I love this recipe. It’s easy and makes a deep, dark and rich apple butter. I was wondering what to do with the many, many, many CSA apples in the fridge when I stumbled across Lolly’s Food for Fall post – apple butter it would be!

I chopped up a whole lotta apples…

Put them in a pot with some CSA cider…

…And cooked them ’til they were soft.

I puréed the apples in my food processor and added some maple syrup and spices.

The mixture went into the crock pot…

…Until it was dark, rich and delicious!

Apple Butter
Recipe courtesy of The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest

• 10 large tart apples (about 5 lbs) – some of my apples were sweet
• 2 cups apple cider
• 3-5 cups sugar I used 1/4 cup of maple syrup and it was plenty sweet
• 3 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 3/4 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp ground all-spice
• 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg

Wash, core & quarter apples. Cook slowly in cider until tender.

Blend mixture in a food processor. You should have about 12 – 14 cups of pulp.

Add sweetener and spices to taste.

Cook 350°F oven or slow cooker for 6-8 hours, stirring often – I let mine go for almost 13 hours in the slow cooker. Test for desired thickness by spooning mixture onto a cold plate. If no liquid oozes around edges, it is thick enough. Ladle into jars.

Apple Butter recipe to follow as promised…

Recipe to follow tomorrow. Happy Thursday everyone!

As I am sure you have gathered, this is most decidedly not a political blog.  I love politics (PoliSci was one of my majors), reading about politics, thinking about politics, and discussing politics.  That being said, this little corner of the internet is (for the most part) dedicated to food and knitting; the parts that aren’t dedicated to food and knitting are dedicated to random stuff that flits through my head at any given point in time – under that umbrella I am going to say a few words about yesterday’s elections (feel free to stop reading now if you wish and focus instead on the pretty leaf picture…)

Maine is a disappointment.  Scott over at Mr. Mill City said it better that I ever could: “Maine, once known as the state of tolerance, lobster and funny accents, is now just known as the state of lobster and funny accents.“  (Maybe Mainers felt that it would be too much to compete with the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the areas of tolerance, lobster and funny accents.  We’ve definitely got them beat on the tolerance count.)

All joking aside, I know this will change in my lifetime.  We stand on the side of tolerance, love and progress – it may take some nudging but we’ll get there.  It’s a change and change is scary and people will worry that marriage equality will hurt their businesses, relationships with family and friends, whatever…  The world will spin forward without them.

The other races I was watching closely were those in the great city of Lowell, MA.  Lowell is not my hometown but it is the place I call home (that would make me a Blowellian).  Here in Lowell, the City Council had its biggest turnover since 1993.  That’s a long time but I think it illustrates the nature of change – it starts slowly and then builds to the point where you wake up on a Tuesday morning in November and say “Look at that!”

“This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.” Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika  An aside: I love this play, I love these lines.  Look how far forward the world has spun since the 1980s.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the posting has been pretty heavy around here the past few days. There’s a reason for that – I have sort of, in my own half-a$$ed, non-committal way decided to participate in NaBloPoMo.  I am not holding myself to particularly high standards (posts that are pictures count) and I reserve the right to quit at any time (because honestly 30 days of me may be a bit too much for me to handle, and while I think I am the most fascinating person in the world, you probably don’t! )

Happy Election Day everyone! If you haven’t yet, get out and vote!

It’s always the high point of my day!