Brown Sugar Double Apple Jam

Of all the sandwich spreads, jam is my favorite (to eat and make LOL).  I'm thinking about entering this one at next year's State Fair.  It's apple pie-y and slightly caramel-y from the unusual addition of brown sugar.  It's a "double" apple jam recipe b/c I use apple cider instead of water, the same way I do for applesauce.  I think I may play with the spice combination a bit, but as is, it's a delicious twist on regular apple jam.

I've tried a variety of chopping methods to make apple spreads, and the best IMHO is putting the apples through the coarse grating plate of my food processor.  The pieces come out uniformly and it's so much faster than hand-dicing.  The apples do seem to brown a bit faster when they're mechanically cut vs. handcutting (I guess b/c the plates aren't quite as sharp as my knives, and "tear" the apple flesh more, creating more surface area to oxidize?) but since you're using brown sugar anyway, color matters a little less.  You can toss the grated apples into some lemon-infused water if you want, but I think that just makes them wetter than you want for jam-making.

By the by, when you see butter called for in a jam or jelly recipe, it's to cut down on the foaming that occurs once the protein-heavy pectin is added to the pot. 

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Eat it the way you found it: Apples

Harvest Pink Lemonade

Making applesauce is no extraordinary feat of cooking.  But figuring out what to do with all the peels and cores can be.  You could just chuck them into the compost, OR you could turn them in a delicious, refreshing pink apple lemonade. 

I like using store-bought lemonade to make life easy on myself and for the fact that I usually find store-bought lemonade to be too sweet and too lemony...when cut with the pink apple juice rendered from the "leftovers" of your applesauce endeavor, it is just right.

I prefer Jonagold apples for making applesauce.  The flavor is so spot-on that I don't add anything except apple cider while cooking.  Good produce ultimately means less work for a better final product, so it's worth finding a local orchard and finding out what good sauce apples they grow.

I don't sieve my applesauce, as I think it's wasteful and I happen to like chunky applesauce.  Most recipes give a yield of about 2 pints per 3 lbs of apples, but that's if you sieve.  Unsieved, I got 11 pints from 10 lbs, or about 3 pints per 3 lbs of apples.  I give the following recipe per 3 lbs. of apples, scale up as desired.  I needed a 12 quart pot for 10 lbs of apples, and it took about 25 minutes for them to cook fully.  The peels and cores from 10 lbs made 3 quarts of pink apple juice, or 6 quarts of pink lemonade.  I froze the apple juice in quart-sized amounts.

And today's I Screw Up So You Don't Have To...if you make loads of applesauce and plan to can it in a water bath process, keep waiting jars in a pot of warm water.  That way, when you put 2nd or 3rd batches of jars into the already-boiling water bath, nothing explodes.  Just a friendly tip.

Lastly...bonus cocktail recipe!  If you get cidered out, try a Chimayo...a surprisingly un-tequila-like mix of tequila, apple cider, lemon juice and cassis (and if you don't know what else to do with the cassis, try a kir or kir royale).


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