Applesauce

Since I had a few apples lying around, a brand new bottle of ground clove, and a neat recipe, I decided to try applesauce as my next foray into slow-cookery.

I found this recipe on About.com:

• 3 apples, peeled and minced
  
• Water
  
• Cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg
  
• Sugar
  

If you take the time to actually go to the page and check out the recipe, you'll see that I modified it slightly. Namely, I decided to use way less apples (I don't need 10-12 apples' worth of applesauce), added clove and nutmeg, and made no attempt to gauge the amounts of the other ingredients.

All I did was prepare the apples, pour them in, add the spices and sugar, pour in water (way too much, as I discovered later on), and set Gretel to “Low.” I finished this all at about 10:00 PM and turned Gretel off at about 8:00 AM.

It was pretty good. Sweet (the sugar probably wasn't necessary; I'm not sure why I included it in the first place), spicy, and cozy. Also, it made the room smell comfy and spicy, which was great. (The picture doesn't really capture the essence, as I'm sure you've deduced--the only camera I have is the webcam on my mac.)

I don't know that I'll make it again—I enjoyed it, but not enough to justify peeling three apples (easier said than done) and not being able to use Gretel for 8-10 hours. I might try this with another fruit, though; nothing comes to mind immediately, but I really like the idea of slow-cooking fruit for hours and hours with a bunch of spices.