Homemade Applesauce

I grew up eating homemade applesauce. My mom made chunky applesauce with the skin on, which was good, but my baachan (grandma) used to make skin-off non-chunky, super-sweet applesauce just for me. It always made me feel so special to have a grown-up cook something especially for me. Her applesauce came in a large Bell jar, and I can still remember the exact taste. It was the applesauce equivalent of WonderBread, perfectly suited to a kid's palate because it was sweet, smooth, and the flavors were simple. We now eat the unsweetened applesauce from Trader Joe's, but I had the urge to whip up some cold-weather goodness. Since the only thing at the market right now is apples and root veggies, applesauce seemed like a good dish to whip up. This version is fairly seat-of-my-pants-ish. The flavors are more complex than my grandmother's recipe, but lean more toward the comfort food end of the spectrum than my mom's. Remember, things taste better when they are made with local and/or organic ingredients!

Ingredients:
3-4 lbs. apples (I used Granny Smith, Macoun, and Fuji)
slightly less than 1/4c turbinado sugar (like Sugar in the Raw)- the types of apples that you use will determine how much sugar you need, so be sure to taste your apples before you use them.
1c water
3 slices of lemon skin
2tbsp lemon juice
1tbsp cinnamon
1tsp cloves
1tsp nutmeg
Directions:
Peel your apples, and cut them into 3/4" pieces. Place them in a saucepan with the rest of the ingredients, and simmer until the apples are soft and most of the water is gone (it took my sauce about 20 minutes, but it could take longer depending on the pan that you use and how big your slices are). You'll be able to tell when your sauce is ready because if you push down on the top of the sauce with the back of a spoon, only a teeny bit of thicker liquid will seep onto the spoon. The bubbling should also take on a quality not unlike fully-cooked cream of wheat, where the entire contents of the pot bubble rather than the bubbles just coming up through the contents.
Before cooking:
Fish out the lemon peels with a fork or a pair of hashi (chopsticks)- hashi are SO much better for this job, but if you don't have them around, you can use a fork.
Mush up the apple chunks with a fork, or run the sauce through the blender if you don't like chunky applesauce. Serve warm or cold, and store the remainder in an airtight container in the fridge. Enjoy!