Teaching myself to cook, one recipe at a time.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

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.

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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.

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

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They sure look different all chopped up.

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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.

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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!

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Recipe in Tastebook soonish!

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