When you have made a commitment to taking it slow and you have a school holiday right smack in the middle of October, you go to the pick-your-own farm. You watch your child delight in nature and in his cousins and you drive home with a trunk full of the goodness of the earth. And you hope your child’s superstitiously declared desire to “eat an apple a day to keep the doctor away” will hold out for at least another month so as to insure a sizable dent in the bounty of fruit you are lugging out of the car.
And when your child surveys the wonders of his harvest and announces with joy and anticipation, as you attempt to find places to store this collection of fruit in your tiny city apartment kitchen, “I am ready to bake,” you have only one choice. You put the catching up on emails, the finishing of paperwork, the making of dinner on hold and you bake with your child.
With great excitement, WJ washed and chopped apples as I made an attempt at overhauling the Joy of Cooking’s apple crisp recipe. I used whole-wheat pastry flour instead of all purpose and substituted half honey and half agave syrup for the sugar. I knew the topping would be wet instead of crumbly with these substitutions so I planned to add some oatmeal, but found that I only had steel cut, which I have never baked with and this did not seem a good time to try. I added a handful of almonds to the dough and food-processed it. Still wet. A handful of wheat germ; still wet. Staring into the open cabinets, I saw the Honey Nut Cheerios and thought to myself, couldn’t hurt! So I added a big handful of those too and chopped them in the food processor. The dough was doughier but still not the chunky crumbs you usually sprinkle atop a crisp.
Our apple crisp was not all that crispy; maybe it was crispish, a little more like a cobbler. But it was crunchy thanks to the nuts and the Cheerios. And it was warm and sweet on a cool fall evening, keeping us together at the table for a few minutes more.
Have you picked your fall fruits yet?