Teach Your Kids to Make Applesauce (And Then You Never Have to Do it Again Yourself!)

Homemade applesauce is one of the official Things That We Do with Apples in the Fall.

It's tradition! I mean, you know, as far as tradition states that we buy waaaaaay too many apples at the apple orchard in the fall, and then have to find useful things to do with the ones that even we couldn't stuff ourselves with (in this family, we are VERY into apples).

I know that store-bought no-sugar-added applesauce is inexpensive, but our applesauce also has no sugar added, and it's fresh, and local, and we know where all the apples came from, and it's incredibly delicious, and it's good for the kids to learn how to make their own food.

Especially when it's this easy to make!

1. Peel and core the apples. You can prepare as few or as many apples as you want! I think it's a good way to use up any apples that are unsightly enough that the kids won't eat them as-is, mwa-ha-ha.

This bushel of apples did not keep as well as I'd hoped it would (I think it's because I let them all sit at room temperature, when I should have kept most of them stored somewhere cooler), so I had the kids pick through the entire bushel, taking out every apple that had a bad spot or was looking pretty bruised.

The kids peeled and cored each apple, and cut away any remaining bad spots. Then they tossed them directly into that big pot there in the middle of the table:

2. Cook the apples on low in a lidded pot until sufficiently done. The kids put the lid on the pot, then put it on the stove on low heat. This cooks down very gradually for most of the afternoon, and the kids just have to remember to check on it every hour or so:

 
Each time they check on it, they stir it with a wooden spoon and start to mash it down when it's soft enough, and when it reaches a consistency that they both like (chunky is yummy!), they take it off the heat and spoon it directly into large Mason jars.

The kitten helps, because of course he does!

Notice that I had them leave plenty of head space at the top of each Mason jar--we leave one jar in the refrigerator to eat right away, and store the rest of the jars in the freezer.

Well, except for two giant bowls full of applesauce that the kids eat piping hot, of course!

The kids made another, smaller batch of this applesauce a few weeks later, with the very last apples remaining from that bushel, at least the ones that Will didn't juice, and that was it for our orchard apples!

We like this applesauce recipe enough that I've never experimented, but sometime I plan to get enough time on my hands that I go a little stir-crazy and decide to try out something like these spiced or fruit-blended applesauce recipes. I'm also interested in the fact that the author doesn't peel the apples first; instead, the applesauce is blended afterwards, which apparently breaks up the peels enough to hide them? I'd love the nutrition and fiber boost of including the apple peels, but the one time I did try to make applesauce with the peels on, I was definitely left with woody bits of peel all through the applesauce, so I dunno.

P.S. For those of you playing the homeschool game, here are the boxes that we checked off with this activity!

• Both kids used this as a step for the Girl Scout Senior Locavore badge (Syd is only a Cadette, but I let her earn Senior badges. Feel free to call the Badge Police on me!).
• Will used this as an enrichment activity for the Girl Scout Senior Sow What Journey.
• I'm also looping the Sow What Journey into Will's AP Environmental Science class, since food issues are intrinsically tied into land use.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Infused Vinegar and Rustic Weddings

a review of the book Rustic Chic Wedding

and a tutorial for making homemade infused vinegars for cleaning

These infused vinegars are something that I've been doing for quite a while, and it's really fun. Now whenever I've got something a little strange in the pantry--the rest of the package of whole cloves that I'm pretty sure has already sat on the shelf for a year, yet another batch of peppermint thinned from the garden after I've already filled an entire gallon jar with dried peppermint--I look it up to see if it has any disinfecting or other cleaning properties, and if it does, then I infuse it into a Mason jar of vinegar. The jars look pretty, and they can basically sit out at room temperature until I want them. It's a double win!

We're actually swimming in clementines right now, so one of my goals for the day--along with making a couple of etsy orders, writing lesson plans, and finishing an excellent book that I started last night and then didn't want to put down for bed--is to start a half-gallon jar to infuse clementine vinegar. 

Sitting on the windowsill, facing the outside that tomorrow will reach 9 degrees at the HIGHEST, the jar of orange-hued vinegar at least *looks* sunny.

Dehydrated Orange Garland, Country-Style

I know, I know, it's so countrified that it kind of makes me wonder when I'm going to start cross-stitching ducks in bonnets, but still...

Pretty, right? The view straight out my study window in winter is, shall we say...unlovely--something about the next-door neighbors and my sinking suspicion that it's their bathroom window, uncurtained, that I'm staring directly into through the bare branches of the rose of Sharon that sits between our houses. I've gotten into the habit lately of putting some pretty things up in the study window, then, pretty things that can be taken down when the rose of Sharon flowers in the spring, pretty things that look especially pretty when placed in a window, such as this dehydrated orange garland that the girls and I made, so lovely to look at when back-lit by the morning sun:

Our house is naturally so dark that blocking a window at all seems almost criminal, but until we find our dream house one day, with many bright windows and lots of roses of Sharon but absolutely no neighbors for acres and acres, this will do.

Seriously, though, a little curtain in front of a bathroom window? That's not hard!

How to Have a Happy Harvest

It requires at least one (but preferably five) sleepy kittens--
--some very busy little girls-- --and a finished total of 16 pints of diced tomatoes with basil:On the whole, now that my very first experience in canning is over, I'd say that the process is way easier than I'd thought it would be--if I can do it the first time with no major mishaps, then it's DEFINITELY easier than I thought it would be--but it did require a major fight with my spouse (who agreed before we started that he would not try to tell me how to do anything while we were canning, on account of I have read and watched probably a dozen tutorials on canning and he has read/watched none, and who did not last half an hour before breaking that promise and being asked to go spend some time reading comics at the bookstore), an unplanned trip to Wal-mart on a weekend night to grab more wide-mouth mason jars, and waaaaaaaay more hours than I thought it would. I mean way more, like midnight more.

I've been researching canning and getting advice from real-live people who know how to preserve their own food (thanks, Cake!) for months, now, but this tutorial on canning diced tomatoes and this canning tutorial video were especially super-helpful, and both short enough to look over several times on the day itself. I also was able to follow the instructions that came with my brand-new pressure canner for how to can tomatoes, and thus I was pretty much all set.

I had sort of hoped that the girls would be uninterested in the canning, and would prefer to entertain themselves independently all day while I worked--this was naive. And thus I am now also the expert on how to let a three-year-old and a five-year-old "help" one preserve food. The trick? Have them hand you stuff. They handed me tomatoes from the cold-water bath so that I could peel them, and then they put each skinned tomato into a bowl (and then, sometimes, from that bowl into another bowl...). Or give them scissors and a bowl and let them go mangle your basil plants. And then they can wash the basil, and the tomatoes. And then they can use the scissors to cut the basil. They can stir the pot in which the diced tomatoes with basil needs to boil for five minutes. They can hold the ruler and measure the half-inch headspace in each mason jar as you pour in the hot tomatoes. They can wipe up the ridiculous amount of tomato juice that you spilled. They can carry all the tomato peels out to the compost bin, and help you fill the dishwasher. See? Helpful! And it probably only adds an extra hour or two to the total time you'll spend canning!

So that's one winter's worth of vegetarian chili taken care of:

Now, anybody have a good recipe for a nice, versatile tomato sauce? Cause I bet the farmer's market will have canning tomatoes again this Saturday...