 PJ set. Lot of dying!

Lots to play with

Then we chose one of the shirts and tried our bleach art again.

Hmmm, I'm concerned...

It didn't work. I guess the bleach was no good anymore. And unfortunately the dying didn't work either. We must not have followed the directions carefully enough (although it sure seemed like we did) because everything ran together and just turned various semi-solid shades of blue. Argh. 

We're not giving up though. I went and got some red dye and we'll see if we can make some interesting and weird purple patterns. (In reading up on dying techniques I think where we went wrong was in not rinsing enough. It seemed like the water was clear but I'm guessing not).

Garden harvests

Remember how I said the garden wasn't very successful this year? Well, here's some evidence.

I planted three potato hills. This was the first harvest:

The great potato harvest

Fortunately the other two hills, which I let go nearly a month longer, yielded a few more potatoes. I got enough to make lunch for us any way. And they were delicious!

The tomato plants finally started really producing as we got some hot weather in September. And I harvested those two wee watermelon.

Beefsteak & cherry tomatoes, cukes, watermelon

Both were roughly this size

Fortunately the watermelon were actually really yummy. Much more like the watermelon I remember from my youth - sweet, juicy, and chock full of seeds.

Yum

We also had some volunteer sunflowers. Love the design of the seed ring.

Miscellaneous Stuff

It's funny how much miscellaneous life goes on while you're doing big stuff. Chris is working on kitchen cabinetry, a pit greenhouse, and general house maintenance; I'm installing hardwood floors and keeping up with the usual housework and cooking. 

We're also managing to enjoy all the other stuff that happens along the way:

Sewing a woobie for my Great-Niece

Very picturesque plum jam

Surgery on the squash plants

Vine borer - the reason for the surgery

Enjoying the eclipse

Washington county fair

We go on old folks day - pulling trials, horses & antique tractors

One of the old tractors

Harvestor, not a horror movie prop

Much like my Dad's 

Freaky rooster

And his freaky hen

A good idea for a stream foot bridge

Kitchen progress - the historical tour

Okay, so it's only 4 years, but it's our history so I'm sticking with the title. Chris has been diligently working on finishing my kitchen cabinetry and I'm going to do some posts on that soon. But I was looking through old pictures and realized that the kitchen has come a long way since we moved in. We've made many plans about layout, lived with improvements and additions, and changed those plans to accommodate how we really live and cook. It's been a true luxury having time and skills to make this kitchen our own.  

Move-in day, February 2013

March 2013 - gained a temporary sink

April 2013 - added chrome racks

August 2013 - added the tool chests (love those things) 

July 2014 - moved the butcher block for the 5th time

August 2015 - added window trim 

Oct 2016 - barrister bookcases for future use 

Back in November of 2016 we officially began building the cabinetry. January 2017 saw the install of the antique kitchen sink. And then the last months have been spent building the rest of the cabinetry, making many, many drawers, trying out various ways of attaching silverware as drawer handles (that'll be a post - most of the methods failed and I've finally found one that truly works), and setting up the kitchen in general. I've now got tons of storage space and a really nifty cleat system that I haven't figured out how to fully utilize yet. As I said - many posts to come. But it's been fun looking back on where we've been.