We have three apple trees in our yard: a venerable Gravenstein, a Pink Pearl that we brought back home from a trip to Mendocino last fall and an unknown dwarf that might be another Gravenstein variety. The trees bury us; it’s a challenge to use them up before they rot. This year we’ve already dried plenty and have made plenty of apple sauce so I thought we’d try something different. Enter, Amelia’s lunch box.
- Enough apples, peeled, cored and chopped, to make ~6qts.
- Several large handfuls of dried cranberries.
Throw it all in a pot with some lemon juice over a medium heat and cook until the apples have started to get tender. While some recipes call for making sauce and then using it, that seems like more work than needed; I used a stick blender to chop it all into small bits and then dumped it out into a half sheet pan lined with plastic wrap. The mixture almost came to the top of the pan. Put it in an oven on ‘warm’ and check in once in a while. It took mine near 36 hours to fully dry out. We flipped it over once to help it dry more evenly
When it was all finished we cut it into 1″ x 4″ strips and wrapped them up in wax paper tied with a bit of string ready for a snack.
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