The Applesauce Has Arrived

I love homemade applesauce.  My Grandma Edna used to spoil me with homemade applesauce all the time when I was a teenager and in college.  One time she even brought homemade applesauce to my voice recital, and the jar sat right up on the flower table on the stage while I performed.  I’m sure the audience wondered a bit, but applesauce was one of Grandma Edna’s love gifts.

I like my applesauce tangy and zesty.  When we went apple picking in Bayfield, we picked a box of McIntosh apples to turn into applesauce.  I borrowed my neighbor’s KitchenAid mixer and bought an attachment to strain fruits and vegetables.  The attachment came in yesterday afternoon on the UPS truck, so I spent the evening and  greater part of the night turning a bushel of apples into sauce.  I am in love with the KitchenAid grinder strainer.  Where was that thing when I was grinding up all that food to feed my babies?  I’ve never really felt the need to have a kitchenAid mixer, since most things I like to mix by hand.  However, grinding up all those apples was terribly therapeutic.  The sauce is creamy and wonderful, and the grinding part went so very fast!  Zip, squish, and the warm apples were pulverized.

Dr. Peds couldn’t believe I was still grinding apples at 2:00 a.m.  I want to get the mixer back to my neighbor today, and everything in the kitchen was a chaotic apple-covered mess, so I just wanted to get the whole job done at once.  I canned most of the jars since we don’t have much freezer space right now.  There were thirteen quarts of regular apple sauce, and two and a half quarts of some extra special berry applesauce that I made at the end.  Yum.  I’m having some for lunch, and the big kidlets took some to school in their cute little lunch boxes.