Also known as Appltober.

Hiya all, it's Robbie again.

Alla dem apples

      I made apple sauce this week. My girlfriend went to an apple orchard on Sunday, and she graciously brought me a bag of apples! Problem was, and we both agreed, while they were darn tasty apples, they just didn't have that crisp, perfect-for-eatin' texture. So I decided I'd make some killer apple sauce! I used the nine Red Baron variety apples she bought me, and two Granny Smiths, stolen from the dining hall.

I was following Bittman's recipe on page 383, but there's not much to follow there.

See the peels boiling in the back?

I skinned, cored, and halved all of the apples, and, not wanting to waste a bit of tasty apple, I threw all of skins and some of the cores into my small pot and set those aside to boil away. I put all the apple flesh, along with some cinnamon sticks & whole cloves, into my big ol' pot, added about a cup of water and a dash of salt and turned it to med-hot, lid on. I cam back around to stir that every ten or fifteen minutes. The apples needed some movement, as the apples on top were barely steaming while the ones on bottom were already saucy. I was a bit worried the electric stove would burn the bottom, like it has everything else I've made on it, but it didn't, thankfully. Turns out these Red Baron apples were the perfect sauce apples; they were all mushy in less than forty minutes. The Granny Smith, not so much.

I strained the peels & cores, got about a half-cup of concentrated apple-stuff, added that to the mix, and let the big pot simmer another half hour. After about one hour, twenty minutes total cooking, I called it done. I put most of it into one tupperware container and let that sit overnight on my windowsill to cool, but I also set aside about 1 cup I plan to use for devious experiments....

Mmmm... saucy...

Good eats!