I bought a buttload of Granny Smith apples last week. Like about 5lb, because they were cheap, and I LOVE Granny Smith apples. Not quite as much as I love Braeburn apples, but I sure like 'em a lot. So I get my ginormous sack of apples home, and discover that they're not just green like a Granny Smith is supposed to be, they are greeeeeeen!
I'm basically a nanny-goat, and I can and will eat damn near anything of the fruit or vegetable persuasion, and I couldn't hack it with these apples. Seriously, when you got through to the cores, the seeds were cream-colored. These apples were NOT RIPE and dog only knows who saw fit to pick 'em. Bleh. I ate about 6 of them out of sheer, foolish optimism, then gave up and made a massive vat of applesauce. I ran out of space in my vat for the last three apples, so I invented a recipe. It is baking right now, and we shall see how it turns out.
When I was in college, when I got my first apartment, I took to cooking like a one-legged duck to water–lots of enthusiasm, not a lot of direction. I regularly found myself lacking key ingredients for many formal recipes, and became wildly adventurous with substituting. This lent to many a dinner which only faintly resembled its intentions, but rarely did I make anything so foul that it could not be ingested. Due to copious trial-and-error experience, I am now quite adept at making-do on the cooking and baking front, and often take a cavalier, Frontier-Woman approach to measuring. Handful, splash, scoop, and pinch are all perfectly reasonable units of measure in my kitchen, and are key components of any Gonzo Baking in which I might wish to indulge.
So, to use up the last of those apples, plus a half a stick of cream-cheese that was sitting in my fridge, I mocked up some sort of cobbler-thingy.
I based the dough bit off a biscuit recipe. But I didn't have any shortening.
So.
3 cups flour, sifted
approx 4 oz. cream cheese (and I got to do that nifty knife-choppy thing to mix it into the flour)
4 capfuls of olive oil (about 4tbsp)
4 tsp baking powder
1 cup soy milk
aprox 1/4 cup brown sugar
3 apples, chopped fine
approx 1/4 cup brown sugar
some cinnamon (I ran out of pre-ground cinnamon, but I found some stick cinnamon in the cupboard from the last time I mulled wine, so I took it and put it in my little food processor and ground the everloving fuck out of it, then put the cinnamon shards in a sifter and sifted some over the chopped apples and sugar, mixed it up, added a little more cinnamon, mixed, etc., until it smelled about right.
So I put the chopped up apples in a casserole dish, threw in a handful of brown sugar, probably about 1/4 cup, give-or-take, and the cinnamon. Then I packed the biscuit-dough stuff on top of it, and stuck it in the oven at 400. The biscuit recipe says 12 minutes. I'm giving it 15, then checking on it.