[TheForge] The hard cider is good... OT:

[ries]

300 pints of apple sauce?
85 pints of apple butter?

Me, I eat about 1 pint of apple sauce a year- I cant imagine making that much apple sauce unless I was going in the business.
Eating apple sauce every day would make me a lot sicker than ice cubes in scotch, thats for sure. 

Instead, I wash the apples, core em, and slice em 1/4" thick, and put em in my 8 layer food dehydrator. I ziplock bag up the dried apple slices, and my wife and son eat them all by about january.
More work, I suppose, although the dehydrator does most of it. But its an apple product my family actually consumes.
If we made that much apple sauce, we would be giving it all away, and people would be running when they saw us coming, kinda like when you grow zucchinis.

We usually get a few hundred pounds of pears, too, and I dry a lot of those, but they are good hard bartering tools- I swap a few bushels of pears for a nice tab at the local bakery.

Ries Niemi
Industrial Artist
http://www.riesniemi.com/