I have wanted to make homemade applesauce ever since I got my crockpot a while back. My baby Crockpot. Have I ever told you about my itty bitty adorable little Crockpot?? I got it on sale on Macys.com for like twenty bucks – quite the steal. It has TWO sections, so you can slow cook two totally different things at the same time. Craziness! I love that it’s so little and can make one or two serving dishes. I used it to make overnight oatmeal, which turned out amazing. I should make it again soon so I can share the recipe and pretty pictures with you guys!
Anyway, back to homemade applesauce. I keep saying it over and over, but I guess I needed a kick in the butt to actually do it. Welp, GYCO (Get Your Chef On) was that kick I needed! I completely forgot that I had signed up to participate in this round of GYCO. Jen and Julie hosts this great blog hop of recipes with a different ingredient challenge each month. This month is applesauce!
The rule is that applesauce should be the main ingredient in your recipe. Eh, I decided to go one step further and not make applesauce the main ingredient, but instead make it the actual recipe. With fall making its way to Florida, warm homemade applesauce sounds really freaking delicious… I was inspired by Oh My Veggie’s Chai Spiced Pear Applesauce, but I didn’t have all of the Chai spices in my cabinet. I did, however, have something else. Something perfect. Pumpkin pie spice! So I spiced up my apples with a little of that. And brown sugar. And cinnamon. And vanilla. Yeah, this is gooooooood. 
PS- I heart chunky applesauce, so I did not puree all of my apples. If you like your applesauce sans chunks, go ahead and mash those puppies into smithereens until you’ve got yourself some smooth, cinnamony deliciousness.
Crockpot Pumpkin Pie Spiced Applesauce
4 small Fuji apples
1 tsp lemon juice
2 1/2 tbsp brown sugar
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp pumpkin pie spice
Combine all ingredients in your slow cooker. Heat on low for about 6 hours.
Remove the cinnamon sticks. Remove half of the apples and use an immersion blender to puree the rest of the apples in the slow cooker. (Like I mentioned above, if you want a completely smooth sauce, just puree all of your fruit instead of removing half)
Applesauce really does not photograph well, so don’t judge the photo… Just know that when I woke up in the morning, my house smelled like apples and pumpkins and made me so excited for fall! 🙂
Make sure to check out all of the other bloggers who are Getting their Chef On and sharing a recipe using our ingredient on the month: applesauce!
