Multi Tasking

making cookies in one corner, apple pie filling at the island



6 quarts of apple pie filling




 40 sugar cookies ready to be iced

Shell asked me if I would please make my " famous" sugar cookies cut into hearts for her to decorate for the up and coming wedding of her friend that she and I were going to attend in Nashville when she drove up last week.  I still had half of the apples that we had bought at the orchard and I knew I'd better do something with them before I headed off to Nashville for four days. I decided to use them in apple pie filling.  I had made up two batches of my cookie dough and put it in the refrigerator for the day.  After dinner that night, I started rolling out the cookies.  When I got the first batch into the oven, I started coring...actually, Chuck cored them and I peeled and cut the apples.  Notice I said " started".  Had to stop and take the cookies out, put them on the rack to cool and cut out more to go into the oven.  Back to the apples!  I put the apples in two big bowls of water with lemon juice in them to keep them from turning brown until I was ready to use them.  Time to take the next batch of cookies out of the oven, roll out more and stick in the oven.  Now it was time to cook the filling to put the apples in.  Of course in the middle of that, I had to take a batch of cookies out of the oven and add more.  Ok, where was I?  Oh yeah...cooking the filling.  I added the cut up apples to the filling and  put it all in the quart jars, then put them in the hot water bath for 25 minutes.  At least that gave me enough time to finish the last batch of cookies and clean up the kitchen.  Whew!  I found out that I'm not good at " multi tasking" thing as I used to be. Don't try this at home if you are over 60 and haven't multi tasked in a very long time. You will feel like your head is spinning!