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I am back with a new recipe, and I hope that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Are you gearing up for all the holiday festivities of Christmas? I really wanted to get the house decorated the day after Thanksgiving. It took a little longer that planned, and to be honest, our tree is still not completely decorated. I am so pregnant. Plus it was 90 degrees here the day after Thanksgiving. Actually, that whole weekend was hot. Who wants hot weather at Thanksgiving? NOBODY!

That is actually one reason why I love this recipe this week because making it made our house smell like fall!!!
Remember this post where my mom canned some of the apples that she and I bought? Well I decided with the leftover ones I was going to make apple butter and can it.

I have really enjoyed getting into canning this year. I hope to bring you more canning recipes. Canning is a great way to build your food storage! It is actually a lot of fun! This recipe is so simple. Once you peel and core the apples you leave them in the crock pot for a solid 8-10 hours. I did mine overnight and then I canned when I woke up in the morning. Your whole house will smell like apple pie. You're welcome. Here are a few tips:
1. I did not chop up the apples after I peeled and cored them. Also, I didn't worry about any little bits of skin left on the apples.
2. Speaking of peeling and coring, make sure you have a good apple peeler, it makes all the difference.
3. Really pack your apples in. I just peeled and sliced until my 6 quart crock pot was full, but after ten hours it cooks down. I ended up doing two batches and got three cans out of each. I think if I had done them all together I could have gotten seven jars of apple butter. So pack those apples in there because they'll reduce down while cooking.
4. I did a water bath for the canning. Now, here are some rules about canning that I didn't follow: you are not supposed to let your jars touch the bottom of your pot. You should use a canner to keep them in place and separate. I just stuck them in the pot. Luckily, they did not break. However, be wise, and use a canner so you can be assured that all of your cans will come out of the pot and you won't have any apple butter casualties (trust me, nobody wants that.)
5. Have plenty of snacks on hand to spread on your apple butter. It's really delicious. 
6. Enjoy it! Share it with your adorable 18 month old nephew who will inhale it like apple sauce. Be in love with his cute little apple butter covered face. That's what I did and I highly recommend it.

Crockpot Apple Butter

DON'T FORGET! If you're in the Phoenix area this Saturday come see us at the Ugly Sweater Express! We'll be selling our famous Hot Cocoa Bombs! You can try them out, sign up for our email, and much much more!!

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     With Thanksgiving on the way, it is definitely time to be ready for pie season.  By now, you know my love for pies and the love that goes into making them. We have posted a lot of pie recipes here. I gave you my Apple Pie Filling recipe on this post.  I often make enough pie filling for just the number of pies that I am going to make.  But, it is great to be able to can filling in advance and save myself some time when Thanksgiving actually arrives! 
     Lindsey was able to get a big box, or bushel of apples for a really good price.  I split the cost with her and decided to make pie filling and also another easy beautiful way of canning apples with my half.  Cinnamon Apple Rings! So, today, I am going to share both recipes with you.

     When processing a large amount of apples, one of the greatest tools ever is the spiral cutting peeler/corer.  Obviously, mine is old, as you can see.  But, here are a couple of options.

     This gadget makes it so much faster to peel and slice your apples.  The slices come out in round rings, so for the pie filling application, I just slice the entire stack in half after it is spiralized, and throw the slices into the pot.  

     I like to make nice deep dish 9" pies, so I usually use 1 and 1/2 jars to fill a pie. So, 3 jars will make 2 pies.  For an 8" pie, 1 jar is enough.

Canned Apple Pie Filling

     The 2nd thing I did with the apples is both beautiful and delicious.  You use cinnamon red hot candies in the syrup to make cinnamon apple slices.  When they are all finished, they look so beautiful in the jar! 

I still use the apple spiralizer, but this time I only cut through one side of the stack of rings in order to have pretty rings in the jars. Here is how you make them! 

Cinnamon Apple Rings

     Have I mentioned what a great feeling it is to can?  Now I feel a little bit closer to being prepared for the holidays and it is such a great feeling to have this food in my pantry.  

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The other day when I went to the grocery store I saw that strawberries were on sale, 88 cents a pound! I bought a LOT of strawberries. I love a good strawberry, and it was perfect for the strawberry spinach salad I was going to make for dinner that weekend.
However, I had several pounds of strawberries, and PH and I are only two people. I didn't want them to go bad, and so I was planning on building our food storage with them. I have a lot of fruit and veggies that I've frozen to have on hand when necessary, but this time around, I decided I wanted to try my hand at canning.

My mom has talked to you about canning a few times on this blog. I remember growing up all the canning she would do. She'd make different types of jams, and she'd can various fruits and veggies, and even meat!
You may remember this post where she told you how to can peaches using a water bath. She also gave you some jam canning tips (including strawberry jam!) here and here.
My mom is kind of a canning pro, and since I have never canned anything before in my life, I asked her if she'd come help me make some strawberry jam!

She came over, and we decided to do something a little different this time and film the process for you to watch and enjoy! Check out our videos below.

Now I have to step in here and let you know that this is where we had some technical difficulties with our camera and had to switch to a different one. Unfortunately, by the time we realized our camera wasn't filming we had missed a few crucial steps. The main one being that once the jam was boiling after the pectin and butter were added we added the sugar. A few tips from my mom. The recipe calls for A LOT of sugar (seven cups!) You can make a low sugar variety of jam, but you have to use a special pectin or it won't work. Since we had regular pectin, we had to use all the sugar. The second thing about the sugar is, you have to add it all at once. I measured all seven cups into a large bowl and when my mom told me it was time to pour in the sugar then I poured it all in at once. 

We kept stirring continuously until the jam came back up to a rolling boil. Then we turned the head off. All while cooking our strawberry jam our jars were sterilizing. We filled the jars up with boiling water, and we put the lids in a bowl and covered them with boiling water as well. That water also helps the lids to soften so they'll be ready to seal once your jars are filled.

Once you turn the heat off you'll see some foam in your pot. Mom took a regular spoon to skim that foam off the top. She put it in a separate bowl. There is nothing wrong with the foam, but when it cools it kind of looks like a hardened skin and isn't very pretty inside the jars. So just use a spoon to skim around the top and get all the white foam out. She also saves the bowl because at the end there is always a little extra jam that you can pour into the bowl and you can use it right away. It gets you started on enjoying your jam!

Okay, continue onward now that you know the rules about the sugar and the foam!

Making my own jam and canning it was a lot of fun, and actually much easier than I thought! This recipe we used used up three pounds of strawberries. So I actually have three more pounds that I intend to use to make even more jam this weekend! It's exciting to be able to do something that helps build our food storage, and it was a fun little project to do with my mom! So get together and make some strawberry jam!