Baked apples

I am a big fan of apple crisp – the sweet, crunchy topping with the tender, juicy apples – but sometimes I just don’t have the right amount of apples or time on my hands. And sometimes I don’t really want to make all that extra effort of peeling and cutting up the fruit. I decided to try to find a recipe that would allow me to make apple crisp on a smaller scale and that would still have the taste of crisp without too much extra effort.

This baked apples recipe is so versatile – it’s hard to mess it up. Make it yours – add raisins and walnuts, or bake it in apple or orange juice. It’s really up to you what the final dish will be. Plus it’s great for breakfast or dessert.

Baked Apples
This recipe yields four servings.

• 2 apples, cut lengthwise and cored
• 1/4 cup rolled oats
• 1/4 cup white flour
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• Cinnamon
• Dash of salt
• 2-3 tablespoons vegan butter
• Raisins or nuts, optional
• 1 cup water

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Prepare your apples by cutting them in half. You can also peel your apples if you do not like the skin, and you can also discard the stem.

Cut your apples in half

Core your apples with a melon baller. It might not be entirely even, but that’s okay because you’re going to cover it up with topping.

Coring apples with a melon baller

Mix all of your dry ingredients together. Note that since this is a small batch, I didn’t measure out the cinnamon. I just sprinkled in a little bit (probably about 1/4 teaspoon).

Mixing the dry ingredients together

Once the dry ingredients are incorporated, add the vegan butter and incorporate with your bare hands. It should become a crumbly mixture, yet still a little moist.

Mixing in the vegan butter

If you want to add in nuts or raisins, now would be a good time to add those. Just mix them in with a spoon or with your hands.

Place the apple halves in a deep dish and spoon the topping onto each apple. The topping should cover as much of the top of the sliced apple as possible.

Adding the topping to the apples

You can add the raisins and nuts on top of the topping, but when I did this it did dry out the raisins a little bit.

Add the water to the baking dish (don’t pour on top of the apples), cover with foil and put in the oven for about 30 minutes. The apples may not be entirely done at this point, so remove the foil and bake for another 10 or 15 minutes. Check with a knife to see how soft the apples are. If you need to continue baking them, allow them to bake for 10 or 15 minute intervals.

Once done, allow them to cool for a few minutes and then serve. You can serve with a vegan ice cream, vegan whipped topping or just by themselves.

Yum - the taste of apple crisp without too much effort!

I do admit that the apples didn’t seem to bake long enough. I think that next time I might try increasing the oven temperature to 375 degrees Fahrenheit or I might try to bake for a little longer. Still these turned out really nicely, and I liked the addition of walnuts and raisins.

Do you ever make baked apples or apple crisp?

This is the third post in a series focusing on how to save money by making foods that you would normally buy already made. Not only is it cost-effective to make a lot of your own food, it’s just so much more satisfying and rewarding.

With Mexican being one of my husband’s favorite foods to eat, we nearly always have tortillas or tortilla chips in the house. We’ve kept saying that we should try to make tortillas instead of buying them since it would probably save us money, but we never have done it. With my recent foray into trying to make more things from scratch, however (like pita bread, for example), I decided to just go ahead and do it. I tried a couple of recipes, but while the first was decent, I found it to be too dry. The second recipe I found is a keeper, though, and I’ve already made two or three batches of tortillas using this recipe. It’s now been weeks since we’ve purchased tortillas at the store.

A lot of times when I am trying to find a good recipe, I often look for videos that walk you through the process. I found the following video, which I found to be interesting because instead of using shortening or oil, they use walnuts to make their tortillas. I decided to try it and we really like this recipe.

Whole Wheat Tortillas
This recipe makes about 16 8- to 10-inch tortillas

• 2 cups hot water
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 cup walnuts I think you could probably also use pecans
• 1 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups white flour
• 2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

Blend together the hot water, rolled oats, walnuts and salt for a couple of minutes. If you have a high power blender you can probably get away with less time, but lower powered blenders probably need a full two or three minutes.

While your liquid mixture is blending, stir together the white and whole wheat flours in a large mixing bowl.

Pour your liquid mixture into the flour and mix.

I like to stir it by hand first…

…then use an electric mixer to knead.

Once the tortilla dough is done mixing it will be soft.

Cover the mixing bowl with a damp towel or with plastic wrap, and let the dough rest for about thirty minutes.

After the dough has finished resting, flour a clean surface and take a piece of dough about the size of a ping pong ball or golf ball and roll it out to your desired thickness.

You may find that it’s challenging to make it perfectly round, but with practice you’ll find that it gets easier. You could also use a tortilla press, but it’s not necessary.

Heat a large skillet or pancake griddle over high heat. Place a tortilla on the skillet. Watch it closely, and once you see small bubbles forming turn it over.

It should continue to form larger bubbles.

Wait about 15 to 20 seconds, then turn it over again and let it go for about 10 seconds.

Repeat the process until all tortillas have been made.

These tortillas have a really nice flavor, and you can’t taste the walnuts at all. They can be used for burritos and wraps, or torn up and used for dipping.

They also are pretty cheap to make. Let’s look at the cost difference.

Looking up a random grocery store’s prices on the internet, we can see that a package of whole wheat tortillas (a count of six tortillas) costs $2.89, while a package of eight 8-inch white flour tortillas costs $3.19.

When looking at our ingredients list, the most expensive is the walnuts which is $6.03/pound. There are four cups of walnuts in a one pound bag. Next, the rolled oats comes in at $5.29/42-ounce canister. In this size, there are 15 cups of oats. The whole wheat flour is $3.19/5-pound bag, and the white flour is $3.69/5-pound bag. A 5-pound bag of flour contains 20 cups.

Based upon the above we can see that it costs us 300% more per tortilla if we were to buy the whole wheat version at the store or 233% more per tortilla if we were to buy the white flour version. That’s just crazy how much you can save by making your own! Sure, it can be a little time consuming, and a bit of a workout if you roll each out by hand, but believe me, it’s completely worth it. They taste great, and they keep well in the fridge for about a week, if you’ll let them last that long. :)

Do you have a favorite tortilla recipe?

I recently had a hankerin’ for some cherries. I am not usually a cherry kind of girl, but when they’re in season I’ll indulge in a pound or two. If you get a perfectly ripe cherry, you’ll get a perfectly sweet and spicy flavor – too soon and it will be tart (not my favorite), too late, well it will just be too late.

After gorging myself, I decided that I needed to do something else with them. What I wound up with was a variation on (or very much inspired by) apple crisp.

Mini Cherry Pies
Makes approximately 6 mini pies

• 1 cup cherries, pitted
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1 cup white flour
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 6 – 8 tablespoons vegan butter

First, pit your cherries. I’ve heard that cherry pitters can make things go a bit faster, but just cutting them out with a knife works too. What I did was slice each cherry in half from the top to bottom, then open it up and pry the pit out with my fingers.

Once you have all of the cherries pitted you can mix a couple of teaspoons of sugar with them, but it is not necessary.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (I used my toaster oven). Mix together the remainder of your ingredients (dry first, then incorporating the butter). Press a small amount into each muffin round of a greased muffin pan, making a pie crust of sorts. Make sure that you have some mixture leftover.

Place your muffin pan into the oven and bake for about 10 minutes. When you take it out the crust will have puffed up, but take a spoon and press each back down.

Take your cherries and put some in each of the crusts.

I wound up with almost too many cherries, so you may have to get creative to make sure that they will all fit. Remember that as they bake they will sink a little bit, so more is usually better.

Once all of your crusts are filled, sprinkle the remainder of your crust mixture on top of the cherries.

Put in the oven for about 15 to 20 minutes, monitoring after about 10 minutes to make sure that the top doesn’t burn.

I’ll warn you – these are a little bit of a challenge to take out of the pan, but I found a spoon to be pretty helpful. Surprisingly these stayed intact for the most part, so if you have to do a little extra coaxing they probably won’t break apart.

You can serve with some vegan vanilla ice cream and some of your leftover fresh cherries (if you have any, of course).

These were quite good. I think it would have been easier to just make a cherry crisp, but then it wouldn’t have been as cute, and I probably wouldn’t have wound up with as much crisp/crust.

So that’s the second mini dessert/breakfast I’ve made – the other being mini apple pies. Any other mini ideas?! :)

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) season is soon upon us again, and we cannot wait. We’ve been members of a local CSA for several years now, and finally this year we decided to just purchase the fruit share. Twice. We love fruit – that fruit from Hepworth Farms – so much that we decided to get twice as much.

In the meantime we rely on our local Greenmarket in Union Square. We bought so many apples a few weeks ago that we’re overloaded. We do love apple crisp, though, and we’ve had it a couple of times already.

Apple crisp is one of the best things ever, ever! It’s got crunchy and salty and spicy all rolled into one. We make it so often, but rarely tire of it, and when we have other fruit around we make several different varieties (it is great with peaches, nectarines, and plums).

This is also a recipe that is hard to mess up. If you tweak ingredients, it probably will still taste great.

Apple Crisp

• 6 – 8 apples, peeled, cored, then chopped into large pieces
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 cups brown sugar
• 1 1/2 cups white flour
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 2 cups vegan butter

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease a large baking pan, and then add your chopped apples as they are ready. I don’t ever measure out a specific amount of chopped apples. I just usually add apples as I am peeling and chopping them until the pan is nearly full, but still has room for the mixture of other ingredients. Pour the water over the apples.

In a large bowl stir together all of the dry ingredients. Cut in the vegan butter, and if necessary use your hands to make sure everything is well mixed. Once it is ready, spread it evenly over top of your apples that are already in the pan.

Place the pan in the oven and bake for 40 minutes.

This is amazingly good. Every time I make it though, my husband says that I should double the topping. For him, this is the best part:

For me, though, I think that it needs a good balance of the apples and the topping. Both feel as if they are lacking something if the other is not there.

One thing that I’d like to play around with that I haven’t yet is altering the sugar part. I think that the brown sugar definitely needs to stay, but there is so much of it. Maybe do 1 cup of brown sugar, and add in sweet some other way – perhaps a sweetened applesauce or mixing in a little stevia… I’ll let you know how my experiments go!