How can I enter items without adding quote marks?

Greetings Treehouse mates,

I've been writing some of the code featured in these videos outside of the workspace, creating files with a text editor, and using my computer's terminal. I've been staying true to the shopping list code featured here in the video, however it seems that if I want to enter an item, I have to enter it with quote marks. Other than that it works perfectly fine. Can you help me modify my code so I can enter any item without quotemarks? here's what I have so far.

# make a list to hold on to our items
shopping_list = []

# print out instructions on how to use the app
print("What should we pick up at the store?")
print("Enter 'DONE' to stop adding items.")

while True:
    # ask for new items
    new_item = input("> ")
    # I thought converting the input variable to a string would solve the problem.
    new_item = str(new_item) 

    # be able to quit the app
    if new_item == 'DONE':
        break

    # add new items to our list
    shopping_list.append(new_item)


# print out the list
print("Here's your list:")

for item in shopping_list:
    print(item)

HERE'S WHAT MY SHELL DISPLAYS WHEN I TRY TO ENTER apples WITHOUT QUOTEMARKS:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/NAMEWITHHELD/Documents/Programming/Treehouse/shopping_list.py", line 10, in <module> new_item = input("> ") File "<string>", line 1, in <module> NameError: name 'apples' is not defined