Looly's Solo Apple Crisp

No doubt about it. Looly's growing up. With a visit from the tooth fairy under her belt, it's time to start pulling her weight in the kitchen.

Last spring when she was a mere babe of 5, not the worldly, gap-toothed 6-and-a-half-year-old you see here, we took a field trip to Penzeys Spices, where Looly chose a jar of Vietnamese Extra Fancy Cinnamon. She's been waiting to make her own apple crisp ever since and apparently I've been neither accommodating nor timely in making it happen. So she did what any gap-toothed, worldly 6-and-a-half-year-old would do. She went online and printed out a recipe herself.

Look at her, hands washed, hair back, apron on, ingredients assembled, reading through the whole recipe before she starts. She's already a way better cook than her mother who has an embarrassing habit of needing to run to the store for a roll of parchment paper or a bunch of cilantro because I swear it said nothing about that a minute ago.

 And check out those knife skills. I was 25 before I knew to curl the fingers on my left hand.

Mixing the "crisp".

Watch out, Martha. Looly's in the kitchen.

Looly's Solo Apple Crisp
adapted from Simply Recipes

5-6 medium apples (preferably Granny Smiths)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 cup rolled oats (old fashioned or quick-cooking)
1/2 cup butter

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Lightly grease a 9" x 13" pan.

Peel, core, and chop the apples into 1-inch chunks. Place them in the prepared pan. Sprinkle the lemon juice over the top.

In a bowl, stir together the brown sugar, cinnamon, and oats. Use your fingers to rub the butter into the oat mixture. Sprinkle the oat mixture on top of the apples. Bake 35-45 minutes until the apples are soft and the topping is golden brown and crisp.

Operation Kumquat

Have you ever eaten a whole kumquat? You should. 

In a continuing effort to expand the culinary horizons of my berry-crazed fruit worshipers, we sampled our first kumquats this week. When I say "we" I mean it. Neither Mufasa nor I could remember having tasted a kumquat before.

These olive-sized beauts look like baby oranges and are completely edible. You can eat the rind, which proved an endless source of delight to my children. The thin orange peel is sweet and floral, which is a very good thing since the juicy inner pulp can be shockingly tart.

I took one bite and just about sucked my cheeks down my throat. The pulp was so acidic that I considered scrapping the experiment with the kids all together. But then I ate another one. Three kumquats later, my lips and tongue numb, I was completely addicted.

Kumquats!

 As an added bonus, slicing these little lovelies gave us a chance to sharpen our knife skills.

By the way, this Kuhn Rikon serrated paring knife is my absolute favorite for teaching kids how to cut. It's sharp enough that it glides through the skin of most fruits and vegetables but not so sharp that it draws blood with any frequency. It's small enough for little fingers to handle, cheap enough that I don't worry about throwing it in the dishwasher, and it comes in bright colors that kids love to use.

Time for the taste test...

Bean preferred the sweet rind to the pulp.

Seriously sour. He ate four.

Bean liked the sweet rind. Looly and Roo fell hard for the acrid pulp and spent the afternoon trying to outdo one another's sour face. Between the three of them, they finished a pint.