A Change in Season

As the weather changes and there becomes a cool bite in the air! I love to get back to the kitchen, baking, bottling, warming up the house and having sweet spicy smells, while watching the whole world change colors outside and taking brisk walks! I love it! I also love that my children are right here along with me as we share learn and grow together. Enjoying visiting and just spending time while we work and play!

Grandpa gave us lots of tasty little apples and I have always wanted to make apple butter. As I was trying to figure out how I didn't like the idea of having to make apple sauce FIRST and then the butter. WAY to much time and work;) So I came up with a way to do it in the crock pot fairly easily but still very tasty! First Matt peeled and cored most of the apples with the handy dandy apple peeler corer slicer he thought it was very fun to operate and eat the peels as he went.

We put the apples with a few other ingredients. (Recipe next;) In the crock pot and let it simmer all day long! Making the house smell sooooo good! We then mashed the mixture with a potato masher. Turned off the crock pot for it to cool a bit then blended the mixture in the blender so it was nice and smooth. We then Bottled it!

Tam's Almost Makes Itself Apple Butter

20 medium to small or 10 large Apples peeled sliced and cored

3 cups apple cider

1 teaspoon lemon zest

juice of half a lemon

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon allspice

1/8 teaspoon cloves

2 Tablespoons Coconut Oil

1 drop butter flavor (optional)

1/2 cup Sucanat

Put all ingredients in crock pot on high for 6 to 8 hours. You can stir as much or as little as you want I like to do it about every time I go in the Kitchen just cause I love to lift the lid and smell it;) I also start mashing it up with a potato masher as the apples start to get soft. After it is well cooked and thicker I turn off the crock pot and let it sit for a bit then I blend it all in the blender till smooth. At this point you can put it in a container in the fridge and use like jam or just eat plain (Matt and Charly thought it was great by the spoonful) or put them in jars to bottle. I tripled the recipe to bottle it and it made about 10 pints.

This week we started a bit of a new schedule with chores and stuff. We also started doing something we call Stewardship. Mom has been pondering this for a while and she decided to come up with age appropriate things around the house to have the kids be over. They seem to like the responsibility and understand that they are a very important part of this family and helping it to be a happy well functioning household. We know it takes all of us to strengthen home and family! They also are learning how important it is to be a good example to your brothers and sisters especially the older ones to the younger ones. The picture above is Charly watching the kids brush their teeth. I thought it was cute!

This was cute too Charly decided she wanted to get the beans out and play with them. She is such a busy sweet girl! She loves signing and is learning to say so many of the words right along with it! You should hear her say hungry it's really funny she doesn't even open her mouth. We will try to get a video of it soon so you can hear it!

And I found this on my desk this morning! The kids LOVE to draw, paint, write, create! They are ALWAYS doing something! Matt drew this particular one! Can you guess which Veggie Tale it comes from?

Sorry we didn't get pictures of this but last weekend Dad took the boys on a "Fathers and Sons" and Mom and the girls stayed home, we made pizza for the all of us to have the girls enjoyed watching The Work and the Glory in the basement! The boys went to Cabella's and watched them feed the fish and played at the shooting range. Then came back and had some pizza and fun in the trailer and then slept in the trailer. It was lots of fun and we tried some new pizza recipes that we really liked! We will share them as soon as we get them typed up!