I may have been overly enthusiastic about the local apple crop this week. I went out yesterday to run some errands. I have to finish my Christmas shopping for my family before Thanksgiving, so there were some places I wanted to hit, and along the way was a produce stand that sells apples from the local orchards. I want to make some apple butter and I needed to pick up some apples.

It turns out that they sell apples specifically for that purpose. You can get a half bushel of seconds, the apples that aren’t pretty enough to sell on their own, for far less than it costs to buy supermarket apples. They helped me pick out a bag of the right kind of apples for my needs.

But it turns out that half a bushel is a LOT of apples, more than I need to make even a large batch of apple butter. What I think I’m going to do is make and freeze some apple pie filling. I do a pre-cooked filling, where you cook the apples on the stove before making the pie. That way, you don’t have to include thickener and you get a stronger apple flavor, and the apples shrink before they go in the pie crust, so you don’t get that gap between the filling and the top crust that you get when the apples cook in the pie. And the pie cooks a lot faster. You’re just cooking the crust, not the filling.

So I figure I’ll cook a bunch of pie filling and freeze it in amounts to make various sizes of pie. Then when I want apple pie, I can just thaw some filling, make a crust, and bake. That’ll be especially handy if I need to bring a dessert to something. I might make a batch where I dice the apples instead of slicing them, so I’ll have tart or turnover filling. Apples cook down a lot, so I may not have as many as I think I have.

And now I know where this produce stand is to come back next year. They’re closing for the year next week, but this looks to be my best apple source. The fact that the book fair (three barns full of books) is on the way and it’s near the good shopping district in this nearby city is a bonus.

It looks like this will be an apple butter weekend. I do the initial cooking in the pressure cooker, which speeds up the process, but cooking that down into a butter takes a lot of time, and I tend to get impatient, so the apple butter is watery. Last year I finally got it right, so I’ll have to do it again. The timing is perfect because I just used up my last jar from last year.