Applesauce & Applepaints

Today we had an apple tasting, made homemade applesauce, and painted…or tried to…with cut up apples.

First, I dug the various varieties of apples out of our fridge:

Ginger gold, summer gold & pink lady

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of summer gold, and based on how incredibly tart they were I suspect the man at the farmer’s market just picked ginger gold apples waaaay too early!  The girls definitely likd the pink lady apple the best, but also enjoyed the other two, despite the fact that they weren’t so sweet.

Chopped up apples in a pot.

Then I peeled and chopped the apples while the girls snuck apple peels to munch on.  We added a couple more ginger gold apples and wound up with about 7 cups of chopped apples.  To this we added a tablespoon of sugar (since the apples were mostly tart), a few drops of lemon juice (to prevent it from browning so much), about 1/2 cup of water, and several shakes of cinnamon.

Is that enough cinnamon...?

While that was cooking (for about 10 minutes?) we sliced an apple around it’s middle and found a star shape made by the seeds!

Look, a star!

So I got out some paint and paper.  However, the apples didn’t really cooperate so much…they just made a paint-y mess.

Er...this worked better in my head.

So then we resorted to finger painting (the templates from our stained glass apples).

Finger painting is more fun, anyway.
Squishy red paint.
We could make apple prints on the apple templates!
Messy, messy jazz hands.
Wait, we're finger painting...not painting fingers!

Finally, the apples were cooked and mushy.  So, after lots and lots of hand-washing, we got out the potato-masher and smashed them…

This looks smashing!

…and ate the resulting delicious applesauce warm.  Mmmm.

So very, very yummy!