Apple

Here are some really quick apple pie pockets that go together literally in just a couple of minutes - I can get up for 5am for my early morning Aikido class, and have one in my hand out of the oven 30 minutes later when I'm jumping in the car. This assumes you have some dough in the fridge - which I strongly encourage you to get into the habit of doing for making all sorts of pockets, pizzas, buns and more. Not only are these quick, but if you use whole wheat dough they are quite healthy too, with no fat aside from the little bit used to make the dough, and just 2 teaspoons of brown sugar per pocket.

Making applesauce is pretty easy to do, if a bit time consuming. It does work out to be a fair bit cheaper than buying even the cheapest of applesauce though. 1/2 bushel cost me $12, and gave me 18 x 500ml jars of applesauce. The home made stuff seems to be a lot thicker than the commercial stuff, so there is probably even more apple per unit volume.

Since I made the salsa and pasta / pizza sauce really mild this year, I wanted to make a nuclear hot chili sauce to compensate. Something that I could use just like that, or mix into one of my other tomato sauces to spice it up a bit. I did some googling and asking around, and finally found a recipe that really appealed to me. I did not follow that recipe to the T - left out the salt and pepper, and the vinegar. The latter I believe was only added to make it suitable for boiling water canning, which I do not have to do since I pressure can.

I wanted a sweet tomato-based sauce that was spicey as heck, and that's what I got! It's got apples, peaches, pears and honey to sweeten it up. It calls for 10 lbs of tomatoes - I used 7 lbs of romas, 2 lbs of various heirlooms from my CSA, and about 1300 ml of canned diced tomatoes from my 2006 batch.