APPLES and CRANBERRIES

 Time to pick the last of the apples. Kind of  a little wormy and buggy on the inside, so  requires a deft hand when cutting around the core. No slate bugs allowed in the cranberry sauce. Already had an earwig crawl out of the pot.....

 Labour intensive picking  apples.This year, the trees produced heaps and heaps.Every so often an apple would come plopping down. Good idea not to be standing underneath. How many  times did I feel  like Chicken Little and think the sky was falling......

 As always, the neighbours' cats  kept us company, watching while buckets and bags were filled and piled.

 Opened a bottle of Cordelia's Concord Cordial to let it breathe. Plenty of time to slosh a generous amount into the cooking apples and cranberries. 

 And let it  breathe, and breathe and breathe while the apples were peeled.After about the first couple of dozen I wished they could peel themselves.

  I tossed  apples into a lemonade bath. I think they like floating in their bowl of lemonade.They don't brown as much, and you can add extra lemonade into the pot when you cook up the fruit.

 I guesstimate everything to make this. Just take a large pot, toss in a lot of apples, and maybe 4 bags of fresh cranberries. Add some sugar to taste, or add 1 cup per bag of cranberries. It is whatever you like best. You can add no sugar at all, and just add it later. But it does best added in the pot so it cooks down.

 I also added  1 cup water to each bag of cranberries, and substituted a cup of wine ( or two) instead. And a good shake of cinnamon. If you have a cinnamon stick you can add that, but I don't have sticks at the moment. Fresh cookies had just been made, so we snacked on those while waiting for the pot to finish blupping away.

 Let cool. Freeze. Serve with anything you like.Let the  pot  bubble and burp away. Be careful of splattering, keep the heat fairly low. Ladle into a pretty bowl,or freeze in plastic containers.