Nothing Like Waking Up to the Smell of Warm, Spiced Apples

The Midwest apple harvest is in full swing, so many of us are finding ourselves loaded down with extra fruit.

Thanks to 4H-Champ, I learned how easy it is to make crock pot applesauce.

The hardest part is actually cutting, coring and peeling the apples. There are gadgets available that make that easier. It took me about 15 minutes last night to prep 10 apples for this super easy Cooks.com recipe so that my family could have steaming hot applesauce for breakfast.

Here's the recipe, plus my notes:

10 lg. cooking apples, peeled, cored & sliced or cut in chunks [Keep the chunks large if you want more texture.]
1/2 c. water
1 tsp. cinnamon [Pick any spice that goes with apples.]
1/2 to 1 c. sugar [I like how you can control the sweetness. I used a variety of apples, many of them were very sweet, so 1 cup of sugar would have been way too much.]

Put all ingredients into crockpot. Should be about 3/4 full. Cover and cook on low 8 to 10 hours (high 3 to 4 hours).

Next time I'm going to play around with the spices, maybe add allspice and some citrus rind or mix up the fruit a bit. I also want to see about adding tapioca.

My grandmother used to make tapioca applesauce, collecting apples from the trees in The Farm's orchard. I absolutely loved it, but have never been able to repeat it on my own. I'm thinking the crock pot (which is more patient than me), will do the trick.