Applesauce Time!

Continuing on with our Apple Week celebrations, we’re enjoying applesauce today!

There are so many places we can connect as a family during our everyday routines, and the kitchen is one of them! We’re always looking for opportunities for the kids to help us prepare food. Sure, this can be a challenge, because kids helping in the kitchen inevitably leads to more of a mess! But, it’s valuable to start teaching them these life skills early, so we brace ourselves for a messier kitchen and do all we can to set everyone up for success! This starts with finding a recipe or task that is easy, not overly messy, and appropriate for your children’s fine motor skills. Applesauce is the answer! It’s super simple and the prep work is relatively tidy. We’ve already made a couple of batches of sweet, tangy applesauce since our apple picking afternoon! Isaac and I peeled the skin from the apples and cut them into chunks. We then handed the apple chunks to the kids so they could slice them into smaller pieces and drop them into the sauce pan. Our kids use butter knives or kids’ knives to keep there little fingers safe. (We have this set of kid’s kitchen tools and love it!) Once the saucepan is filled with apples we squeeze the juice of one lemon over the pieces and gave them a toss. Then we added a splash of fresh apple cider to the pan, covered it with a lid and set it over medium-low heat to bubble away for the next few hours. Other than stirring the sauce occasionally and monitoring the temperature to ensure it’s not too hot, you don’t have to do anything else!

One thing you could do while you wait for your apples to cook down into sauce is snuggle up and read together! We have some wonderful apple books that inspire us every fall.

Applesauce Season focuses on so many of our favorite things– family, traditions, seasonal celebrations, and food! I think we love it more every time we read it! How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World follows the adventure of a girl who sets out to make an apple pie and discovers her local market is closed. Undaunted, she embarks on a journey around the world, collecting all of the necessary ingredients for her pie. This is a wonderfully witty and creative story, and it includes a very tasty pie recipe at the back that we made last night! Apple Pie ABC just might be my very favorite alphabet book. It features an adorable and determined little dog who is trying to get the fresh apple pie its owner just baked. Apple Pigs is a book I’ve had since my own childhood. A lonely neglected tree fails to produce any fruit, until one little girl began caring for it. Suddenly, there were more apples than anyone knew what to do with– until they decided to host a feast and share with man, and bird, and wooly beast! Red are the Apples is bursting with bright, vibrant illustrations that show unique perspectives. This rhyming book takes you through a colorful fall garden that is about to be harvested.

You can see more of our favorite fall books in this post and on Pinterest!

Friends, do you have any awesome applesauce tips? Tasty apple recipes? Or favorite apple books? We’d love to learn more, so please feel free to share in the comments!