Anonymous Apple Crumble

I made this this afternoon partly because I was in the mood for a bit of dessert, and partly because I had four huge apples still here and the farmshare coming up tomorrow, as well as bags of apple slices and chunks in two freezers -- one next door, and one here!  

And I'd already used a big bag of apple chunks in today's soup.  Which was very good -- buttercup squash, that is not a typo, no, I'd never heard of it before, either, apples, corn, used the water from steaming the squash, which was hard skinned, as the soup liquid.  And still had all these apples to go..

Sooooo, I leafed through my personal recipe book, where all sorts of cuttings and little cards and mysterious notes show up, and found this recipe I couldn't remember saving.  

I wondered a bit, since the oven temp they recommended seemed a bit low, even for a glass pan, and the time of baking seemed a bit short, and the amount of apples seemed inordinately large for the size of glass pan they recommended.  But anyway, who am I to judge, I wonder if the Pope does a good apple crumble, and I went ahead.

And found exactly what you might think.  Enough apple mixture (I had Granny Smiths and I think Cortlands, they were nice) of granulated sugar, lemon juice, to fill TWO dishes. 

The glass one in the foreground being the one they wanted filled.  And not quite enough crumble topping, good oatmeal, ap flour, butter, brown sugar,  to spread over two dishes.  But anyway I soldiered on, all good ingredients, you know.  And that was one reason I went ahead -- the recipe was specifying very good ingredients, which I happened to have on hand.

And I ended up baking for about 20 minutes longer than they said, and pushed up the oven temp, before it started to smell good.  It did taste fine.  But it didn't really get all lovely and brown and bubbly.  It's edible, not wonderful. 

Next time I'll go back to Martha's recipe for a similar item, which went down a treat a few weeks back.  And this anonymous one, cut from some magazine,  I noticed that there was no name on it, no origin, nada, now I know why, will be ceremonially removed from the book and recycled.  You'll notice I'm not giving the recipe, didn't want you to tumble down the same rabbit hole.  A pox on "recipe" writers who don't test the recipe.  Or proof it before going to print.

Meanwhile I now have a big anonymous crumble thing in the freezer and another one in operation in the fridge.  It can be a breakfast item, since it's not too sweet, one point in its favor. 

But, as they say, it's not a dessert you'd actually invite anyone to.  Not that this is a tragedy.  Says she bravely, lip quivering, after all that peeling and cutting and chopping and mixing and baking and rebaking and finally struggling to shove the second dish into the overloaded freezer under an avalanche of little odd shaped frozen packages.  And all the labor of tasting, too.  And having to have a second helping, to see whether it was better the second time..