Redneck Recipe # 38 – Happy Apples (New Revision)

Today's Super Bowl game was one of the few that were not boring to watch. Back and forth the players rambled – from one end of the gridiron to the other and then back again, and again... The first team to score was the New York Giants team, but it was their defensive squad that made that happen. It was most unusual to have the scoring done the way it was done - the defense pinned the New England Patriots team down quite close to their own goal line. The New England quarterback, Tom Brady, backed up deeply within his own end zone, threw the football a country mile right down the middle of the football field. There was no Patriot player there to receive the football. When Brady threw the ball, he was not under great pressure from a Giants player: that is, he was not then fixing to be tackled. The referees immediately assessed a penalty on the Patriot team for Brady's intentionally “grounding” the football from behind his own goal line. The penalty for that is two points, and those points went to the Giants.

I had never seen that particular penalty cited before today in any football game – and here it came about in the championship contest. New things to see are great good fun, making sitting in front of an otherwise unimpressive old TV actually worth the sitting and the staring.

Midway of the Super Bowl contest, knowing that the halftime intermission was going to be of double the usual length, I decided that I would whomp up some good stuff on which to snack during the second half of the football game.

I wish you could have seen this usually slow-moving Redneck in action in the kitchen right then. I did not want to miss any of this unusually interesting game. I made it back to the TV on time. The snack was still cooking away while I sat in front of the tube, just waiting for one of the long advertising breaks to take place so that I might fetch some of what I had just put together in the kitchen.

I forget the several advertisements that came along, but the one for Coca Cola caught my attention. “Time to get some happy apples, Gus, and don't forget to bring back a can of ice-cold Pepsi while you are at it!”

Here's how you can make some happy apples yourself. They surely taste good. Yes, they do.

The Ingredients and what to do with them:

6 (or so) apples, each about 3 inches diameter
2/3 cup of brown sugar – split into two parts
½ cup flour
1/3 cup uncooked rolled oats
¼ cup of olive oil or melted butter or margarine
(I prefer the olive oil)
1 to 1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon salt

In a large bowl mix the flour, oats, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, 1/3 cup of the brown sugar, and the oil together to form little “crumbs.” Break the big crumbs into smaller pieces, making all of the crumbs fairly evenly sized. I used a big spoon to do this.

Set the crumbs aside.

Peel and core the apples. Quarter them, and then cut the quarters into chunks of about a half-inch in size. Toss the chunks into a microwave oven-safe cooking pan that has a depth of 5 inches or so. I used a microwave pot of that depth with a diameter of nine inches. Do not grease the pan.

Dump that other 1/3 cup of brown sugar onto the apple chunks and gently distribute it among the chunks without “mushing” them overly much. Note: Omit the brown sugar if you don't like things very sweet.

Sprinkle the crumbs reasonably uniformly all over the top of the apple chunks.

Cook (bake) the Happy Apples at “full power” (650 watts) in the microwave oven for 10 to 15 minutes. I reduced my oven power to 60% of 1,100 watts (660 watts) and cooked my Happy Apples for 18 minutes.

When the next advertising break occurred, I removed the nicely cooked Happy Apples from the microwave oven, spooned up a big bowl for myself, and went back to view some more of the football game.

I learned something else that was new today. Happy Apples produce Happy Rednecks.

This is just a little add-on to let everyone know that this Happy Apples recipe is open for new ingredients. If you like to eat something, and if it fits into the microwave baking pan, it will probably work out nicely here.

I made the "crumb" stuff just as it is described above, but I threw a can of cherry pie filling into the pan in place of the apples. Not wanting to leave well enough alone, somehow or other several handfuls of dried cranberries ("Craisins") found their way into the cherry pie filling, and it was not even close to being a mystery how several handfuls of pecan halves appeared on top of the crumbs.

This time I used a pyrex rectangular baking pan - about 9 x 12 or so inches. The microwave baking was for 15 minutes at 660 watts (60%) power in our microwave oven. It came out very nicely.

Have fun !