Tis the season for apple picking! My Facebook feed is bogged down with beautiful pictures of adorable families picking apples and pumpkins at local farms. So cute! So perfect for photo ops, but what do you do with a bushel of apples once you get home?

I ended up with about four dozen usable apples from the tree in our backyard. They aren’t the best texture for just eating raw, so I’ve found and made up a bunch of recipes to use them up.

Crock Pot Apple Sauce

There are a million and one crock pot apple sauce recipes out there, but I mostly started with this one from I’m A Lazy Mom blog and from a text message from a friend. Instead of water, I used apple cider. Instead of honey or sugar, I used maple syrup. Since I didn’t peel 100% of the skin off the apples, the sauce didn’t necessarily look that pretty, but it was worlds better than the stuff in a jar at the store.

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Honey Apples With Pork (Or Chicken Or Turkey)

One of my go-to cookbooks, a Junior League of Houston book, Stop and Smell the Rosemary: Recipes and Traditions to Remember has a great recipe for pork roast with honey apples. If you can get your hands on this book, I highly recommend you try the recipe. In the meantime, cook your meat however you like it and make their apples as a side dish. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.

Honey Apples

Print recipe

Ingredients

1/2 cup Honey
1/4 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon Ground Cinnamon
2 tablespoons Apple Cider Vinegar
4 Apples, preferably tart (peeled, cored, and cut into 1/2-inch thick slices)

Directions

1.	Combine honey, salt, cinnamon and vinegar in a large saute pan. Bring to a boil.
2.	Add apples. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

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Apple, Pear, and Dried Cranberry Crisp

I originally cut out this recipe from the October 2007 Bon Apettit magazine and have made it at least once a fall since.

This year, it was a perfect contribution for a new networking group I have joined. At this event, we were asked to use at least two Wisconsin products. You don’t get much more local than my own backyard (apples), but I also used maple syrup from our CSA and spices from Penzey’s. If the whipped cream didn’t work, I think the whiskey or cinnamon ice cream from Purple Door would have been the perfect addition!

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Apple Pie

I’m sorely disappointed in my pies. I wanted to try a homemade crust, but both times the crust turned out dry and too flaky, sucking up all the good juice of the innards. I used recipes from The Dessert Bible and The All New All Purpose: Joy of Cooking. Do you have one I should try next time? And/or do you have a semi-real ingredient version of the Pillsbury crust to recommend? That product is so much easier and tastes way better than homemade in my opinion.

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There are a bunch of recipes left in my “to try” file. Here are some highlights.