Fall has arrived and so has the harvest to be put up!
I posted in a local FB group that if anyone had fruit trees that needed picking, I was available. I got two offers to get fruit FOR FREE!!!
One lady had apple trees and I came home with 4 boxes! I overestimated my energy level to process all of those apples. (It didn’t help that by the time the weekend was over, I had a pretty nasty cold for a couple of days.) I gave one of the boxes to a family at my church.
With the apples, I have made a double batch of apple butter, 4 quarts of applesauce (so far) and freeze-dried 2 trays (so far) of apple slices.
I have another batch of applesauce started and will finish the box of the red (Liberty) apples making those into sauce. When I cook them down, I run them through an old-fashioned sieve and end up with a lovely pink sauce because of the red skin. My husband has been enjoying eating what’s leftover in the sieve.
My applesauce is literally just cooked down apples. I don’t add anything to it. I prefer unsweetened and these apples are so sweet, I definitely don’t need to add anything to them.
Another lady had an Asian pear tree that was ripe. Unfortunately, that one ended up being too tall to get much, but I did come home with 3/4 of a box of pears.
When I got home that afternoon, I made some ginger pear muffins from the Trim Healthy Mama membership site. They’re delicious!
I plan on making a batch of pear jam and then freeze-drying the rest of them. I like pears as snacks when we’re hiking but then can easily rehydrate them for baking.
We also harvested the quince from the quince tree. My husband planted the tree as a novelty in the backyard last year and there was 1 quince. This year, we picked 13 for just under 9 lbs. of fruit.
I’ve had to look up quite a bit on quince to know what to do with them. These are Portugal Quince, and they look like a large pear. They can be eaten raw but are quite hard and very tart. But when they are cooked, they sweeten up and have an almost tropical scent.
Unfortunately, when I cut the first one open (and each one so far since) they’re brown on the inside. I have a message to the nursery we bought it from to see what they think.
UPDATE: I heard back from the nursery and they confirmed they were overripe. Next year, we’ll pick them as soon as we can smell them while on the tree.
But, we did bake the first one and my husband ate it. I don’t think it had been cooked quite long enough as it was still pretty hard. And today, I’m cooking down 3 of them to try quince jam.
The best way I can describe what quince tastes like is a peach/pineapple cross. It’s good, just unusual. I believe I cooked down enough for 1 jar of jam. We’ll see what happens!
UPDATE: The finished jam has a delightful flavor that I think is a peach/pineapple mix, my future SIL said he thought it tasted like pear. My husband and stepdaughter both said mango. So, pick your fruit flavor, but it’s a really bright flavor for a fall fruit. I like it!
The weekend will tell how much of this processing gets finished. Happy Fall!
