(Michael Ashley, if you mean the no-milk-with-meat thing, that is about separating life from death. Milk is for new life, meat is dead, obviously. The rule only applies to Jews. No gentile is a bad puppy for eating a cheeseburger. Happy Hannukah and congrats to your Mom. At least you have a Mom who cooks. Pretty good.)

Mia, it is so easy it’s a joke. You don’t even need sugar and like Sarah said add the cinnamon later. And if you make a small batch and stay on top of the cooking you can let it cook down a lot until the natural sugar carmelizes a little bit but before it burns. Yum. And it’s so healthy too.

Homemade apple sauce? If shipping didn’t cost an arm and a leg, I’d send you bucketloads of that. My mother’s got property with a few apple trees, and some years we’ve got up to 2,000 kg of apples (about 500 kg this year). Anyhow, it’s not so difficult to make; if you want a “whiter” apple sauce, you need to peel the apples. If you don’t peel them, you get the goldish-brown colour. Chop the apples and put them into a pot with some water, steam the chunks till soft, stir occasionally. Remove the pot from the cooker. Then either mash the apple chunks (the peeled ones) or strain them through a colander (if you make a lot of purreed stuff, it pays to get a special straining colander). Sweeten and add cinnamon if desired. Don’t add the cinnamon before boiling as it might turn bitter. Also, if you cook for kids, make sure to get Ceylon cinnamon (e.g. from a pharmacy). Other varieties were shown last year to possibly cause liver inflammations that can be lethal for kids. Just make sure the base of the pot is always covered with water so while boiling so the apples won’t get burnt (that’s a big mess to clean). And if you want to sock up on some apple sauce without giving away freezer space, fill the hot apple sauce into jars with twist-off lids. Close the lids and turn the jars upside down on a wet towel. Let the jars cool. When turning the jars around again, you’ll see that the lids look ’sucked in’; that way you can tell the jar is well-sealed. You can easily store that apple sauce in a dark, dry place for more than a year.