Apples, apples everywhere, but none for me to eat....yet!

Last week, I went to Butler's Orchard here in Maryland to pick some apples. I ended up with two bags in under ten minutes. Each of the bags weighed about 10 pounds each. In other words, I ended up with a lot of apples, very, very quickly.

This is not a bad thing since I love apples. Apple pie has become a staple for me during Lent since I like doing the medieval Lent thing. However, this does mean I needed to find a way to keep the apples until I actually want to use them. With around 60 apples, there is no way I could even begin to just let them sit around until I need them - like I normally do with a bag of apples. Instead, I decided to freeze them.

Yes, canning 'em would be period correct but I simply do not have the time, money, or room to go out and buy a ton of canning equipment and then store all the canned apples. I could borrow some of the canning equipment from Mom but, really, freezing apples is very simple and you end up with apple slices that are ready to be cooked.

First, you peel the apple. This is pretty standard for any long term storage of apples. I then used my apple corer/slicer to end up with nice, little pieces of apple quickly. I then took the apple slices and put them in this:

This is a bath of lemon juice and water. Technically, it's about 1/4 lemon, 3/4 water but I kept adding fresh squeezed lemon to the solution so I have no idea what it ended up being. Anyway, it worked. Bath the apple slices in this and you don't get brown apple slices.

After that, I put the apple slices in small containers. Each container or bag ended up with roughly four apples in them. Today, I have seven containers filled with apples. Tomorrow, I plan on peeling,coring, and freezing the other bag I ended with.