Crockpot Apple Butter and Pretend Apple Soup

 

We still have a bunch of these beautiful apples left so the boys and I decided to make crock pot apple butter.

Crock pot Apple Butter

Apples- peeled and chopped

Cinnamon

Apple Pie Spice

Ground Cloves

2 cups of Brown Sugar

2/3 cup water

First peel and chop your apples:

I peeled the apples and cut out the cores and the boys were able to chop the apples with butter knifes. Use your judgement as to how much or how little your child can help with this step. I have a crank apple peeler and corer that we used to do this step last year but I have no clue where I stored it! 

Keep peeling and chopping until your crock pot is about 3/4 full. It will cook down a lot!

Add 2/3 cup water, 2 cups brown sugar (I've seen recipes with white sugar or honey but my Grandma always used brown because she liked to get a deep brown apple butter).

Let your helpers sprinkle on cinnamon, apple pie spice and cloves. They can be fairly generous with the cinnamon but we did 5 shakes of the apple pie spice and cloves. Mix well and cook in the crock pot on high for 3-4 hours or low for 6-7 hours until the apples are soft. Mash well with a potato masher if you want it chunky or an immersion blender or blend in batches in a blender if you want it smooth. Then cook on high with the lid off for an additional 1-2 hours. When its finished it will be thick and stick to the back of a spoon. Sorry I didn't get a picture of the finished product. I put mine in freezer jars and froze it.

After all our peeling we were left with this:

So I thought I would let the kids play with and explore the peels and cores. I brought out some containers and water they could use too.

 Digging for seeds.

 Will it float?

 Then they decided to make pretend apple soup!

When they were finished we spread the apple soup in our garden for the birds and squirrels to enjoy.

Shared on Made by you Monday  and what-makes-you-say-mmmmm

Fun For Dinner! Make Your Own Sub Shop

I've been trying to get the boys more involved in cooking dinner because they love helping me cook. So last night I thought it would be fun if we had a make your own sub shop for dinner. Now I know this isn't a ground breaking new idea but when cooking with kids I think simple is fine. I put out a tray of assorted veggie meat, cheese, olives, pickles, and sliced veggies and some sub rolls. I also put fabric over the table because whenever we play restaurant the boys like to have a table cloth to make it fancy!

I invited the boys to the table and told them we were going to make our own subs for dinner. This lead to a fun conversation about underwater submarines. They had fun picking out what they would like on their sub.

L really liked putting the ingredients on his roll. E just wanted to eat everything separately.

We had a fun sub shop dinner!