As Casey Would Say, "More Fun Than You Can Shake a Stick At"
On Labor Day we made our annual mecca to the Dixon's orchard to pick pears. They have a garden of Eden-style backyard--over an acre of pear, peach, plum, and apple trees, surrounded by grapes vines. The crazy thing is, most of the fruit just falls to the ground and rots. They have maybe 8 pear trees alone. I laid our harvest out on a big table in the basement to ripen, and by this last Monday it way go time. Ilean had picked up peaches for me from the Brigham City neighborhood connection last Saturday, so I had a bushel of those to do as well as the loads of Shirlene's apples that we'd picked the week before. Monday and Tuesday were total sweat shop days in Wayne's basement kitchen. I made loads and loads of pear-applesauce. The kids LOVE to help crank the fruit through the Victorio strainer. At one point, when they all wanted to help simultaneously, we worked out a genius shift system where one would crank the handle, one would tam...