Apples and Onions

I spent several hours at church again yesterday chopping vegetables and making applesauce. Libbie and Valeri are in charge of the kitchen for the upcoming gift festival, but making enough of three kinds of soup to feed hundreds of people is a huge job. Chopping onions is not fun or glamorous. It needs to be done, though, and Susan and I were happy to help out.

[Susan was commenting on my onion chopping skills on Saturday and how fast I was. Everyone thinks I like to cook. I am a good cook, but it is one of my least favorite things to do. I told her it was like the scene in one of the Little House on the Prairie books—or maybe in one of Laura’s memoirs—where someone commented on the speed and perfection of her (hand-bound!) buttonholes. She responded that she hated to do buttonholes, so she learned to do them quickly and well. That’s kind of how I feel about cooking. It needs to be done, but I don’t linger over it.]

Making applesauce is rather fun. Susan, with her master’s degree in botany, is something of an apple expert and loves to tell us about the different varieties. All apples are not the same. Some ripen early, some mid-season, and some are only really good after a frost. Some only keep for a few days and some keep for months. Some make good pies and some make better cider. Susan has 40+ varieties in her own orchard and knows about many more.

She brought New York 12, an old experimental variety, for us to use in making sauce yesterday. We’re way past the early apples that are really good for sauce, like Yellow Transparent or her Summer Rambo apples that we’ve used in the past. The New York 12 apples are a deep burgundy red with red-streaked flesh inside, and they make the most beautiful sauce:

This is not a doctored photo. The applesauce was exactly that color, the color of raspberry sherbet. We added a tiny amount of sugar—because we’re all picky about our sauce tasting like apples and nothing else—and that was it. This sauce, along with homemade rolls, will be served with the soup in the Village Cafe at the gift festival.

I am knee-deep in chasing down punch list items for both businesses now. The new Big Sky Knitting Designs website went live yesterday morning and I’ve already gotten some pattern orders, so at least the e-commerce part of it is working properly. Trying to manage two Instagram accounts is maddening—particularly because I had to add extra software to be able to post to IG from my desktop instead of my phone—so I am trying to move everyone from my personal IG account to the one for Buttercup Made. I need to post to the BSKD Facebook account, and I should probably set up one for Buttercup Made, too. Getting all of these ducks lined up, though, is keeping me from the one thing I want to do, which is sew. (The oft-heard refrain of owners of small creative businesses everywhere.) I did manage to sneak in some time late yesterday afternoon to do some cutting:

We’ve got a farm animal theme happening at the moment. I have an obvious weakness for chicken fabric. That’s only some of what’s in the stash.

I also sewed the binding onto the comforter that Elaine and I tied last week at sewing. Forward progress.