Preserving Floyd: mmm....Applesauce

Making applesauce creates a scent that smells like all the ripe apple trees of Floyd condensed into one and spilled into our house.  I swear it has the ability to attract the neighbors who arrive at the door with spoons in hand!

Applesauce straight from the jar, applesauce dressed up with spice and cream, applesauce topping pancakes and waffles, applesauce baked into cakes and pastries, applesauce glazing ham or pork, applesauce cooked down into butter or leather.  So many uses for applesauce!

Preserving Floyd: Drying Apples

Some of you may remember this very helpful gadget from last fall's Extreme Deep Dish Apple Pie post.

Well, it's time to break it out again!

Cooking Floyd: About Those Apples

Floyd County is mountain apple country.  There are commercial family-run orchards, farm orchards, trees in backyards, trees along the Blue Ridge Parkway (which the Parkway Service allows to be picked), and random apple and crab apple trees along the roadsides that just happen to have sprung up.  And there are abandoned orchards.  If you explore the back roads and "goat paths" of Floyd (and most of the roads here are back roads) you'll come across long abandoned homesteads with decrepit farm houses and outbuildings, or a lone fireplace and chimney standing in a pasture.  In the spring some of these are amazing, the houses surrounded by blooms of  tulips and daffodils, old-fashioned peonies and lilacs, and later poppies and roses.  But, in the spring, if you look beyond the houses and outbuildings, you'll spot trees in bloom.  Fruit trees covered in pinkish flowers.  Apples.