Crab Apple Jelly

There are several crab apple trees around our apartment. A few months ago, we asked the manager if we could harvest some of the crab apples once they matured. He gave his okay, so we've been waiting patiently for the fruits to mature. Now that it's the fall, they have finally reached their maturity, and on Wednesday Jeff and I picked about 400 crab apples. Hooray!

Now, crab apples by themselves taste pretty awful. They're very small, and quite sour and bitter. But when you juice them, you can turn them into really wonderful jelly. So that's what I did yesterday. We borrowed Grandma Danes' juicer, and I cleaned, sorted (throwing out the wormy ones), chopped, cooked, and juiced all the crab apples; once they were juiced I was able to cook in all the sugar and pectin, and make just over 4 pints of jelly. Sort of meager after all those peaches we did (over 100 quarts!), but this time I did it almost all by myself! Mom helped with processing them, but I pretty much did all the rest of the work on my own. So I was quite proud of myself.

Here's some pictures of the process:

The crab apples cooking before being juiced - I didn't quite have the 4 pounds called for, so I cut up a couple regular apples as well. You can see some of them in here. I liked not having to peel and core the apples - that's a lot of work saved!


Stirring the juice and sugar.


My four pints, ready to be processed!


The finished product - four delicious little pints of crab apple jelly. Sorry for the weird lighting on this one, I took this picture out in the garage.


We also got almost a whole other jar that didn't get processed - I put it in the fridge, and once it's set up, we can start eating it!

I'm really excited about these - doing it all on my own made me feel so homey and self-sufficient. It was nice!

I also feel homey because I finally did some good cleaning last night and today. I swept and mopped last night after the kids went to bed, so the floor stayed clean all night! I've also kept the dishes done all day, and I cleared the living room and vacuumed the carpets in the living room, hall, and kids' room.