What to do with 2 Giant Bags of Apples

A dear friend of mine from church blessed us with 2 giant paper bags full of apples the other day. She let us jump her fence while she was out for the afternoon. So my husband, the kids, and I picked as many apples as we could possibly get our hands on. We were in apple heaven!

While we do love apples (my husbands favorite after dinner snack is apples with home made almond butter), we can only eat so many apples before our tummies burst or the apples go bad. So I needed to preserve some of the apples for later while making plenty of delicious apple treats for now.

First I picked out the prettiest non wormy, un-bruised apples I could find and put them in the crisper in our fridge.

Then, I busted out my dehydrator that I haven’t used once… nope not once in the 3 years I have had it. I bought it (used) from a friend for 5 bucks and it has been collecting dust ever since. We dehydrated about a third of the apples that we picked. I peeled a bunch and cut off the bad spots and sliced them up for drying. I wasn’t aware of how loud an old dehydrator could be but hey, it got the job done. I now have 3 jars of dried “apple chips” that will last us long after the fresh apples are gone.

Here are some of the jars as I was filling them up.

I also made a couple “open face apple pies“ out of some of the nicer looking apples. My daughter goes on and on about the crust and how simply amazing it is…  she has never had real apple pie and she loves oatmeal. So this gluten free treat was just perfect for her.

Last, I made fermented applesauce! Yum! Of course you could make regular applesauce but the fermentation adds amazing probiotics that are much better than any of the stuff you could buy in stores.

Apple sauce is the perfect recipe for all the gross wormy bruised apples because you can just cut all those spots off and save what is left over for the sauce. You don’t even need to peel the apples for this recipe I use. I love that I can give my kiddos a play dough or butter knife and they can cut up apples too because it doesn’t matter the shape of the chunks you throw in the processor…. it all just comes out as smooth yummy apples sauce. Perfection!

And in case you were wondering, the answer is yes, my son is usually shirtless (at least when we are at home anyways).

The kiddos have a hard time waiting the 3 days it takes for our applesauce to fully ferment but I think they love it even more because they can’t get their hands on it right away. My mother-in-law loves mixing fermented apple sauce with my home made almond butter. We eat a lot of almond butter in our family.

My littles enjoyed photo bombing my photo session.

So there you have it. We were able to use up both huge bags of apples and had a blast doing so. I have apples coming out of my ears but I’m still looking forward to an autumn filled with trips to the apple orchard. What do you plan to make with apples this season? Feel free to comment below!