I recently read an editorial in the New York Times that said the social ties in American neighborhoods are half as strong as they were in the 1950s. We don’t seem to have this problem on my block, and I think it’s because so many of our neighbors grow food. When you have an abundance of cherries, or apples, or snap peas, a logical solution is to knock on your neighbor’s door with a bag of fresh produce in hand.

The other night, our neighbors across the street, Katie and Tom, invited a few people over to make applesauce. They have a big, old apple tree in their yard that has been dropping ripe apples all over their lawn and patio for the past couple of weeks. Rather than let the apples go to waste, they decided to make applesauce.

Katie borrowed this super cool machine called the Squeezo from her mom and set it up on a butcher block in the backyard. The Squeezo looks kind of like a meat grinder for fruit. Basically, you scoop cooked apples into a funnel, turn a heavy crank, and presto, applesauce comes out one end, and the apples’ skins, seed, and pomace squeezes out the other.

Cranking out huge vats of applesauce made us all hungry (it smells so good!), so we decided to make Aebelskivers, which are these little spherical, pillowy pancakes that you serve with applesauce. Jon cooked up batch after batch of them and we ate them hot off the stove dipped in applesauce and sprinkled with powdered sugar. At the end of the evening everyone left Tom and Katie’s with a full belly, a big freezer bag filled with applesauce, and plans to hang out again soon.