Excellent Applesauce

Lest you all think I am a rice-freak, I decided to post something a little different. This is actually something I don't eat much myself, but my son loves it, and my husband and my mom both agree that it is much better than what you can buy at the store.

I try not to be a fanatic about anything, but I am pretty concerned with what my son eats, and I try to make sure that I *know* what is going into his little tummy. I don't like buying a lot of processed foods, or things with too many unpronounceable items in the ingredients list, so I've made most of his baby food myself. It's really pretty easy, and this is something that babies and adults both love.

apparently 5 stars!

8 medium Granny Smith apples
1 cup water
cinnamon
brown sugar to taste

Heat your oven to 350 degrees.

Peel your apples. This is the most time consuming part of the whole process (in terms of time you have to actually spend working on the dish), especially because with Granny Smiths, you're going to want to make sure that you have gotten ALL the peel off your apples. Peel left on will ruin your sauce. Once they're peeled, chop them up, throwing away the cores and seeds and so forth, of course.

Drop all your apples into a casserole dish and add the cup of water. Sprinkle cinnamon very liberally over your apples. Then stir everything up so that the cinnamon gets in the water as well.

Cover and bake. I put this in the oven, and then my son and I went and took a nap, so it was baking for just under two hours. When you remove it from the oven, it's going to look like a mess. Just stir it up really well, and then add brown sugar until it's sweet enough for you. We don't really eat a lot of sweets, so around 1/8 cup was enough for us.

I suppose that if you like your applesauce chunky, rather than smooth, you could just not bake it as long, but my husband likes his smooth, so this works for us. I get to put it in before a nap, and he gets smooth applesauce.

Now, like I said, I don't eat applesauce. I don't know if I'd ever had it before I made this, but I had to taste it in order to make sure it wasn't too tart for the one-year-old, and it was pretty good. My husband and mother, who both like applesauce, both declared it excellent, and MUCH better than commercial applesauce. And it has the added bonus that you know exactly what is in it. Not to mention being almost ridiculously easy to make.