Juicing

Slightly intimidated by the size of the apple harvest, and with a wary eye on the rapidly ripening pear crop, DH and I have invested in a juicer. We planted the pear tree when we moved in ten years ago, but it's only during the last few years it has started producing more than a few pears. 

Pears don't keep so well, and so although I stewed lots, we ate quite a few and I baked with some, we always felt that we wasted too many. Neither of us are very good at spending money, but after a lot of discussion we decided that we could justify a juicer.

 

It looks like it would be at home in a chemistry lab! Its gleaming chrome looks a bit out of place in my frankly homely but muddled kitchen. I was very surprised how easy it was to use. I started off by using up some of the smaller apples which are too fiddly to peel. It only took a few minutes to turn them into this:

Hmmm. Not really what I had envisaged. After a bit of brain-cudgelling my chemistry A-level kicked in and I filtered the murky liquid through a tea-towel. The filtrate (good word!) does actually look like apple juice:

Our apples are cooking apples so the juice is sharp, but mixing it with pear juice should sweeten it. In the meantime I am rapidly filling up the freezer with pots of golden juice.

Edited to add: Pear juice did indeed work really well with the sharp apple juice.