Getting in touch with one’s hunter-gatherer roots….

My schedule doesn’t allow me too much time to indulge in domestic interests, so fortunately, Mr. F is willing and able to serve as master of the kitchen. Unfortunately, he is SO good that we are on Jenny Craig! I had to work around his latest project, Boston Cream Pie (stay tuned), but managed to do so even in our little kitchen.

We happen to have a very hyperactive See Canyon apple tree in our yard, and I thought it would be fun to try my hand at some homemade applesauce. In the past, using these lovely baking apples was too much of a chore, but Mr. F found this handy little gizmo that peels, cores, and slices the apples (even our less than perfectly shaped ones) with a simple turn of the handle.

Armed with this magic wonder of technology (that cost all of $19.95 at our local Linens ‘n Things), I have been making enough applesauce to feed an army for a year–fortunately, the stuff freezes well, and we have three, yes three, chest freezers in the garage (don’t ask–Mr. F needs all of these for his many cooking projects). I adapted a nifty recipe from Simply Recipes that tastes like apple pie without the crust–much better than the watery commercial stuff I’d been buying. After running it through my nutritiondata.com analyzer, it appears that it’s quite Jenny-compliant, too, in terms of nutrition and calories.

What really caught my attention about this process, though, was the odd sense of satisfaction I had from making food from my own garden. I had experienced this before, when Mr. F and I would visit u-pick blackberry farms when we lived in New York. It’s an interesting sense of satisfaction and reward to go out and find your own food, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this correlated with an fMRI. I actually looked for any such research, but couldn’t find it. My guess is that the same thing happens when people hunt and fish, and it would be interesting to see if there were any gender differences (if I had to hunt or fish to eat, I know I would starve first).

If you’d like to test out the recipe, you can find it here, but don’t expect it to taste as good with store-bought apples!