Last fall seems to be a huge blur to me…between having all-day sickness and trying to keep up with school work, it’s all a big blur. However on days like today…

It's rainy and wet out, no sun...yuck, mud soup!
It seems to bring a little sunshine to our day when we can enjoy goodies like these…

The fruits of fall...
From these fruits…

Apples and Pumpkins...
We were blessed to be able to work out a trade with Kathy over at Two Frog Home. In August we processed chickens and gave Kathy the chicken feet so she could make and can some incredible looking chicken broth and this fall she had an abundance of wonderful apples. So early October, my mom and I spent 2 days prepping, cooking, pureeing, cooking some more and finally canning some apple butter, applesauce and pumpkin butter. In the middle of early pregnancy they felt like l-o-n-g days, but they were oh-so fun!
Mom and I ended up cutting and coring the apples (leaving the skins on) and cooking the apples down to mush in my electric roaster. Then put Sawyer up to the task of running the manual food mill (good work for a 16-year-old!) which produced beautiful looking sauce. We ended up cooking some of it down into a thick caramel goo for apple butter and made the rest into applesauce.

- Pureed pumpkin…
We also had an abundance of pumpkins this year, so in between doing batches of apples we cut pumpkins in half, gutted them and baked them down. Once they were soft enough we scraped out the pulp and pureed it in food processor. We froze some as was to use for pies and other pumpkin treats and then cooked the rest down into a another yummy goo (pumpkin butter) and canned it.
Days like today you can almost see spring coming…in between sprinkles.