More Thanksgiving Recaps, More Dreena

I don't know if you noticed, but I basically made my entire Thanksgiving Day meal from Dreena Burton's cookbooks. Because she's awesome. Or, at least, her blog is awesome and now that I'm finally cooking from her books instead of simply drooling over them, I'm finding that her recipes are awesome too.

I made several desserts, but this one, from Vive le Vegan! was my favorite:

Gingered Pear Crisp ---hit the hyperlink for the wheat-free version

Pear base: 
3 Tbsp pure maple syrup
1 tsp arrowroot powder
5 fresh pears, peeled, cored and cut into chunks (roughly 4 1/2 cups)
3 Tbsp dried cranberries
2 - 2 1/2 tsp freshly grated ginger
2 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/8 - 1/4 ground cardamom
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/8 tsp allspice

Topping: 
1/2 quick oats
1/4 ground oats (grind oats in the food processor)
1/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 almond slivers (optional)
1/4 unrefined sugar
1/4 tsp sea salt
3 Tbsp canola oil
1 Tbsp pure maple syrup

Preheat oven to 350 F. For the pear base: in a large bowl, combine the maple syrup with the arrowroot and stir until arrowroot is dissolved. Add the remaining pear base ingredients and toss throughly until well combined. Transfer to a lightly oiled 8x8 baking dish. In another bowl, combine all the topping ingredients, and use your fingers to work the mixture until just crumbly. Sprinkle the topping over the pear mixture, distributing evenly. Bake for 30-35 minutes, until golden and a little bubbly. Serve hot or warm.

I made a few alterations to our crisp: I left out the almond slivers, I used raisins instead of dried cranberries, and I used grapeseed oil instead of canola. Also, I prepared this dish the day before, cutting up the pears, measuring-out the dry ingredients, and then didn't combine the wet/dry and base/topping until the next day. It was really easy to mix everything together and pop the dish right into the oven as we sat down to eat so that after dinner we had a warm, fresh-from-the-oven dessert to eat, topped with scoops of vanilla ice cream. Yum!!

Getting Saucy with Apples

Yes, that's correct, apple sauce. Seems simple enough, right? Like, I shouldn't even be using a cookbook, heh? Well, that was the plan: make apple sauce from scratch with just my own clever brain telling me how. But I panicked toward the end and grabbed the Joy of Cooking (the "All New" version) to see if what I was intending to do was, in fact, what I should be doing.

And it was. Cut up apples, put in saucepan, add a bit of water, toss in a cinnamon stick, and simmer until soft. Then add sugar, some nutmeg or ginger, and you've got apple sauce.

Except.

I used the apples that hadn't been needed for the Gingerbread Apple Pie--of which there were just three. Three apples to make apple sauce. That was fine by me, since I was just going to give it to the baby; no need to make gallons of it. But when I'd referenced the Joy of Cooking's instructions, what I'd taken away from it was to add 1/2 cup sugar. 1/2 cup. Not paying attention to the fact that the Joy of Cooking's recipe had used 10 apples.

It was apple syrup, basically.

Luckily, I had some pears on-hand and ended-up adding them to the mix, making a pretty decent apple-pear sauce, though I admit it was still sweeter than I would have liked.

And then I talked to my mom and she said that you don't even need to add sugar, neccesarily. I could have avoided the whole issue! Next time I'll skip the refined white stuff and, if the apples are too tart to go without sweetener, I'll add a teaspoon of agave nectar and see if that does the trick. Live and learn.