Harvest time - tons of apples

This weekend in early September was warmer than Midsummer! Wonderful time to pick and preserve what mother nature has to offer. I had a couple of extra holidays and enjoyed fully the harvesting time.  From the forest I picked and dried porcini mushrooms. While they were in the Evermat dryer, I focused on fruit.  

There was a big crop of apples and plums in the garden. This is actually the first summer when the plum trees brought from my mother's garden in Turku are bearing fruit.  I dried a small amount of apple rings and plum halves, however, it was only maybe 0.1 percent of the crop. Then I made one lot of plum lemon marmalade. Preserving the small plums is very time-consuming because the stones have to be removed manually… I picked 170 stones from the kettle.


The chilies were also ripe and I tied them in a thread and just hung them out to dry.

As we have a large family and everyone likes juice, I thought we could use the tons of apples lying under the large old apple trees and make apple juice. We invested in a proper juicer and found a robust one, the largest of Kenwood’s models, most suitable for these amounts of apples. You can feed whole apples in the juicer.  

I pressed altogether seven 10-liter buckets of apples in two days and got 12 liters of juice and 20 liters of pulp. That felt like working in a juice factory, the entire kitchen was filled with all kinds of bowls and buckets. But the juice was very good, sweet and tasty and full of vitamins! I froze part of it, gave some bottles to our daughters in Helsinki and we’ll drink a couple of liters next week. And we’ll continue our juice factory next weekend.

 The days were busy, and to make the cooking easy, we made a lamb-cabbage stew in the oven. We had some lamb shanks and local vegetables, so the ingredients were prima. I fried the lamb first in a frying pan and the shredded cabbage with butter and syrup, too. Then we let it stew four hours in the oven until the meat was tender and came loose of the bones. 

The dessert was made of apples, of course, and in the oven, too. I scattered some oatmeal in a lidded pan, added pierced apples, plenty of cinnamon and some syrup, put the pan in the oven covered and after half an hour the dessert was ready. It was served with Valio’s vanilla sauce.