After eating flavorless applesauce from the store, thinking about making applesauce homemade, makes me salivate. So when I found a smashing deal on small, tart apples at the farmer’s market, I had to go for it. Besides, my handsome honey loves tart apples.

I was excited about throwing all these small apples in the pot and cooking the halves, but after we started cutting it was obvious there were lots of worms in them. We persevered and cut out bad parts for a while.

After 3/4′s of the pot was full, I gave up and …

pulled out the apples I bought last week from the farmer’s market.

No worms. A full pot in 5 minutes flat.

A moment of silence, please. These pots are . . (sigh) the most amazing cookware I’ve ever used. They function at very low temperatures, so my food isn’t cooked to absolute death every time I make something.

My old pots used to burn every time I cooked batches this big. They have little whistles on the top of every lid. I use medium heat until the whistle sounds. then I close the vent and turn the heat to low.

Everything cooks faster in just a little water (which keeps in the vitamins), with much less energy. My friend Ray from Oklahoma, taught me all about using them (3 years ago), and I’ve been a happy cook since.

A quick wash for sparkling jars.

Kids Helping

Raquel is pushing the cooked apples into the fruit strainer (Back to Basics).

It spits out the pulp and seeds and pours out beautiful sauce.

Lily and Seth have to get in on the action.

The kids love the tart sauce with a bit of brown sugar.

Special Ingredients

I use unrefined sugar called Sucanat (dried cane juice) and savor its crunchy texture. Here’s Nathan, Joel and Raquel inhaling it as fast as I can dish it. 

I add a shake of cinnamon before pouring it in the jar. Yum! Optional add in of  2 to 3 drops of Wild Orange Essential oil

Finished with about 8 quarts-not enough to bother steaming and sealing them. I just stuck them in the outside fridge, since we’ll probably eat them all within a couple weeks.

A girl in our town orders a semi truck load of Yellow Delicious and Fuji apples every October. I’ll do another big batch then, enough to last us more than a few weeks . . . I hope.

See the video we made for fun: