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Well, the September installment of the “Food in Jars Challenge” was for fruit butter.
Apple Butter
I’m not new to fruit butter, as I grew up helping my grandma pick apples from the loader bucket of my grandpa’s tractor so we could take the apples inside and make applesauce and apple butter.
My grandma always made her applesauce kind of chunky, and it’s my favorite – the same way I try to do mine when I make it on my own now, though I never can seem to get it quite the right level of chunkiness as she did.
Anyway – I have also made cranberry-apple butter in the past, and last summer I made peach butter. Â I am a big fan of the slow cooker method for fruit butter, and love how thick and smooth the end result is.
For this month’s challenge, first I was planning to do apple butter – but I checked the “jams and jellies” section of my canning pantry and it turns out I don’t really need any more apple butter for right now. Â As I was looking, it turns out I also have a couple of small jars of cranberry-apple butter left and several jars of peach butter. My next thought was plum butter, maybe a small batch recipe, but then I realized that the plum season here was short, and over – so no plums for me!
Pumpkin Butter
Though it isn’t a canning recipe, I settled on making the Maple Sweetened Pumpkin Butter recipe, because our garden produced a lot of Cinderella baking pumpkins this year and it seemed like a good way to use a couple of them.
I just cut two of them (gross weight was 5 pounds) in half and removed the seeds. Splashed a touch of olive oil on them, and lightly covered with tinfoil. They baked in the oven at 350 degrees for about 2 hours.
Check Out This Great Slow Cooker Trick!
Pumpkin Butter = Delicious Pumpkin Pie!
This basically tastes like pumpkin pie filling to me, although very delicious pumpkin pie filling! I froze it in two quart-size Ziploc bags and I think that we are just going to use it to make pumpkin pie. Really delicious pumpkin pie!
In an unrelated to my pumpkin butter note, I saw this recipe today for an “Apple Butter Old Fashioned” drink and I think we are going to use some of that pantry apple butter to try this soon!
Blueberry Butter
Another recipe I considered making this month is Slow Cooker Blueberry Butter. I think it sounds delicious. This winter when I’m bored and I don’t have anything else to do, I might give it a go!
What’s your favorite fruit butter to make? Tell us about it in the comments!
If you like this post, check out my other Food Preservation posts!
