This Is Now Your Applesauce, Do Not Try To Deny Its Wishes

You’re saying:

“Chuck, I don’t need a recipe for applesauce. I just throw a bunch of apples into the mouth of an angry dog and let him chew them up and spit them out into a Tupperware bowl and then I dig in with my favorite Spongebob spoon why do you try to force recipes on us, you recipe fascist.”

And sure, you’re right. You could just let an angry dog chew your raw apples into sauce.

But I’m a guy who doesn’t like easy answers. I’m a guy who sees a grizzly bear and who decides to ride it. A guy who goes to the moon and asks, “Why aren’t we going to Mars?” Who eats chocolate and says “WHY CAN’T I EAT ALL THE CHOCOLATE RIGHT NOW?” and then proceeds to eat all the chocolate right now. On the back of a grizzly. On the moon.

So, I’m going to give you a recipe for applesauce.

And you will never make applesauce any other way ever again because if you try, angry praying mantids will eat your fingertips off. It’s true. I’ve seen this shit happen.

Okay, here’s the recipe. Are you ready?

Take seven grapefruits.

Yeah, no, okay, you were right to pause there. This recipe doesn’t feature any fucking grapefruits. You caught me. You were tested and you passed, if only by the skin of your delicate pink genitals. This recipe contains zero grapefruit because that means this applesauce would make your mouth pucker like an ugly butthole. Good. Now we can move to the real recipe.

Take a bunch of apples.

I’m gonna say 6-8 apples, but really, this recipe works regardless of how many apples you choose to use. That’s on you. This decision is in your hands.

Now you ask: “What varietal of apple am I using?”

Again, I don’t much care, but choose two from the following list:

Red Randy, Pink Gingy, McReedy, Jumbaloo, Mojo, Slim Shady, Freya, Honeyshine, Fapplecrisp, Spangdiddler, Obvious Dolly, Yellow Mediocre, Gorgon, Franka Potente, Monkeyplum, Reynolds Black, Tito Dubious, Wormseed, Cratchett, Blue Fenmoore, or Steve.

BOOM you failed that test. None of those are real apples. Not a one of them. Those are all nicknames for penises and vaginas and you didn’t even know that. Those aren’t apples. Why did you think those were apples? Did you think only like, special fancy fucking farmers markets have these? That’s not true at all. See? You just don’t know things. This is why you need me. You need me to trick you out of your own ignorance.

Whatever. I like to put two different types of apple into my sauce.

I use one sweet, and one tart apple variety.

Mostly sweet.

Sweet, I like Jonathan, Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Fuji, Gala.

Then I add in one or two tart apples. Granny Smith, maybe.

Or, if you don’t want to mix: there exists a new apple out there I’d not seen before (so, new to me, maybe) called Sweetango? It’s the bomb. Literally. It’s an apple bomb THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON okay no it’s just metaphorically the bomb. It is both sweet and tart and makes for a nice all-around apple, including existing as an apple that deserves to go inside your applesauce.

Skin these apples as you would flay those who would insult your hair or your shoes.

Cut up these apples into coarse hunks, chunks, bricks and boulders.

Set your HELLBOX (aka, oven) to 350 degrees.

Place all your apple chunks on foil atop a cookie sheet.

Dust these apples with:

A freckling of nutmeg.

A dusting of cinnamon.

A crumbling of brown sugar.

A speckling of vanilla bean.

An alternative to the brown sugar + vanilla bean is to make your very own vanilla sugar, which means shoving a vanilla bean hull into a container of sugar and standing there and staring at it in judgment for seven days whereupon the sugar will absorb the vanilla essence — AKA the vanilla’s soul — and then the sugar tastes both like motherfucking sugar and like motherfucking vanilla at the same time. Which is basically magic, we can all just admit that.

If you do that, sprinkle your vanilla sugar atop the apple chunks.

(“Apple Chunks” was my nickname in the Marines, by the way.)

(THE SPACE MARINES.)

Now, take those apples, and shove them in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

They are done when you spear them with a fork and the fork finds no resistance — it’s like stabbing a cloud with an ice pick because fuck clouds that’s why, fuck them for raining on our wedding day like Alanis warned us all about whatever shut up.

Take the apples out of the oven. Their punishment is complete.

By the way, your house at this point should smell pretty much the best it’s ever smelled. So good it’ll cover up that wet dog + toddler pee + dead body + ennui smell you got going on. It’ll smell like Thanksgiving and Christmas had a baby in your kitchen. And not in that fake-ass shitty way like you find at some stores around this time of the year (seriously, you walk into a crafts store in October it’s like someone punches you in the sinuses with a fist made of chemical potpourri and yeah, that’s right, I go to craft stores because this motherfucker right here likes using wicker and yarn to make his various effigies, go on, make fun of me, see who gets an effigy made of them and burned on my front lawn in a Satanic rite, huh).

Anyway, when I said that the punishment of the apples was complete, obviously I was lying because now you take those apple chunks and you pick up the foil beneath them and slide them into a blender. Or into a pot where you will use an immersion blender (or just use your forehead or your feet, I seriously don’t care, I’m not eating your applesauce, I already made my own).

Then, you will squirt onto them some fresh-squozen lemon juice.

A quarter-to-a-half of a lemon will do. Watch the lemon seeds because those slippery little dicks will try to get into everything. It’s like they want to you to choke on them.

You will also add a half-cup of apple cider. Not apple juice because what are you, a loser? Cider. I said cider. Not cider vinegar because uhhh, ew. Why are you trying to fuck around this late in the game? Are you trying to ruin things? YOU ALWAYS RUIN THINGS.

Anyway.

We are at the point where you could also add other things.

You could add:

a) A dollop of good honey.

b) Another fruit or fruit juice of your choosing.

c) A splash of rum.

d) A pipette (or seven) of bourbon.

Yes, I am advocating boozy applesauce, WHAT OF IT?

All of it is in the blender, yes?

You will now blend them into a desirable consistency.

You like ’em chunky? Leave ’em chunky.

You like ’em aerated into puffy light hillocks of apple foam? THEN DO THAT.

Now it’s done. You can eat it warm or you can send it to the frozen gulag that is your refrigerator for it to develop added flavor overnight.

Then, in the morning, BATHE IN IT.

I mean, EAT IT, I totally didn’t say “bathe.”

The end.

…

Okay, now it’s your turn. This is a recipe exchange whether you knew that or not. Head to the comments, drop a recipe or a link to a recipe or I will find your favorite person in the whole wide world and I will eat them. These are my terms.