Saturday Apple Cooking

Saturday cooking is one of the great pleasures of life. I use it to set aside worries and concentrate on preserving and making food for our family with an emphasis on taste and using the garden abundance. Rain was forecast all morning so I spent Saturday in the kitchen. This post is a slice of that life.

The day began with breakfast of cottage cheese and some cherry juice left from the recent visit of our child. Next I did the dishes to make space to get everything clean before making a new mess. Then I went through the refrigerator, which is packed to the doors. I pulled out everything that could go into a new batch of vegetable broth and laid the items on the counter. I also went through the cucumber drawer to make sure decaying vegetables were either used up or composted.

Cucumbers take the most management because there are so many of them when they come in and their shelf life is short. I noted the quart jar of pickles was almost gone, so I reused the brine, fortifying it with some new vinegar and seasonings, and refilled the jar. There are already three or four quarts of refrigerator dill pickles tucked away in the back but we have to make them while cucumbers are in season.

While cleaning the fridge, I made a cut vegetable tray for snacking. Celery, zucchini, cucumber, and bell peppers cut and ready to eat if I need a break from the action. This is for sharing, yet sometimes I am the only one who eats this convenience food. I typically like some kind of salad dressing with them.

Vegetable broth is an easy use of vegetables nearing the end of their life. I make it with standard mirepoix, bay leaves, and the oldest bag or two of leafy green vegetables from the freezer. This day, I used up a couple of bags of last year’s celery leaves to make way for new. One of the last gifts Mother gave me was a large All-Clad multipurpose stainless steel stock pot. If I’m working a full shift in the kitchen, I usually put a pot of broth on and water bath can it. I made six more quarts. At 42 quart jars in the pantry, I am good for most of the rest of this year into spring 2026.

This may seem like a lot yet it was preparatory of making apple sauce.

One of the few surviving photographs of our family in Appalachia is of Granny Reed at Stella’s funeral. Reed’s given name was Josephine, yet I only discovered that from searching the U.S. Census a few years ago. She was always called Granny Reed. She is our child’s great, great, great grandmother.

Granny Reed, along with other female family members worked at a canning plant where they put up apples. When I am picking, sorting, peeling and coring home grown apples for use, I inevitably think about those Virginia women. When in 1983 I visited the home places in Virginia, my Uncle Gene talked about apples.

Next, we went to Norton, another of the places Grandma and Grandpa lived. Uncle Gene talked about apples, how Grandma used to work on peeling and coring apples for one of the big companies. At one time, then, there were large orchards. But now, there is only the coal companies. They used to eat fried apples for breakfast. Later Aunt Carrie told us how to make them. Slice apples into wedges, fry in a little water, sprinkled with sugar. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).

Uncle Gene talked at breakneck speed and I tried to get it all down.

Something that goes through everything is the presence of apples. Grandma worked in an apple cannery, had orchards. There is an apple tree on the old home place, Aunt Carrie served fresh applesauce for us, she said a day hasn’t gone by when she hasn’t had apples. Uncle Gene talked a lot about the apples and how he and the boys helped with them. And everywhere we ate them, the apples were good, the trees bearing fruit. The apple trees bearing lots, even the ones abandoned for years. Eat them green, cooked, fried, in applesauce. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).

As Gene said, “That Granny Reed was always a smart one.”

My entry into Zestar! apples had me eating them fresh and making apple sauce. Before now, I had only every made applesauce from Red Delicious and Earliblaze apples. It turned out on Saturday the flavor profile of Zestar! apple applesauce was delicious (no pun intended). I am so glad that tree is now a part of our home orchard.

I was dog tired at the end of my six-hour kitchen shift. It was an inexpensive escape from the internet and everything on it. A time to live in the past with my forebears, if only for a few hours.