Conway Family Thanksgiving

What a rowdy crowd we Conway's are, there were approximately 30 or more of us crowded into one house for our blessed Thanksgiving Day. First I want to thank our gracious host and hostess my brother in law Joe and his lovely wife Peg for not only having us over for Thanksgiving but housing us for the whole week of the family reunion. There are so many people staying here it is like a motel. Find a place to sleep.

Everyone pitched in and brought their specialty of food and we had so much food we could have fed an army. My favorites were the ranch mashed potatoes and the ham. Yummy but what is Thanksgiving without a delicious turkey and it was great! The white meat was so tender and moist.

It was great to see the older cousins and siblings bonding in the younger generation after we had eaten. They were all gathered around the kitchen island spending time together.

Unfortunately all of our younger kids are all grown to high school age now and we were missing out on four of mine and Darrell's kids so the one we brought has been stuck playing video games or hanging out with girls. Alex really loves his mine craft anyways. lol We have one little one in the family and his name is DJ. He runs around and gets into what he wants to and tires his dad Dre out. His thing over at Aunt Pegs is the piano. What a kick in the pants that is. I have been trying to bond with him, he is so worn out of all the people I get a little hi 5 here and there. I am hoping by the end of the weekend we will be good buddies hugging and have pet names for one another but we'll see, that may just be too much to ask out of this trip.

The best thing about all of this is all of the fellowship, getting to sit and talk with everyone. We don't get together as often as we like and it is nice to see everyones smiling faces.

Canning Apple Butter

This weekend my Ma and I had fun canning apple butter and apple sauce. Last weekend we sent my 14 year old son Alex up on the ladder in the tree to pick apples and we came up with two trash cans full of apples.

Apples from MA's tree

So we got our recipe together and our supplies which consisted of pint jars, a water bath canner, knives to peel, a food mill, cinnamon, cloves, sugar and apples.

Recipe

We peeled the apples together and sliced them into the plan and had a lot of fun laughing and joking around. We missed the kids a lot because they always did stuff like this with us. After we peeled the apples we had to cook them to a soft consistency. We found that the recipe castled for too much water and we were standing there for a long time waiting for the juicy apples to cook down into a thick consistency that we could keep on a spoon so the next batches we lowered the amount of water we added. 

Apples before boiling

After the apples had softened and boiled we to the to the food mill and processed them through that to come up with the butter that we desired. In another bowl we had added the dry ingredients of the sugar, cloves and cinnamon so that after we had processed the butter we added all of that together and took it to the stove to cook it down to a thick consistency that would not fall off the spoon.

                                                                      After Food Mill

While cooking down to proper consistency

While the butter was cooking down we heated our jars in the water bath as well as the lids and after the butter was cooked down we poured it into the jars and cooked it in the water bath for 10 minutes. After that we took them out and let them cool and listened for the lids to pop. 

It was a fun day and we are making apple sauce next weekend when we have Alex because he loves applesauce. Hopefully he will have as much fun as we did. Oh I forgot to tell you during this whole ordeal, MA burnt her hand and we had to take her to the E.R. So please be careful if you try this. Hot water scalds.

God Bless.

B