Are you like me? When presented with a standard apple (or whatever) crisp, do you find yourself longing for more crisp and secretly resenting the excessive amount of fruit? This recipe, in my crisp-wanting opinion, finally provides the desired ratio of good stuff to fruit (roughly 2:1, possibly 3:1). Plus you can make a bottom layer of crisp instead of loading it all on top, and it's so satisfying that you don't need to bolster it with ice cream. It is a legitimate dessert in its own right, not a mere ice cream topping. You probably already have all of the ingredients.
Why am I making a fruit crisp? One of our backyard trees is producing plums for the first time ever. Plums! Awesome! What to do with these plums? I would make jam, but it's not like the tree is laden with pounds and pounds of them. It gives us about ten plums a week. Enough for a little dessert thing but that's it. Last week I made a tart:
That was just my standard pie crust topped with plums tossed in sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. After baking/cooling, I brushed it with thinned raspberry jelly. GOOD STUFF. But I didn't want to make it two weeks in a row because then Jeff would think that I had lost all of my creativity, and the pizazz would quickly drain from our marriage, and there we would sit, eating our joyless second plum tart while facing our twilight years in abject terror, obviously.
INGREDIENTS
- 2-3 cups fruit, however you can get it--fresh, frozen, canned pie filling (for the lazy). If fresh, peel and seed it, although the skin on my plums was so thin and weird that blanching/shocking made it sort of dissolve when I made the tart, so I just kept it on for the crisp. A regular crisp recipe will call for 5 cups of fruit, and that is crazy.
- 2 to 4 T sugar
- 1 C regular rolled oats
- 1 C packed brown sugar
- 1/2 C flour
- 1/2 t ground nutmeg, ginger, or cinnamon
- 1/2 t salt
- 1/2 C butter
- Optional: 1/2 C chopped nuts or coconut <-- Coconut = excellent.
- Optional: handful of crushed cookies you think might be good in the crisp. This is my own idea. I tossed in some gingersnaps because why not? It really put the crisp over the top, as my brother in-law Tyler* would say.
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 375.
For filling, thaw fruit, if frozen. Do not drain. Place fruit in a bowl and toss with sugar. Set aside.
For topping, in a mixing bowl combine oats, brown sugar, flour, and nutmeg, ginger, or cinnamon. OR A COMBO OF ALL THREE. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in nuts or coconut. AND COOKIES. Please know that what you have here is double the amount of crisp most recipes want you to make. Ha! Sprinkle almost half of the topping into an ungreased 2-quart square baking dish, or similar. Top with fruit. Cover fruit with the rest of the topping.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until fruit is tender and bubbling and the topping is golden.
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* Now that The Juice is done, I've started to paint Tyler, young attorney at law. He's in his office with a bunch of (unseen here) papers, his laptop, and other office supplies. I always start with the face, because if you screw that up, what's the point of painting the rest? I have lots of work ahead of me on his skin and have only started to add scruff to his upper lip. It's all over his jaw, too. I am looking forward to that; scruff is one of my favorite things to paint. I'll also do a little fine tuning on his right eye. It's too bright right now, but Tyler seems to have the kind of blue eyes that change color depending on his surroundings. This room is green, so his eyes seem a lot greener than usual. I'll try to split the difference.
As I painted Tyler, it struck me that he has the same coloring as The Juice. I'm kind of looking forward to painting some brunettes. :)
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