Roger Rheinheimer's Blog - Posts Tagged "amish-food"
Full Circle
Yesterday was one of those cold gray Pacific Northwest days that just begged for homemade dessert, my specialty. I asked Ginny if she was in the mood for crème Brule, and she said she would prefer apple crisp. She is a big gardener, and had been gathering ripe apples from the trees we planted when we bought this place about ten years ago, so it took little persuasion and I was on it.
In spite of the volumes of recipes she has collected over the years, I tend to go online for quick answers, and found a recipe that looked do-able. We’ve been making a lot of applesauce every year, so we already had the corer-peeler-slicer to do all that, so I took five big apples down to the basement, cored, peeled, and sliced them, and came back up to the kitchen. The recipe called for ½ a cup of melted butter, mixed with ¾ cup of rolled oats, ½ cup of flour, ¾ cup of packed brown sugar, and cinnamon to taste. I soon had this mixture spread over the apple slices, and ten minutes of microwave-high later, the house filled with the scent of fresh baked cinnamon apple crisps. I burned my tongue on the bite I couldn’t wait to try, but later in the evening, we had some with vanilla ice cream. Just like my mom used to serve us on those cold, winter evenings.
Like most teenagers, I suppose, I didn’t know what we had, growing up on an eighty acre farm with soil so fertile it would actually burn if you put a match to it when it was summer-dry. My mom’s garden produced so much that we were like one of those families in Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, sneaking around after dark to leave paper grocery bags full of garden goodies on neighbors’ porches. I don’t remember really doing that, but do remember having so much sweet corn, carrots, lettuce, cantaloupe, potatoes, cherries, squash, apples, that we couldn’t possibly eat all of it, even with two brothers and two sisters, growing and hungry.
Writing Amish fiction gives me a chance to re-live some of those memories.
In spite of the volumes of recipes she has collected over the years, I tend to go online for quick answers, and found a recipe that looked do-able. We’ve been making a lot of applesauce every year, so we already had the corer-peeler-slicer to do all that, so I took five big apples down to the basement, cored, peeled, and sliced them, and came back up to the kitchen. The recipe called for ½ a cup of melted butter, mixed with ¾ cup of rolled oats, ½ cup of flour, ¾ cup of packed brown sugar, and cinnamon to taste. I soon had this mixture spread over the apple slices, and ten minutes of microwave-high later, the house filled with the scent of fresh baked cinnamon apple crisps. I burned my tongue on the bite I couldn’t wait to try, but later in the evening, we had some with vanilla ice cream. Just like my mom used to serve us on those cold, winter evenings.
Like most teenagers, I suppose, I didn’t know what we had, growing up on an eighty acre farm with soil so fertile it would actually burn if you put a match to it when it was summer-dry. My mom’s garden produced so much that we were like one of those families in Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, sneaking around after dark to leave paper grocery bags full of garden goodies on neighbors’ porches. I don’t remember really doing that, but do remember having so much sweet corn, carrots, lettuce, cantaloupe, potatoes, cherries, squash, apples, that we couldn’t possibly eat all of it, even with two brothers and two sisters, growing and hungry.
Writing Amish fiction gives me a chance to re-live some of those memories.
