Raspberry Applesauce (Frugal Food Thursday)

Welcome to Frugal Food Thursday!  If you have a great frugal recipe, please link up below! 

These recipes are also listed at these wonderful linkup parties - thank you to all the hosts for allowing me to link up!

There are well over one hundred recipes here at Frugal Follies - click here for the list!  Some have been very popular over the years, while others haven't seen the light of day since they were published.  So I thought I'd reprint one that I loved from the second week of this blog (it's now over 3 years old), but hasn't seen as much blog love since then!

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So last week I was buying produce at Penn-Dutch and looked over the different bags of apples. I saw one bag of Rome apples that were on sale, much cheaper than the Red Delicious or Granny Smith. So I decided to give them a try.

I put them in the kids' lunches Monday, and when they came back, they told me that they were disgusting. I looked at the bag and realized that Rome apples are for baking, not for eating out of hand. Oops.

So, what to do with the rest of the apples? Making applesauce in the crockpot came to mind. I recently got a new crockpot after the ceramic crock of the old one developed a crack. (Yes, it was a crackpot.) This was the perfect thing to make to break it in!

When I started peeling and dicing the Rome apples, I noticed that their flesh was pink-flecked. That made me start to think... instead of using lemon juice or apple juice, as many recipes specify, why not use my daughter's apple-raspberry juice? (The store was all out of the apple juice concentrate brand that I had a coupon for, so I figured I'd give apple-raspberry a try. It's good!) So I used it. I didn't have quite enough Rome apples, so I threw in a couple of Red Delicious apples I found while cleaning out the pantry for the Eat from the Pantry Challenge, and a couple of Granny Smiths I had bought that day.

After a few hours of cooking, there were still chunks of apples in the crockpot, and I wondered if it would ever simmer down into sauce. But then, almost magically, all the lumps disappeared into lovely, dark pink-colored sauce. Once it cooled down, I tried it - deliciously sweet!

RASPBERRY APPLESAUCE

10 apples, peeled, cored, and diced
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup apple-raspberry juice.

Put all ingredients in the crockpot. Cook on High for 4-5 hours or Low for 8 hours.

There are lots more easy and cheap recipes posted here at Frugal Follies.  Click here for the list!

Got a great frugal recipe?  Link below to your actual post, not your main page.  Please only link up recipes and other food-related posts. I'd appreciate it if you would link back to Frugal Food Thursday as well! If you have a linkup party that you'd like me to know about, please leave a comment below.





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