Crab apple sauce with Max

The University of Waterloo has a few stellar crab apple trees on its property.  Today we augmented our routine dog walk with a bike trailer full of empty baskets.  We stopped at one of the bountiful trees and picked to our heart's content.  It took us 15 minutes to pick enough apples to fill an entire cooking cauldron.  Max helped us rinse the apples.

"It's Shake 'n Bake, and I helped!"

A rare shot of Max doing something productive.  He spent most of the time throwing the apples onto the ground.

This is our entire haul.  Not too terribly much.  But not bad for a few minutes of leisurely picking.

You rinse the apples, dad.  I'll pull the rain hose out of its socket.

The hard work was processing the apples.  Last year we painstakingly peeled and cored hundreds (maybe thousands) of tiny crab apples.  We also burnt the sauce last year.  Imagine our dismay at having burned days worth of work.

This year we tried a lazier approach suggested to us by both Mike and Heidi.  We simply dumped the untreated apples into a cauldron with a bit of water, boiled it until it was mush, and then forced it through a sieve with a stirring spoon.  It was a lot less work than peeling, though Mike seems to think we could cut out even more of the work if we bought ourselves a food mill -- perhaps in the future.  We ended up with four-and-a-half containers.  The containers are old feta cheese containers from the grocery store.  They hold a kilo of feta each.  That's no small amount of crab apple sauce!

The sauce was initially runny.  Rather than try to boil off the excess water, thereby wasting energy (not to mention possibly burning our sauce again!), Greta had the brilliant idea of re-straining out the water, which was then canned as crab apple "syrup" -- a tasty sauce for ice cream, drinks, pancakes, etc.  It worked beautifully.