Cooked fruit is a tasty and healthy winter treat. It’s basically a winter smoothie – minus the shock of cold that your stomach really doesn’t need this time of year. You get all the vitamins, fiber, and pectin in a much easier-to-digest format than raw fruit. I especially love this one during the gray days of winter – the bright lemon flavor wakes up my tastebuds!
Ingredients:
- About 5 medium-sized apples
- One organic Meyer lemon
- About 2″ of fresh ginger root
- Optional: a cup or two of frozen or canned blueberries
- 2-4 Tbl maple syrup
Method:
- Peel, core, and chop the apples.
- Wash the lemon well, because you are going to eat the peel. Cut into quarters, then slice each quarter thinly. Discard any seeds.
- Scrub or peel the ginger and dice small.
- Add apples, lemon, and ginger (and blueberries, if using) to a pan and simmer until the apples have cooked down to a thick applesauce consistency and the lemon and ginger are cooked through.
- Add maple syrup to your taste. The finished product will be delightfully tart but shouldn’t be painfully acidic.
Notes:
- Use a variety of apples for best results. It’s ideal to have some cooking apples, like McIntosh, and some firmer apples, like Galas so you get both the smooth, saucy texture and some firmer bites of apple. But it’ll be good no matter what – and this is a great recipe to use up apples that have gone soft or wrinkly!
- Organic is especially important if you are eating the peel; they spray citrus with a really scary cocktail of chemicals. If you don’t have a Meyer lemon, a regular lemon will do.
- Blueberries add great color and a hit of anthocyanins – this is a great way to use frozen blueberries if the idea of a frozen smoothie in the winter makes you cringe!