Applesauce

This past weekend my son and I travelled to Kentucky to visit my mother and were fortunate to visit Reed Valley Orchard to pick blackberries. It is amazing to me how much sweeter they are when you pick them fresh as opposed to buying them in the store. Earlier this year we were also able to pick fresh blueberries, raspberries and black raspberries as well. At that time, I froze the blueberries and black raspberries and my mom and I made raspberry jam/syrup (supposed to be jam ended up more like syrup, but still delicious). Seth really enjoyed picking the berries, although I think that we ended up on the winning end of the deal as he ate as many in the orchard as he picked and were weighed so that we could pay for them. He does love fruit. After this visit, we made blackberry jam-YUM! You can see how beautiful the blackberries were:

Something I learned while at the orchard is that they sell imperfect apples. What I mean by imperfect is that they were not picture perfect. They had small spots on the peel or were an odd shape, but otherwise they were perfect apples. So, I bought a bushel of these "imperfect" apples for $6.75. Can you believe that? What a great deal! Always one for a great deal, but then I thought what am I going to do with that many apples? APPLESAUCE! These were the earli-gold variety and known for making great applesauce.

Most recipes for applesauce call for coring and peeling the apples, but I couldn't make myself cut off the healthy peel. So, we had a little experiment to see if we could make applesauce with the peels left on. I sliced and cored the apples using an apple wedger.

Then boiled them with a little bit of water and sugar. After making one batch of applesauce we decided to use even less sugar than called for in the recipe.

Then, the recipe called for putting the cooked apples through a food mill. Well, I don't own a food mill and neither does my mother and we also thought that sounded like a tedious process, so we threw it in our trusty food processor and VOILA . . .applesauce with peels and all.

Now, I am no expert canner. In fact, novice may be stretching my experience at canning, but Mom has canned her share of green beans, jams and soups. So, we canned our applesauce in a pressure canner. For more specific instructions on this entire process you could visit a website like this.

We did not add cinnamon or anything to the applesauce as I am planning on using it in some of my sneaky recipes, plus it just didn't need it. It was delicious and simple and homemade. What a feeling of accomplishment.

Planning on adding a real sneaky recipe soon, for those of you who have noticed that there has not been one of those added in a while.