Ushering in Fall
September 26, 2011 § 2 Comments
It’s hard to believe it’s fall when the air still hangs damp and heavy, broken up by droplets of rain that seem to cling to the skin, alongside clammy, greasy sweat. I just so love East Coast humidity. But one of these cloudy days found us piling into the bright-red bug convertible and driving the fifteen minutes to Tehrune Orchards. It was Apple Day at the orchard apparently, though I did my research and the real Apple Day, in celebration of local distinctiveness and finding common ground, is actually on October 21st. Lies.
Nevertheless, we enjoyed picking Empire and Red Delicious apples, riding the wagon, cruising through the corn maze and celebrating when we reached the exit, and picking wildflowers. We ate fluffy cider donuts, coated in cinnamon sugar, from a paper bag, and peered at the cases of ginger and oatmeal cookies and racks of apple cider in the general farm store. We forgot for a few hours that we were grown-up college students and rode the parked tractor, poked our heads through the farm animal scene cut-outs and practiced our milking skills on the wooden cow. Then we piled back in the cars and drove back to campus, back to our readings, problem sets and the daily grind.
About a week later, the apples cored and cut, coated in brown sugar and vanilla bean, were piled into little baking dishes and topped with a generous heaping mound of crumbly oats and browned butter.
Crisps were one of the very first things I made in the kitchen, if you exclude the concoctions of shaved chocolate and milk I used to love when I was four-years-old. Every so often, I would pull my only cookbook of my very own, Fanny at Chez Panisse, from the shelf and make a fruit crisp, sometimes doubling the topping to make sure there was enough. Sometimes enough wasn’t enough and I remained unsatisfied with a 2:1 topping to fruit ratio. Nowadays, I go by look and feel for the topping. I use my hands and throw ingredients around, a method that tends to work out well in the dorm kitchens, which are just barely stocked enough to be functional.
Soufflé Days 
YUM and my hand is in the donut picture! (Famous.)
You can see the vanilla bean in the close-up shot of the crisp. Mmm 🙂