Run Golden Delicious or Granny Smith apple peels, cores, quartered, blemished and dropped apples in three pound batches through the tabletop press. Three lbs. of apples make a pint of juice. The left over mash is a special treat for the horses. Ten pounds of apples make one pound of apple syrup. Apple syrup is used to make Sauerbraten dishes.

Go to your local farmers market to find the juiciest peaches available, donut peaches and white peaches are the choice here in California. Peach syrup is a great way to add fresh peach flavor to breakfasts, desserts and for baking in winter. The high sugar content prevents the syrup from turning hard in the freezer, handy to use.#GlobalCookpadGames2024

Preserving Summer fruits as syrup is a great way to cook with their flavors year round. Syrups do not get solid in the freezer, they stay fresh and ready for cooking.#globalcookpadgames2024

Heavy winter winds blew all blood oranges off our tree and did damage to the not yet ripe lemons. We pickle lemons, we make blood orange marmelade and made blood orange simple syrup to preserve and cook with them year-round.We make a batch with five oranges and two lemons in a pan, weight them on a digital kitchen scale, then cut up and cover with water and simmer till the water has evaporated. We then add the same weight in cane sugar, plus same weight in water and boil, then cool and taste. Then condense till we have simple syrup thickness.Blood oranges here vary in sweetness from year to year. This wet winter, they needed more than their weight in sugar.#newyear2025 “Replace store bought foods with home made organics”

Good old Farmers Almanac recipe, probably from apple country back east. No sugar added! We use Golden Delicious or Granny Smith green apples, I add a cinnamon stick while cooking, remove it when putting the apple sauce in the heavy duty quart freezer bags.

Spicy thick liquid honey syrup for use in teas, hot wines, and other hot drinks, and a very precise way to add ginger flavor to cakes, breads, cookies and sauces. Simple to make, stays fresh a year in your pantry.

You can make apple cider vinegar “with the mother” from apple juice in 3 weeks, add more juice every 3 weeks, let it ferment all year from apple harvest to apple harvest, while using it. Out of season, you can use frozen apple juice.The vinegar mother is the culture of acetic bacteria that ferments apple juice to vinegar. You can see it, it is the grey film in the fermenting juice.We have a little tabletop press to make apple juice, but you don’t need one, following the recipe of cookpad member Nadia from Turkey, immersing fresh apples in distilled water for six months and adding raw vinegar.

Bring summer to your winter breakfast with Rose hip syrup on your pancakes, crepes, hot breakfast cereal, or yoghurt, or in your tea. One maple syrup size bottle is enough for a winter. The Vitamin C in rosehip syrup is gone after nine months.You can collect your own rosehips iin your garden by not cutting your dead roses in fall, and see if they develop rosehips. You can also plant rose hip bushes as a hedge, like Rosa Rugosa Alba, a hedge rose which produces the best rose hips. You can forage for rosehips in the woods, or order dried rosehips on amazon.

Apples ripen all at about the same time, a blessing but also a dilemma, one good backyard apple tree produces easily over 100 apples. The 20 best and largest ones are for hand eating, half a pound each or more. The next 20 to make 4 apple pies. Another 20 to make 5 quarts of apple sauce for freezing. From your 20 most blemished apples, as well as the peels, cores, and ends from the other apples, you make pints of apple cider. The remaining apples can be sliced and sundried, eaten as a snack or used to make tea. Here is how.

Granny Smith apples are our horses’ favorite apples, and ours. They stay fresh a long time, dry well, make good apple sauce, great apple strudel, apple pie, apple donuts, apple beignets and apple “flaps”. The Granny Smith apples we use are medium size apples, 3 apples per pound. One to two apple trees produce several hundred apples, enough for all recipes below.

We inherited a handtool to make apple pies, because all our Granny Smith apples are ripe at the same time, and making twenty pies by hand with just a knife is a lot of work. The antique hand tool below peels, slices and cores an apple in like ten seconds, amazing. We also press cider and dry apple slices. Grandpa’s secret: I use cookie dough to make apple pies, the flavors are in the crispy crust.

A low alcohol version of the traditional margarita, using sparkling apple cider as the alcohol carrier for the drink, with lime and 2 Tbs Tequila or Mescal and Cointreau per tall glass for flavor. My friend Jane tasted this in West Virginia and recommended I make this summer drink with my home made apple cider. Thank you, Jane. Refreshing, and the drink ended up 4% alcohol, 3% with ice, lighter than light beer.