Apple pressing is a fall activity that has sneakily become a tradition.  I say sneakily, because it wasn’t something we planned to do every fall, but it’s so much fun that we’ve done it for the last three years.

Picking the apples, running them through the presser, and then making the juice into cider makes you feel like you’ve gone back in time.  Especially when you’re doing it with a big group of people.  It doesn’t at all feel like work, especially when this is just a few feet away:

So gorgeous!

Chocolate chip cherry pecan cookies.  I know, right!

The best part is watching this–

Turn into this–

And then eventually turning that into hard cider.  Our stock of hard apple cider almost lasted the year before we ran out.  This year, I plan to try to use our cider for cooking.  I think it will be a great replacement for dry sherry.  (Has anyone ever tried it?)

The beginning of cider making is a pretty involved process, but once you get everything in, out and mixed around, all you have to do is let it age.  We found that the last bottles of cider we opened were far better than those first bottles.

And because I like ya, (and because he asked) my husband is going to write a guest post about cider making!   Enjoy, folks.  I hope you try it out for yourself.  You won’t regret it!