Apple Crumbe

When life gives you lemons we are meant to make lemonade – okay true but only if you are allowed to add tons of sugar. When I think of lemons (mind you this does not happen often) I just want to take out a medium sized sugar jar and burry the damn lemons underneath it. As some of you might notice here, a lemon is an ingredient that I have a taste for. But nevertheless I ended up using it this week.

I had a sudden craving for apples this week and wondered what kind of chicken apple recipe I could find but then thought to hell with it and decided on making apple crumble instead. I found myself surfing the food network website until I found the perfect apple crumble recipe written by the one and only Melissa d’ Arabian (I have never heard of her nor do I know who she is) and before I knew it I was in the kitchen cooking up a storm so to speak.

To make an apple crumble we need the following ingredients:

apples

zest & the juice of one lemon

a bit of sugar

a bit of cinnamon

a pinch of salt

some flour

brown sugar

unsalted butter and a cup of oats.

At the moment I am currently located in Europe in one of the international cities of Poland and for most part we can find everything except for crabmeat, creamy salad dressings and most of the American stuff that I need and miss and a long list of other things but that isn’t important at the moment. I quickly popped by a grocery store and had the hardest time finding oats. I stood in front of the cereal aisle and believe it or not, they didn’t have oats. Seriously how difficult would it be to import oats? Long story short I did indeed find oats at an international shop and nearly paid a fortune for a five small sachets because selling it in a box is obviously too difficult.

This was such an easy recipe to follow. I pre-heated the oven and combined flour, sugar, salt and oats in a bowl. In another bowl I simple mixed sliced up apples, cinnamon, salt and lemon juice and I just had to take a taste to see what the filling would taste like. I tasted an overpowering taste of lemon and when that hit my tongue I cringed and added some more sugar. In a casserole dish I melted the butter and poured the butter into the flour mixture and incorporated it with a fork. In the baking dish I “arranged” the apples and topped it with the flour mixture and baked it for approximately 45 minutes.

I just love a hot sweet dessert with ice-cream served on the side. The apple crumble was delicious. The oats topping was crunchy, the apples were all soft and gooey and even a bit sweet but you could take the tartness of the lemon. Had I not had ice-cream, I don’t think I would have been able to eat this. The lemon added a bit too much tartness for my liking. I will make this again but I will have to double the amount of sugar and cinnamon. What can I say…this gal has a sweet tooth.