Crock-pot cooking

I've never used a crock-pot before, but I was listening to NPR last week and they had a panel of people on talking about favorite fall recipes, and apple-butter cropped up. They spent about five minutes enthusing about slow-cooked apple butter and debating their favorite recipes, and I was sold. I have always liked apple butter, but I've never had both apples and the means of producing butter from them at the same time. Up here in Hadlock, however, there is a crock-pot sitting on the pantry shelf and four or five trees full of apples going to waste up the hill, and I didn't have anything else planned for the weekend beyond sitting on my duff watching football, so I decided to make my own.

First, and the hardest part of the whole endeavor, I had to convince Mandy to go pick me the apples and then help me peel and slice them. After a lot of moaning and complaining this was accomplished, and we found a combination corer/slicer that made the work a lot easier. The apples were mostly pretty small, which meant we had to cut up a lot more of them for five quarts than if we'd been using off-the-shelf apples from the grocery store.

That done, the rest was pretty easy: pitch 'em into the crock pot with a mess of sugar, cinammon, and cloves, and let the whole thing bubble away on low overnight. The recipes I came across were fairly consistent in recommending eight to eleven hours of cooking time, but either my apples were too crispy or I didn't chop them up finely enough, because I had them on for almost thirteen before the consistency was good. The taste, if I do say so myself, is excellent... better than the off-the-shelf variety by far, although mine still isn't as smooth (I could have blended the mush and cooked it down a little more for better consistency, but it doesn't matter that much to me). We ended up with a lot less than I expected, though... five quarts of apples doesn't yield the veritable flood of apple butter that I had imagined. So, we'll probably have to whip up another batch here before all the apples go bad. I should ask Mandy how many are left up there....