Last week we went to a local apple orchard (the same place we picked peaches at earlier this summer). We picked 34 pounds of apples and bought some cider.
LMS picked a few apples, but mostly just held my purse
When we got home, I spent a couple days cooking the apples down into applesauce.
Most of the applesauce is chunky, flavored with cinnamon and fresh ground nutmeg (yum!).
The rest is chunky peach applesauce, also flavored with cinnamon and fresh ground nutmeg (double yum!).
The peaches were some I had frozen this summer, but never got around to doing anything with. So I cooked them down, pureed them, then added them to the chunky applesauce.
On the left: regular applesauce, on the right: peach applesauce
I also used some of the cider to make apple cider muffins.
We couldn't eat the apple cider doughnuts that were for sale at the orchard, but they sure smelled good.
When we got home, I looked through my cookbooks and my favorite gluten free vegan baking sites, and found a recipe that looked good and called for ingredients I had on hand.
The price of the apples was fairly comparable to what we see in the grocery store, but tasted better! I picked two varieties, but I can't remember what they were right off- one was sweeter, the other more tart, so they combined for a good flavor and didn't need added sugar. As with the fruit we picked this summer, it's a good experience to pick your own fruit, but I don't think I saved any money by making my own applesauce. However, there's nothing like the taste of warm homemade applesauce.
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Sometimes it's not so much a price issue. Most of the time the benefits of making something fresh is control of the ingredients - no weird stuff like you see on most labels. It's just a bonus if you can make it cheaper too.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't that much cheaper for me to make my own. when I was pregnant and could only eat my homemade applesauce and not the store bought I knew that I had to make mine in the future. The taste is just better aside from the purity of it.
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