Today is the beginning of the third month!

Being November first and all...

So, today:

Breakfast: Get whatcha want. Again. Perhaps someday we'll get better at "doing" breakfasts...

Lunch: Tuna salad on crackers + left-overs (if you wanted them)

Dinner: Creamy, poppy seed chicken and left-over turnip greens

Claire and I spend almost all afternoon up at the guest house canning apples! Yes, we finally got around to doing some of that! We had time to do 3 water bath batches, or 21 quarts. Still being relatively new to this whole canning by ourselves deal (without Mama and/or Grammy), we weren't entirely confident about what we were doing, but I'm staying optimistic and hoping that the jars won't burst or not seal. ... I exude confidence, don't I? Oh, well. The green beans worked, so perhaps these apples will too.

We canned them in a very light sugar syrup. Our method, step by step (you were anxiously awaiting this, weren't you?):

• Got the canners and sugar syrup heating up. We had one canner on a propane burner on the deck. The other canner and the large pot of syrup were inside on the stove.

• I started using the handy-dandy apple peeler-corer-slicer to peel the apples (the corer-slicer part isn't functioning correctly, but thankfully it still peels well!), while Claire mixed up the sugar syrup and prepared the jars.

• Claire cut the apples into eighths (unless they were really small, then just quarters), and cut off the cores. I continued peeling, and the pots continued heating up.

• Once the sugar syrup finally got to boiling, we added the apple eighths. Then we did more peeling and cutting as we waited for it to start boiling again.

• Once the apples in the sugar syrup were hot, we pulled out the jars (which we stored in the oven - set at 170* - after we washed them.), and started filling them. I usually tried to cover the final apple slices with a little syrup, but after seeing the final product, I'm not sure that was as good an idea as it sounded at the time.

• The canner on the deck had long since started boiling by this point, so we filled that canner up first. Takes 7 quarts to fill a canner, so once we got all those filled, we dropped the rack into the water, put a lid on the canner, and started the timer for 20 minutes. I'm thinking we'll try 15 minutes next time... IF today's have sealed.

• Then we repeated the steps above. Filled the canner on the stove. Then the canner on the deck again.

• We put our finished quarts on towels on a table. That way they won't leave sticky rings on the table, and clean-up's only throwing the towels in the wash.

So, that's what we did. We'll see if we like them, if they seal, and if they keep as the year goes on.