Apple Crisp

After a week of eating nothing but turkey, stuffing, squash, mashed potatoes, and pecan pie I'm back to having to cook, which I'm actually glad about since there's only so much eating-related repetition a girl can handle. I think I also wanted to give the kitchen a break since the untimely death of my food processor deserved a moratorium of sorts; yes, I actually was depressed about it all week, especially since I'd lost my voice and couldn't call Kitchenaid's technical support department without rasping and coughing uncontrollably. I decided to give the bowl a last washing in the dishwasher and put it back on the motor unit until I could get a new bowl (the food processor sits on the countertop, since it's by far my favorite appliance and all), and this morning when I put it on again, the locking mechanism in the handle happily snapped back into what resembled the right place. I gingerly pressed the "pulse" button and off it went whirring happily.

Yes, time to start cooking again. Thank you, food gods. Other gods: yes, I love inanimate objects more than most of my fellow human beings.

A previous entry details my, uhm, issues with shopping at Costco, and in a wild, child-shoving, cart-ramming pre-Thanksgiving Costco bonanza, I "somehow" acquired a whopping 20 lbs of potatoes (of which I have 15 left), a dozen "transitional" Granny Smith apples (of which I have six left), a brick of cream cheese, and a huge tub of sour cream. These things have defined shelf lives, and while I don't like to waste, I also am a cheap bastard fascinated with being able to buy 3 lbs of cream cheese for under $5.

Today's use objective was the apples. I used four for my Thanksgiving stuffing, and then I tried to use them as work breakfast food but after two attempts with their unbelievably tough, waxy skin (which resulted in some awesomely bloody gums, which probably signals a need to go to the dentist, but let's not talk about that), I decided they'd be better served as baking apples. A look through my trusty Joy of Cooking while on the shitter this morning (I'm more than ten posts into this blog now and now feel exposed enough to give you such wonderfully revealing facts about my meal-planning methods) gave me a recipe for Apple Crisp, which looked easy enough and would use up all of my remaining apples.

Apple crisp is a pretty straightforward endeavor according to Joy - it involves peeling and chopping up about 2.5 lbs of apples, putting some cinnamony pastry dough on top of it (happily made in the food processor), then throwing the whole thing in the oven. I thought the dough would flatten out a little but it ends up as little crumby things; I took it out after the recommended 50 min of baking (my apple juices were bubbling), let it cool down a little, and found out my apples had been reduced to applesauce. Oops.

It's still pretty tasty.