Homemade Applesauce

Oh, what a wonderful way to start fall around here! We took the bags of apples from Grandpa's house and decided to make homemade applesauce for the first time ever. Dana borrowed an applesauce-making sieve from her mom and we gave it a shot. First, we filled up Dana's HUGE sink with apples to wash them.

Then came the process of coring and cutting out bad spots. This step was the most time consuming but with me, Dana, and Vince, it went a little faster. Surprisingly, the apples from Grandpa's were way better than we thought and only had a few bad ones. Since they were grown without chemicals, we left the peels on for extra nutritional value and color. This was mine and Dana's pile; we eventually gave up on the corer tools and just grabbed knives.

Vince, on the other hand, stuck with the Pampered Chef apple corer and wanted to display his work proudly.

We then cooked the apples; it took 2 stockpots and one regular large pot to cook all the apples in.

After the apples were mushy, we started putting them in the sieve. All the kids had to take turns and it was a really neat "school" project for them. Vince and Dana started to show the kids how it's done.

Here's Dylan taking his turn with Matthew next in line,Then Faith,And of course little Joshie. Gabie, as usual, had absolutely no interest in what we were doing and was off in Gabie-land.

Everyone's favorite part was watching the applesauce just ooze out of the sieve. This step was a lot easier than I expected.

After putting them in containers, we discovered that we ended up with about 10 pounds of homemade applesauce. (Not all of it is featured in the picture below!)I was so impressed with the color because when you leave the skins on when cooking, the applesauce comes out a really neat shade of pink. We made apple juice with the leftover juice in the pan by straining it through cheesecloth into pitchers; it looks like pink lemonade but tastes like apple juice! The kids have already eaten so much of the applesauce, we'll have to go back out to Grandpa's soon before the frost takes all the apples!