So I failed. I failed, failed, failed, failed, failed (my husband hates it when I say that, but it's true). I failed at apple butter, which should've been a simple and easy process, except for one thing: I don't have a food mill.

See, I thought a food mill was the same thing as a food processor, because I've never needed one before. It is totally not the same thing, fyi. A food processor looks like this:

While a food mill looks like this:

So, yeah, not the same thing at all. And the silly thing is that I was trying to save time (and I thought it might give it a fuller flavor) to cook the apples with the peels and cores intact. 

Oops. I was very, very wrong.

So I ended up spending three hours processing a batch of apples just to get 2 quarts of pulp (most of that time was spent with me trying to push mushy apple goo through the holes in the bottom of my big plastic strainer while crying...it didn't work at all) and then cooking the pulp for another couple of hours, trying to get it to the right consistency, which didn't happen.

So we now have four jars of apple syrup, which tastes delicious, but is completely liquidy. Crap.

What am I to do? Well, for starters, I'm doing it all over again today, but with pears and a different recipe. I've got my peeler out and I'm all ready to go. It will work. If not, I may have to do something drastic, like purchasing a gallon of a fruit butter and then re-canning it and taking the credit. Yeah. I'd go there.

But I won't have to...I will win...I will. Probably.