This is Real Simple smokey fish stew from the January 2010 magazine of the same name. It was delicious. Served with crusty parmesan baguette and a crisp 2007 Albariño (Torre Fornelos).

fish stew

14 pints, 3 cups and 8 little lunch sizes

This kind of work takes time and in the end you have to be an applesauce eater. In the middle of the apple cooking, Ken walks in and says “Whoa”. I know – every window was fogged up and we have a lot of windows. I used 12 pounds of honey crisp and 12 pounds of jonagold apples for my sauce. Organic. The hardest part is peeling and quartering the apples. Ken helped. In the first of two batches I cooked the different types of apples together. That was a mistake. Jonagolds cook WAY faster than honey crisp, they are actually pretty mushy. The honey crisp took more than twice as long – some of them were still somewhat “crisp”. HA! Cooking them in separate pots works best. I used about 1/2 inch of organic apple juice to cook/steam them. Stirred them frequently. One of the recipes said to puree the apples in a food processor. Yeah well, the first batch reminded me of baby food and I could not see any of my family powering down this stuff – including me. The pulse option worked better and by the very last batch I was using the potato masher. I like chunkier sauce. Before processing, I mixed all of the sauce together and added 1/4 cup organic lemon juice (per batch). No sugar. Yep it is a bit tart but the mixture of the two apples have a nice flavor. I’m wondering about all of the other varieties now. Processing the pints took 20 minutes and since my canner only holds 7 jars, no matter their size, I had to repeat this step four times.
I know that on a cold winter day, a jar of homemade applesauce will hit the spot! This kind of work feels good – now to wash the windows.

peeling apples

apples cooking

recipe: Home Preserving by Judi Kingry and Lauren Devine