apples, anyone?

Two weekends ago, in a moment of either brilliance or insanity, a couple friends from the library and I decided that it would be great fun to go to one of the local orchards to get apples. Initially, we had assumed that we could actually pick the apples ourselves, which would have been fantastic. We were momentarily disappointed to find that, that was not the case. While we could purchase apples, we didn't get to pick them ourselves.

Determined not to let the disappointment get the best of us, we each set out to selecting apples and filling up a 1/2 bushel bag of apples each. They were only charging $8 for 1/2 bushel. For those of you (like me) who aren't up on what a bushel actually is, here's a quick conversion:

1 bushel of apples = approximately 42-48 pounds, or 126 medium apples, or 15 9 inch pies, or 30-36 pints frozen, or 16-20 quarts canned**

So divide that by 2, and that's what I have in my apartment at the moment.

On Saturday, I decided to make use of my Betty Crocker skills and make an apple pie from scratch, including the crust. It is delicious and perfect :) However, it only took 6, count them, 6 apples to make the pie. Between that and the few that I've eaten, I still pretty much have 1/2 a bushel of apples.

I had my mom send me her recipes for apple pie and apple crisp and apple butter and apple sauce. If you all lived here, I could make a pie for each of you and still have a ridiculous number of apples left over. I'm hoping that apple butter & apple sauce will help to get rid or a large chunk of the apples.

Next time, I need a better plan for what to do with the apples before I purchase such a large quantity of them :)

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** Info from http://www.applejournal.com/ref.htm