Making Applesauce

Oh Fall, how I love you so! One of our yearly fall fun activities is to make applesauce. We have a local orchard that sells seconds and we buy them up and make as much sauce as we can to get us through the winter. This year it was a group effort. I decided to try and use this as a homeschool lesson.

 We split the apples up. Some were peeled and cored by my helpers.

We had a lot of apples.

The apples that didn't fit in the crock pot I cut up and did the old fashioned way in stock pots on the stove. 

The crock pot is such an easy way to make the applesauce. Just throw them in with as much cinnamon as you like and just a few Tablespoons of water. Let them cook on low until they are ready to be mushed. My first go round I just used a spoon to stir and mush. The next time I used my immersion blender. The blender is the better option if you have one. But either will work.

 Meanwhile on the stove the apples were cooking down. I used Macintosh apples which really don't need much extra liquid. My sauce was almost too watery. But you can't mess up apple sauce so it was fine. I have a really poorly designed strainer I used for the apple sauce in the pans. It was much more labor intensive to get the seeds and skins out, but we got a lot more sauce this way.

I used this as a lesson to work on following directions. We also talked about the parts of the apple. My littles collected the seeds and worked on counting and my older kiddos used it as a botany lesson to review some of the concepts we had learned this year. It was a fun way to break up our routine.

I ended up freezing about 10 pints of applesauce and keeping out 2 to eat right away. The kids love eating things they make, and there is no added sugars just apples and cinnamon. Oh, and as a bonus my house smelled amazing!