CJ's Apple Sauce

I have bought apple sauce all my life and never given it a second thought. I just sort of thought there was some super secret complicated recipe and it only came at the store. (My grandmother is roling over in her grave with that confession). Enter the 3yo. She found a book with pictures of people eating apples in all sorts of ways. Not being able yet to read she got it in her head that it had a recipe for apple sauce since there was a picture of people eating it. She was so excited about making apple sauce that I couldn't resist.

It turns out that not only is the recipe not secret - there are lots and lots of them and the basic ingredients are apples, water and sugar! It couldn't be easier - aside from the need to cut and peel a bunch of apples.

Of course I could have just picked a recipe, but I decided it would be more fun to take bits and pieces of a bunch of different ones. Here's what we came up with:

8 apples (cored, peeled and cut into pieces)

1 cup water

1/2 cup of brown sugar (can substitute white)

1/4 cup honey

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon all spice (or cloves)

Mix together in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. At this point the apples will be so mushy you can probably just mash them all with a fork. Otherwise, put it all in a food processor.

Serve hot or let it cool. I'm sure it would taste good cool - ours never made it that far. It was devoured almost as soon as it hit the table. In fact, it was all I could do to fend them off long enough to get the picture.

My 6yo has declared that we should have nothing but homemade applesauce from now on because all that store bought stuff is "lame." I don't have the heart to explain that although it is tasty, all that cutting and peeling is going to be reserved for special occassions!

You can leave the peels on, we tried one small batch that way. I liked it but the kids gave it a thumbs down.

I have been knitting - I'm still working out my sock phobia. I'm on my third pair for the year. Two at a time, magic loop. The toes went smoothly. The feet were fine. The stripes of the self striping yarn matched perfectly.

Then the heels. I'm trying a new short row method that has you place markers after every wrapped stitch. Much, much easier than relying on counting. But after I started knitting in the round again, I discovered that my perfectly matched stripes were no longer perfectly matched! They are off, just a bit - could be the yarn, could be that I knitted an extra row on the heels. I hope that it's the yarn or that it won't matter - I really, really don't want to go backwards!

Here we are all ready for Halloween! The 6yo and a friend and the 3 yo dug out our stash from the basement (by themselves) and went to town on the porch.