Making The Most Of Your Apple Peels

Part of the frugal lifestyle we are trying for envolves not wasting things and making the most of our food items. To me this is the fun part, it lets me get creative with my cooking. We were making quite a few apple crisps this Fall and found ourselves wondering what we could do with the peels.

One thing we use the apple peels for is to chop them up small, freeze them and add a few to our oatmeal for breakfast. This is great but we had too many apple peels to use in this way. This week I tried making an apple glaze with them and it turned out great! Here is the recipe I came up with for it.

Ingredients
leftover apple peels and cores
water
2 tbs brown sugar

Put peels and cores in a saucepan and cover with water. Boil for about 30 minutes and the strain out peels and cores leaving apple infused water. Boil until the mixture has reduced by half or until you get it the consistency you want.  Add brown sugar and stir to dissolve.

Finished apple glaze

This would probably be great on a dessert but we used it to cook pork chops in. Pork and apples just go together and are a natural pairing.

The above is not a great picture (especially since I forgot to take the picture until after I'd started eating it!) but it shows how we incorporated the glaze in to a meal. These are apple glazed pork chops with salt and vinegar broiled potatoes and cabbage and onion sauteed in butter. Yummy!