An experiment in lazy cooking

The apple tree has been bothering me for weeks. Sending M out into the wylds, though, is a fool's errand. Every time I come back from work, I ask after the apples and he says Oh and time passes yet again. So I went out with a bucket today and pulled everything I can reach off of the tree. Anything with bite marks got tossed back under for the sharp-teethed bandits who've been plaguing the yard this fall.

Being the epitome of lazy this weekend, I washed the apples, cut off the blossom ends, quartered them and cut out the cores. Then, great or small, they all went into the 6qt stockpot with about an inch and a half of water. Skins and all. In huge chunks. (Are you cringing yet, Mom?) M regaled me with stories of how the doctor dug a chunk of sea urchin spine out of his foot while our apples cooked down over medium-low heat.

Did you know our tree makes yellow apples? No? Neither did I. Apparently, waiting for them to blush makes the horribly mealy. In the pot were blushed, yellow, and tiny greens alike. I stopped when I'd worked down to things smaller than my palm, hard, woody and brightly green.

Now and then I came back and stirred. I figured I'd need to cook the water out of the applesauce and it would take time. One time, I came back to check on the apples and they'd pretty much sauced themselves. There was still water in the pan when I started stirring, but the pectin from the slightly under-ripe apples bound that up (much to my surprise!). Lazy applesauce is apparently a little tart, so I added a glug of honey (about 1-2 Tablespoons), a sprinkle of cloves (about 1/8 tsp), some cinnamon (about 1 tsp) and stirred some more.

There's seeds and skins in there, though. So I got out my favorite simple machine: the food mill, and riced it through in 4-5 min. It's still too tart and destined to be applesauce muffins or pancakes or smitten kitchen's spiced applesauce cake, but it's my favorite texture for applesauce ever.

And I didn't peel anything.

Or cut apples into uniform chunks.

Or obsess about coring out every last seed.

30-45 min of prepwork vs 4-5 minutes of food mill. Is there really any contest here?

I have a kitchen gadget crush on the food mill. Perfect pumpkin puree, effortless applesauce. I'm so, so very curious to see what it does to mashed potatoes, and if I can really trick it into making spätzle for me in a less messy fashion.