The Applesauce Story

It started with an email from Nadine.

Dear Siblings,

Don't know if you felt turned off to pears like I did, after seemingly endless jars of canned pears and pears sauce when we lived on Curtis Lane. Up until last year when I rediscovered how good pears could be, because Finn loved them as a finger food, one pear a year was good enough for me.

I did take, however, Mommy's ricer for making apple sauce.

This year our peach crop was decimated by an April snow, but we had a bumper pear crop. What to do with them all? Pear sauce. A little sugar and cinnamon  - delight!

Then I responded

I guess I don’t remember being as overwhelmed with pears as you.  I remember Mommy’s applesauce and until I had store bought applesauce never realized all applesauce wasn’t red.

Then there was the texts

So I did do the experiment.  I bought a bag of Empire apples since they were the apples with the reddest skins and cooked them with the skins and then put them through the food mill with the skins.  I didn't include the seeds because I used an apple corer and divider.  This is the result.

This is the applesauce that I make from the apples on our tree that are mostly greenish click here to see them.

Guess that was how Mommy always made reddish applesauce.

No apples this year and looking at the link above the last time we didn't have apples was 2011. Wonder if the tree takes a break every 5 years.

P.S.  I bought 3 lbs of apples for $2.99 and got 26 oz of applesauce.  I could buy a 46 oz jar of Wegmans Natural Applesauce, No Sugar for $2.49.  The moral of the story is - it doesn't pay to make applesauce unless you pick the apples off your tree or you're doing an experiment.

Apples and Apple Crisp

The apple tree behind our deck was loaded with apples this year and they weren't even as buggy as usual.  Because of this, I felt compelled to not waste them.  So rather than letting them rot on the tree or just fall to the ground, which was my first inclination, I decided to make use of them.  The thought of peeling all the apples was not a good one since that would involve more work than I wanted to invest in this project so I decided to just make applesauce.  However, once I had cut away the buggy sections and quartered the apples I decided I could make an apple crisp out of some.  Below is the recipe I used.  It is a modified version of a Weight Watcher recipe that I found at food.com