Apple Butter
This blog has been a long time coming...it's been in the pre-planning stages for about a year and a half. Due to an unprecedented amount of laziness, forgetfulness, and Candy Crush, blogging was relegated to the legendary "I'll get it done eventually" section of my memory...and the rest is obvious. Anyway, today is a nice day in the middle of Autumn, and I had a lot of apples that needed to be destroyed in some way, so I decided to make apple butter. I have never made it before, and really, since I had to run to Kroger to get half of the ingredients anyway, I could have just bought a jar of it, and saved myself 7 hours. But, since I'd been doing laundry all morning, I was feeling strangely domestic, and decided to whip out the crockpot and give it a try. Gathering the Ingredients: Crockpot: Already had one because of a similar domestic kick back in college that ended in "The Rosemary Incident." Some kind of Jar: All the pictures on pinterest had pictures of mason jars, so I thought I'd need to get some of those to make it look like I really tried hard on this recipe. LITTLE DID I KNOW THEY DON'T SELL MASON JARS IN AMOUNTS LESS THAN 25. Since this is likely only to be a one time thing, I settled for a plastic storage cup that isn't supposed to hold hot liquids. But it is Freezer safe, so I've got that going for me. Apples: I don't really like apples, or anything that can possibly misconstrued as "healthy" but because apple butter is laden with sugar, vanilla, and has the word "butter" in it, my fear of eating healthy was quickly extinguished.
Anyway,due to the housemate having extra apples, a strange craving for apples to go with my cheese about 3 weeks ago, and a gathering yesterday that ended in me having to take about 6 apples home, I ended up with a lot of apples (I have no idea what kind) that wouldn't have been eaten otherwise. The recipie calls for 6 lbs of apples, and I don't have a scale I just cut up "some" and went for it. Sugar: White sugar I already had, and I ended up buying "organic brown sugar, which is only because it was the only kind with a zip top. I'M NOT ABOUT HAVING ANTS IN MY KITCHEN (again). I cut them up, threw them in the crock pot, and busied myself finishing laundry, talking to my mom and sister, telling them of my plans for domestic domination, where I was rudely ridiculed, and played some candy crush. About 6 hours later, I had apple butter. It actually came out pretty tasty, and without mishap...there was only one surprise during the whole process, which is more than I can say for most of my experiments in the kitchen: The recipe said it would take 10 hours. It only took 6. There are 2 possible explanations to this.
1) "Some apples" was nowhere near 6lbs.
2) My enormous Wal-Mart crockpot can seriously put out. I'm going with the former. Whatever. Now I have apple butter, and life is good. Check plus.