I can hardly wait for strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry and melon season.
In the meantime, fortunately, we still have apples -- I can't imagine living somewhere where apples didn't grow on trees!
In Central New York we're blessed with so many different varieties, each with different flavors and characteristics: Juicy Macintosh and Empires for tossing in the lunch bag and eating out of hand; sweet-tart Macouns for salads and all-purpose eating; Cortlands for pies and baking in general.
And so on.
During the winter, when apples are the only locally grown fruit available, we eat a lot of applesauce. It takes a time commitment, but is ridiculously simple to make. Besides, you can make it in stages.
For sauce, I like Cortlands; their skin and flesh cooks down to a pretty, pink-ish sauce. Cook the apples in the morning and sauce them in the afternoon. Or, cook them at night and let them sit until the next morning.
Here's how to do it:
Pick up a three-pound or five-pound bag of Cortland apples. Wash them, leaving them a little wet, then quarter them. Add a small amount of water (a quarter cup at most) to the bottom of a large pot and dump the apples in the pot. Cover the pot and place on the stove over high heat.
When the apples begin to steam and and rock and roll a little, reduce the heat to medium (or medium-high, depending on your stove). Leave the pot covered and set the timer for 15 minutes.
Remove the lid to check on the progress of the apples, then empty the lid of any moisture. The apples should be steaming little pillows of fluffy fruit at this point, starting to separate from their skins. Give them a stir with a long-handled spoon, then cover and cook them for five more minutes if you doubt their doneness. Remove the lid and dump any accumulated moisture again, then remove the apples from the heat. Let them rest, covered, for six hours or longer.
Using a food mill set over a large bowl, add the apples in small batches and mill them until mostly skins and stems remain. If you work at a computer all day like I do, your hands might hurt a little as you do this! Remove the skins from the food mill occasionally and keep adding and spinning the cooked apples.
To the sauce, add ground cinnamon, ground cloves (a little goes a long way), freshly grated nutmeg and a splash of vanilla extract. A three-pound bag of apples will yield about 4 cups of sauce.
Enjoy the sauce on its own, or with a dollop of lowfat vanilla yogurt. For breakfast, add a sprinkle of granola.
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