avocado8

Review/Preview

I'm mostly posting tonight to say that the meatier posts will happen sometime during the week, if possible. Here's what's on my to-blog list:

• Nokia E-71 NAM review
  WOM World/Nokia sent me an E71 to try out two weeks ago with the provision that I tell them and any readers of my blog what I thought about it. I want to make sure I do that before I forget what my thoughts are. (Ideally, I would have done it before sending the handset back, but I don't think I'm going to get to it before tomorrow.)
• Parent-Teacher Conference
  We had a nice one on Friday.
• The Downside of Working From Home
  I've got this post mostly written, but I want to add a few more observations.

In the meantime, I'm happy to report that today was a better day (if not a stellar day), partly because of the change in weather, partly because I played hockey, and partly because the apple butter came out so great. Al says it's the best he's ever had, which is both good and bad—good because it brings a measure of pride, and bad because I'm not sure I could duplicate the effort. I did approximately this:

• Sliced 2 Staymans, 2 Crispins (I think), and four or five Empires that were no longer crunchy as thinly as I could with a dull knife, and without peeling or coring them first.
• Stuffed the sliced apples into a 4 (or 5?) quart crock pot with a couple tablespoons of water.
• Set the crock pot on high for, uh, two hours? Four hours? I'm not sure.
• Lowered the heat on the crock pot (to Low, of course) for another couple hours. Or maybe just one hour.
• Ran the results through a hand-cranked food mill.
• Poured the resulting 5.5 cups of sauce back into the crock pot.
• Added 2 slightly-heaping cups of organic cane sugar (based on a recipe I'd read that said 1/2 cup sugar for every 1 cup sauce), 2 heaping tablespoons cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves + however much more dumped over the sides when a clump detached itself from the mass at the bottom of the jar.
• Stirred, tasted the result, and nearly keeled over from the sweetness.
• Dumped in the remaining unsweetened, chunky applesauce that I'd made last fall, frozen, and thawed earlier this week. It was a mix of Cortland, Macintosh, and Pink Lady apples.
• Tasted again, then dug through the freezer looking for more unsweetened applesauce. Found an unlabeled jar (which means it was either from 2007 or 2006), thawed it in the microwave, and dumped it into the crockpot.
• Stirred, tasted, and added maybe a 1/2 cup white vinegar (possibly less). Vinegar was also in the recipe that gave the .5:1 sugar:sauce ratio, and I figured maybe the sugar and vinegar offset each other.
• Stirred again, put two butter knives on top of the crock pot, balanced the lid on the knives, and set the pot to Low.
• Went to bed.
• In the morning, removed the knives, stirred (well, I stirred first, knocked both knives into the apple butter, and *then* removed the knives), turned off the pot, and replaced the cover.
• Went out to a kid birthday party in New Jersey and a hockey game in Delaware.
• Upon returning at 6pm, attempted to preserve what I'd made (3 pint jars' worth plus a little extra) using a boiling water bath, but I screwed up a few steps. I'm still not sure whether all the jars will seal; if not, I'll freeze them.