Apple Crisp

So many of my friends have been talking about apples lately. Seems like everyone's going apple-picking, then turning their produce into applesauce and apple pie and apple crisp. I felt left out and decided to join in with store-bought apples. Coincidentally, I saw honey crisp apples at the grocery store the other day. I had never heard of them until I read a blog post by a friend that has moved to the South and desperately misses her New York apples… until she found these. I figured they must be good so I picked up a bunch.

I made apple crisp a week or two ago. It was my first apple crisp ever, and I didn’t have the time or patience to really devote to searching for a great recipe. I settled for one that was easy and had good reviews. I thought it was decent, but nothing special. It used white sugar instead of brown, though, and just didn’t seem to have enough topping. Since I still had some apples left, I thought I’d give it another shot and work a little harder to make it a delicious apple crisp.

I started off with slicing the apples as thinly as I could. They seemed a little crunchy in last week’s attempt, and I thought this might help.

This recipe is definitely different. It called for pecans and walnuts in a food processor.

They sure look different all chopped up.

I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. I thought a “dash” of cinnamon and nutmeg were nowhere near enough, so I did a 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and 1/4 tsp of nutmeg. And rather than sprinkling them on the apples and baking them for a little while, I put them in with the brown sugar and flour. Mainly because I failed to read the directions.

I dumped the mixture in the food processor with the nuts and blended it up. Then I turned to my butter. It said to add “diced butter.” I had never diced butter before. It was surprisingly fun. Clean cuts, didn’t stick to the knife, somehow very satisfying material to slice up!

When I added this to the mixture in the food processor, it took on the consistency of very course, wet sand.

It was pretty strange to spoon it on over my apples. Couldn’t shake the feeling that I was spooning stuff from my childhood sandbox onto my apples, making pretend food.

If I’d read the directions thoroughly, I’d have baked the apples for a little while first. Oh well. Baked them now!

Not a great picture, and I admit, I played with the “brightness” and “contrast” scroll bars because it was originally kind of dark, but does it show you how good this smelled?

Or tasted?

I guess not. Too bad. It smelled and tasted pretty amazing. Just saying.

Recipe in Tastebook soonish!