Happy Halloween from a Pineapple Guava

Apple Crisp Recipe

Some of the smaller apples, I forget which kind these are.

But seriously, time is speeding up, right? I just cannot fathom where October has gone.

We went apple picking (yes, apple picking) up near Julian this last weekend and got a nice bunch of imperfectly perfect apples. I think you can judge the organic-ness of apples by the earwig-to-apple ratio. When I made an apple crisp last night with seven of the larger apples, I found two live earwigs in them, which seems like a pretty fair ratio.

The apple crisp is my mom's recipe that I remember from childhood, and I was very happy to have it turn out exactly right. It's not a hard recipe, but for some reason it's just one of those things I never thought to try. And speaking of ratios, the butter-and-sugar-to-apple ratio in this is probably a good reason not to make it too often. I didn't get any good photos of the apple crisp and I didn't want to ruin anyone's impressions of the recipe with a bad photo.

Apple Crisp

6-8 apples, peeled, cored, sliced

1/4 to 1/2 cup water (depending on how juicy you want it)

Arrange the sliced apples evenly in a baking dish (I used a glass pie dish) and pour in the water. Sprinkle 1 tsp. cinnamon over the slices.

In a bowl mix 1 cup brown sugar and 3/4 cup flour. Cut in 1/3 - 1/2 cup butter until crumbly, then sprinkle over apples. Bake covered (I used aluminum foil, but if have a covered dish, that's better) at 375 degrees about 1/2 hour or until apples are tender.

I found that 40 minutes was better, with the last 10 minutes uncovered.

There you go, super easy, really good.

It's the Middle of October?

Yeesh. Where does the time go? I've been thinking that it hasn't been that long since my last post, but it has been a few weeks. I've been alternating between working hard and hardly working. It's a weird time of year for me. Being a Northwesterner living in Southern California, I expect fall weather, but really we just get hot and dry. Add to that my 20 + years of conditioning that fall is "back to school" time, yet I am not back to school, and the months of September through November just end up being a muddle of contradictions.

My research trip to Louisville went well, and I've got a lot of information to sort through, plus more research to do as I get started on the article/chapter that will be the result. I really enjoyed my time in Louisville, which from what little I saw of it, seems like a great city. The Root Cellar was on my walk from the hotel to the archives, so I stopped a couple of times to buy some fresh local produce and chat with the owner, who was an extraordinarily nice man. Also, I think I saw more bricks in Louisville in a week than I've seen in Southern California in four years. It was nice, I like brick buildings. 

Here's the current status of the Bianchi project, which I'm still going to keep quiet about until it's finished. Yes, that's an IKEA flowerpot it's sitting on. The cranks and chainring are original, as is the front brake. The Brooks B66 came off another bike, the brake lever is from my parts bin, and the handlebars are Nitto Promenade B617.

In other news: I saw the largest spider I have ever seen "in the wild" and I ate my first pineapple guava. I would like to repeat the second, but not the first.