Hey, Chef, What's For Dessert?

Having published my “throw in whatever’s in the fridge” burrito recipe, I got an email from a friend, to the effect that I should have included something for dessert.

Okay, if you’re a glutton for punishment, here you go. I do have to give credit to Amy Dacyczyn, writer of the wonderful Tightwad Gazette books. I didn’t copy her recipe, but I did remember that she’d turned a discarded piece of fruit into an “apple crisp” and that gave me an idea of what to do with a one-bite apple.

It’s getting harder to find tasty apples. Red Delicious apples used to be good, but they’ve gotten rather mealy in texture over the years, so I’ve switched to Galas and Fujis. Unfortunately, the last time I went to the grocery store, they didn’t have any Galas or Fujis. So I decided to be adventurous and buy a green apple. I have no idea what kind it was, just that it was bright and shiny and tasty-looking. I bought two.

Those of you who are actual cooks have probably figured out where this is going.

The next day, I pulled one of my lovely green apples out of the fridge, sat down at my computer and took a bite. And promptly spat the chunk of apple out on the keyboard.

I had heard the phrase “baking apple” before, I’d just never before known why some apples were “eating” apples and some were “baking.” Now I know. Baking apples are T-A-R-T.

I looked at the apple. Except for the single bite, it was a perfectly good apple. A shame to just chunk it. Against my principles. What to do? Well, if it was too tart to eat, the solution would be to sweeten it somehow, yes? The phrase “apple crisp” floated into my brain. If I recalled correctly, Amy’s description had involved some type of sugar (or was it syrup?) and some kind of... Bread? Oatmeal? Crumbly stuff?

I bent my powerful mind to the problem. Ten minutes later, the powerful mind have come up with nothing, I went to check the kitchen for inspiration. And suddenly realized I finally had a use for the last cup of multi-grain cereal in the box. You know, the stuff that’s still reasonably fresh, but it's been smashed into such small pieces that if you pour milk on it, it’ll be mush in thirty seconds? I chopped the apple up into small pieces, put it in one of my little silicon panikins and poured the cereal dregs over it. Now I needed a sweetener. I found what looked like a chunk of grainy concrete in the fridge that turned out to be a slab of brown sugar. Took a hammer to it. (Put a dish towel over it and tap gently.) Stuck some in a coffee cup, added a little water, came back a few minutes later and poured the resulting rather chunky syrup over the apple/cereal mixture. Stirred it up and stuck it in the toaster oven. Temperature? Somewhere between 200 and 300 degrees. Came back ten minutes later, stirred the mixture, cooked it another few minutes, turned the toaster oven off, came back twenty minutes later and tried the concoction.

It was DELICIOUS! And another way to get fruit into my “I only like meat and starch” body.

I’m going to chop up the other green apple, freeze the pieces and get another box of cereal. So in another week or so, I can enjoy another delectable Apple Crisp ala Sykes.

Eat your heart out, Amy.