Apple Butter

Three Bushels of Apples.  Three Bushels of delectable, honey crisp apple seconds, complete with soft spots and other "defects."

I stood, paring knife in hand, whittling the core out of one.  "Yow know how many bushels Wayne's family got?"  Elaine asked me, as she poked at a kettle of simmering apples with a long metal spoon.

"Twelve bushels," I hazarded.  12 bushels sound like a lot of apples.  Four times as many as we had gotten and I had been paring the cores for quite awhile.

"No," Elaine replied and then distractedly said.  "Elliot, please give that to Victoria.  I'm sorry, Victoria, Mom's working on apples right now and they are really hot."  Our children somehow haven't figured out the meaning of the word 'share.'

"How many did they get?"  I asked.

"Oh, twenty bushels," Elaine told me breezily and then lifted a pot full of steaming apples off the stove.  "Anna, do you went to help turn?"

Twenty bushels seems like a lot.  Three bushels left us with 40 plus quarts of apple sauce and 14 quarts of apple pie filling.  At the end of it, Elaine took six quarts of the strained apples and put them in a crock pot with various spices and cooked them for the next eighteen hours.

This is apparently the new way to make Apple Butter.  It doesn't involve any fires or big black kettles, but at the end, you have an aromatic, tasty (if you like apple butter) substance that you can spread on a variety of gluten filled options.

A couple of years ago we had decided to make pear butter.  We had gotten a bushel of pears that weren't much good for eating and so we made pear sauce.  Then we did a crock pot recipe for pear butter.  The only thing was that it called for black licorice and when it was finally done, it was pretty much inedible.

Spending 18 hours in a slow cooker doesn't change the ingredients, it only intensifies their flavors.

I have heard it said that adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it.  The things that we did, the choices we made long before we ever got into those situations will decide the sort of person that is demonstrated when we are in the pressure cooker of life.

After eighteen hours, a pot of apples does not magically turn into a pot of kale, nor would a pot of black licorice laced pears turn into a lake of chocolate fondue after a similar period of time of cooking.    In the same way, the man I truly am will come out on the days when life is its most stressful.  Everything else is just a facade.

Apple Butter.

Pear Butter.

Kale Stew.

When stress comes to call, which one are you?