Canning Autumn Applesauce

At Russell Farms, 2013.

Autumn is my favorite time of year to live in the Northeast. Even though I have always lived in the Northeast, I don’t take the changing of seasons for granted. Red, yellow, and orange leaves crunching underfoot, and apple cider. We are lucky to have multiple apple orchards around us like Russell Farms, Lone Maple Farm, Apple Hills Farm, and Torto’s.

Autumn belongs to the apples: Gala, Honeycrisp, Gingergold, Golden Delicious, Macintosh, Macoun, Empire, Pink Lady, Granny Smith… Through the winter, spring, and summer months, I forget what apple tastes like until I pluck one from the tree and bite my teeth into that firm and crisp flesh for the first time. I eat fresh apples daily when they’re in season, because I know it won’t last. Spiritually, I am growing an appreciation for impermanence. It makes you appreciate things when you have them more. After all, our very lives are an exercise in impermanence.

Even so, it is nice to be able to carry a bit of this season into the ones that will come after. When the apples are their ripest, I make and can applesauce to get me through till next harvest. My mother canned. My grandmother canned. I don’t do it as much as I’d like to. I do it because I know that when I open a jar this February, autumn’s harvest flavor will be there. That taste of the first bite of a ripe apple will flood my mouth. No chemicals. No preservatives. No added sugar. Just apples, and a small stick of cinnamon.

I find the prep work is the hardest. You have to wash all the jars in warm soapy water. Fill them with hot water and place them in the canning pot. Add enough water so it sits above the jars by an inch. Cover the pot and bring it towards a boil over medium-high heat. When it is almost boiling, reduce hit to a simmer. Keep it covered until you use the jars. [This part took me an hour.]

Then, in a small saucepan, pour two inches of water in the bottom. Add the lids and heat on low until it reaches a simmer. Cover the saucepan and take it off the heat. Set it aside until you’re ready to use them. Now, you’re ready to make the applesauce, which is fairly easy.

I had a small retinue of apples for this batch. Normally, I might add a splash of water for every four apples I use, but I have found that fresh apples rarely require extra moisture. I peel, core, and cut the apples into slices. Everyone does it different, I’ve found. No matter how you cut them, it’s important to keep the pieces of even size. Add as many cinnamon sticks as you desire to taste- a dash of ginger is always a nice complement, if you want a little tang.

Place everything in a saucepan, cover, and heat on medium for fifteen to twenty minutes. Use a fork to see how easily the tines pass through the fruit. If it passes through without resistance, you’re done. Turn the heat off, remove the cinnamon sticks and mash away. I have a potato masher that I use because I like to make chunky applesauce, but for smooth applesauce I whisk it after it’s been mashed. Now, you’re ready to can!

Remove the jars from the canning pot, carefully, and empty them of their water. I dry them out with a clean cloth. Fill the jars with applesauce, leaving a half-inch of headspace. When the jars are full, gently shake the jars back and forth to release air pockets. You can also slide a clean knife around the edge of the jar to help release them. Wipe the rims with a clean cloth. Use tongs to pull a lid out of the saucepan and set it on the jar. Screw a band in until it’s just tightened.

When they’re all done, place the jars back in the canner (beware of hot water). Make sure, again, that there is at least an inch of water covering the jars. Cover the pot and bring the water to a boil. When the water starts boiling, process the jars for fifteen minutes. Turn off the heat and remove the lid. Let the pot stand for about five minutes. Remove jars onto a clean towel on a table or counter. My canning pot has a basket that I can rise to lift the cans above the water line. But before I found my canner at the thrift store (for five dollars), I used a large stock pot and heavy-grade canning tongs.

Give the jars twelve to twenty-four hours to cool, depending on their size. You may hear a strange warpy, metallic, pinging sound. That’s good. You want to hear that sound. It means the seals are locking and the canning worked. Don’t fret if you don’t hear it either, though. That’s happened to me. When the jars are cooled, press lightly on the seal. If it doesn’t give, it worked, and you can safely store them for up to a year, just in time for the new crop! If the seal gives beneath your finger, it didn’t take. That just means you can pop them in the fridge and eat them right away. 

A Healing Holiday Tree

Whether you celebrate Christmas or Yule, one of my favorite traditions of the season is decorating the evergreen tree. I celebrate both holidays, sitting vigil through the long night of Yule, the Winter Solstice. Dawn means that the coming days will lengthen and the longest night of darkness is over. The Christmas I celebrate is a cultural one. It has become bigger than its Christian meaning in America and its roots are twined in pagan practices of Winter Solstice. Whatever you believe and however you practice, the magic and spirit of the holiday is alive in all rites and rituals of the season, including caroling, office holiday parties, and secret Santa gift exchanges.

As I get older I find I need the magic more. I look forward to the holidays as the time of year when people hum carols under their breath, smile at cashiers and clerks and are generally in a good mood. It’s the time of year when I can look someone in the eye and the chance of them reciprocating is high. Christmas brings out the best in us, and we dream of peace on earth and goodwill to all men.

That dream is important to me and I use that energy to buoy my heart against the number of loved ones each year who are no longer living, who can no longer celebrate the holiday with me. Every year, I miss my grandparents more and more, not less like I hoped. You love the people you love, and for some of them distance of space or time doesn’t change that feeling.

It would be easy, I think, to be so overwhelmed with missing them to not care about the holidays. My grandma and grandpa were that special. So, putting up our Christmas tree every year is a moving meditation I do to work through that sadness, backwards, into the joy of every happy memory I built with them as the foundation of my own holiday spirit.

When we were young children, every year when the holidays rolled around, my dad would bring the artificial evergreen tree up from the gravel and dirt basement and my mom would pull two large cardboard storage boxes out of their bedroom closet. The boxes were patterned with large orange blossoms a la the seventies. Inside their walls lived our ornaments, which we put on the tree together.

My mother would put on the delicate ornaments and then we would take turns picking a favorite ornament to hang. When I was a little girl, I loved the family day of decorating the Christmas tree. My favorites were these white lantern tops, with colored gels that sat over lights on the strand. I loved those little lanterns. But more than that, I loved the event of being together.  It’s what Christmas is really about.

Putting the tree together still holds that joy for me, that act of setting the evergreen up in the house, of bringing nature indoors. We have a thirty-five year old artificial tree that we are recycling until it falls apart. After setting it up and wrapping thick garland in between the branches, you’d never guess at its age. I unwrap the ornaments from their boxes and spread them out on the coffee table. It’s a living collage of my childhood and the transformations I’ve undergone through and into adulthood.

I have a small angel with a plastic head and a white crocheted dress/body. She has brown pigtails and a small halo on her head. My sister had a similar one with a ponytail. She’s been a part of my Christmas tree for as long as I can remember, so long that her origins are unknown to me. Then there is the collection of apple themed ornaments gifted to me by my grandparents over the years. Some are dated, some have my name on them. I linger over these ones, remembering receiving them, remembering the laughter in the kitchen, the warm food and the card games afterwards.

Among our ornaments are an assortment of stars and moons from our early years, transforming into birch bark woodland creatures and plumed birds. There are ornaments crafted and given by old friends as well as handmade ones from family members. Each one has a story. Each one has a name and face behind it. Each one reminds me of the people I love, whose lives have touched mine.

As I hang these ornaments on my tree, I call those memories into the tips of my fingers and place them with purpose. Where do they want to go? It’s a dance I do to remember… to remember my grandparents, faraway friends and to remember that joy and love. To remind myself in the dark days of winter that there is joy and light to be had. My tree becomes a living memory. It becomes a beacon of hope.

            Everyone has their own style of decorating the tree. Mine looks like a quilting of memories, some nestled in each other and some taking center on their own. But the weaving of time and treasures becomes a spell that lifts my heart. We humans come and go like tides rolling in and out. But as I sit in a dark room, sipping hot cocoa and taking in the beauty of our tree, it is a light that can outshine any sorrow.

I cannot gaze upon it without feeling gladness in my heart, without looking forward to all the holidays yet to come.

Relevant Posts:

Poppets for Grief (posted December 15, 2010)

Christmas Legacy of Dick and Donna (posted December 22, 2010)

Autumn Apple Seeds

When you cut an apple in half through its belly, at the center of the fruit sits a five-pointed star. This star, glistening beneath the surface of the skin, is a reflection, a mirror image of the stars in the sky above us. Where we normally look outward, into the night to see the light of that distant being, nature shows us to also look inward, into the core of the fruit of the earth to see the same image. What lives without also lives within.

If you want to speak to your ancestors, do not gaze up into the starry field of midnight sky and seek their names in the light of those heavenly bodies. Go into yourself, dive into the bloodstream towards those endpoints where memory lives. Speak to the voice of the ancestors alive in you. Speak into the darkness and they will listen. They will hear you. Find that edge, that meeting point of their footsteps and yours, and they will answer.

In the crisp and cooling air of autumn, the season is expressed in the crunching sound of dry leaves beneath feet. The orchards release a pungent and overwhelming fragrance. Apples taste best when plucked from the tree, when they are the same temperature of the cold mountain air around them. Nothing compares to fruit fresh off the tree. There is still so much life in the apple when it has been newly broken from its stem.

That crunch of teeth breaking the skin releases the sweet juice. Nectar runs down the flesh, and it is the purest liquid I have ever ingested. Synapses that had been sleeping since last winter begin firing and I can see the crisp edges of the world around me. I inhale them, feeding on them, until I am left with a knobby core filled with seeds.

There are a lot of meditations at this time of year, reflecting on the last of the harvest, and how we cannot escape the shadow of death as the landscape in the seasonal zones dries and crisps and is whipped into dust by the winds. Every year, on Samhain night, I swallow an apple seed as a reminder that death comes to everyone. Death is not unkind. Death is what takes us from the trauma of our failing bodies.

This is the season where we walk a long edge, where hallways to other worlds are everywhere. Close your eyes and whisper the name of your loved one who has passed. Remember the scent of them and the feel of their skin beneath your hand. Under closed lids, build that image of them and open a doorway, inviting them in. Be the lighthouse beacon that guides them to you. Feel your love for them and exhale, making it bigger each time, until it spills out past your periphery. Call them home. They will listen.

Rattling to the Edge

Every harvest season, I eat my apples down to the core, break it open and claim the seeds. I do this for all of the fresh apples from our local orchards. I keep them in a recycled aspirin bottle (washed and rinsed) and use it as my autumn rattle. The sound of the small seeds against the bottle is a gentle vibration that shakes the edges of my etheric body.

            Small seeds bounce against the container’s edge, blurring lines. I open to my ancestors. The world is turning towards the thinnest point between the layers of what is seen and what is unseen. What wisdoms do those who came before me carry that can help me through these dark months? What strength did they bear that I can tap into, plant in my core, and use as I grow?

            I rattle open a door.

            I rattle as the leaves whip up around me and the grey clouds roll in.

            I rattle as the earth sighs into slumber and in that sleep the spirits stir.

The Death inside the Seed

Apple seeds, or pips, contain a cyanide and sugar compound called amygdalin. When it is metabolized, it degrades into hydrogen cyanide (HCN). The tough outer coating of the seed protects us from the poison, and it from our digestive systems, so it can come back out and plant itself in the ground somewhere (theoretically). Unless the pips are pulverized or chewed, the amygdalin remains safely within the seed. Even so, our bodies can detoxify small doses of cyanide, so don’t fret if you have spent a lifetime swallowing apple pips.

Disclaimer: Death is not something to toy with. It’s not a game. Cyanide denies the blood its ability to carry oxygen and causes asphyxiation. There is no antidote for a lethal dose of cyanide and death takes minutes. The fact that ‘death’ lives in the heart of the apple seed is a reason I use it to symbolize death and rebirth. Speaking to the truth of something is in no way advocating for the use of it as such.