Making a Home, a Home

As I so often say on behalf of my dog: Get in my belly.

I take comfort in food. You know this about me. Entering 10th grade, I was 5-foot-1 and weighed 235 pounds. I still have the stretch marks.

In adulthood, I've figured out how to appropriately manage my weight. I exercise like a fiend and try to eat a lot of vegetables, because I like vegetables. Preferably with blue cheese dressing. But I'm flexible on that.

Here we are in Boston. My 16th move, or whatever insane number it is. We have no friends. Going to the grocery store is arduous. Going for a run is difficult. The dew point is roughly equal to the temperature. My dog is panting on the floor under the air conditioner. We have Comcast. I'm not happy.

So when someone mentions apple crisp at work, my ears perk up as they did a couple of nights ago. It was jokingly suggested that we celebrate the first actual day of the GOP convention with a potluck. This is how newspapers work. We mostly want to eat. We run spell check with buffalo wing sauce on our fingertips. I do, anyway.

I immediately volunteered to make "my" apple crisp. The recipe comes from a cookbook our elementary school (Afton-Lakeland pride, ba-by!) put out as a fundraiser when I was in first grade. The cookbook had Nicole Oakland's apple crisp recipe. My Mom tried it and made it roughly 100 times during my childhood (only her raisin bran muffins were a more common site in the oven; I don't care if I ever eat another).

In Duluth, MN., I was feeling unsettled in the fall of 2003. I was 26. I owned my own home, but I didn't really cook for myself. I asked my Mom for the apple crisp recipe; I still have and refer to the recipe, though I know it by heart.

The recipe has been tweaked. In Duluth, it was followed to the letter. In Salt Lake, I experimented with gluten-free flours. That was mostly a failed experiment. In our home in Stansbury Park, Utah, I doubled the amount of ingredients in the crust. When we moved to downtown Salt Lake, I don't think we made the crisp.

But New England is leafy and apple-y. Portland saw many an apple crisp. I'd buy a half bushel of Cortland apples and make a giant tray. I went back to plain-old, whole wheat flour. I figured out how to chop the apples. Cut it like a tomato. Stand the apple straight up. Cut down like you're slicing a tomato, leaving a little wider chunk for the seeds in the middle. Take the middle and cut off the sides. Cut those to make bite-size pieces. Take your big slices, stack them up like you're trying to reconstitute half the apple and make lengthwise slices. Then make crosswise cuts. I can do an apple in about 30 seconds.

Those giant trays of apple crisp would serve as my breakfast for a week.

With the oven at 375 degrees, I can already smell the crisp crisping. The toppings were appropriately doubled, so the top of the apple crisp is essentially a giant oatmeal cookie (with cinnamon mixed in). The apples aren't right. We only had Fujis, but I was too lazy to go to the grocery store for the third time in 48 hours. But that oatmeal crust is about right.

I make it a little different every time, but it's pretty much the same. I probably won't even eat any at work tonight. I know exactly what it tastes like. Everything is different. But that apple crisp is a constant.

RECIPE

Cut 6-8 Cortland apples into a 9x13 baking dish (ungreased)

Mix together:
1 cup white sugar
1 and 1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup flour
2 cups oatmeal
1 tablespoon cinammon
1 cup Promise/butter/Country Crock

Cover the apples with the topping. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes to an hour.