Baked oatmeal with apple + cranberry sauce

So you just had a marvelous four-day break and are feeling a bit insulted by the harsh return to reality?  Here, try some of this:

Baked oatmeal with apple + cranberry sauce

• 1 large apple, peeled and shredded
• 1.5 cup rolled oats
• 3 cups water
• leftover cranberry sauce

1. Combine the oats, water, and apple in a baking dish and bake on 400F for 20 minutes.
2. Add the cranberry sauce to the top and bake for another 5 minutes or so.
3. Serve with honey.

Yes, I suppose you will still have to go out and brave the world.  But you will be going out with something righteous and warm in your tummy, and that helps a little.  (Oh, and coffee?  That helps a lot.)

Apple crisp

The following were my sources of inspiration for this scrumptious bit of fall in a bowl:

1. Last Saturday, mid-morningish, my husband staggered into the kitchen– squinting and yawning and scratching his chest–to ask, “What are you cooking?”  “Nothing,” I said; the extent of my culinary prowess up to that point had involved starting a pot of coffee.  And then I got it.  Our home did smell mindbogglingly of apples and vanilla! …but only because I had just plugged in a Method air freshener.  While I was pretty darn pleased that cheating made my home smell like I had just made something delicious, I did feel a little twinge of guilt for shattering Mr. Onepot’s morning enthusiasm, that most fragile of things.
2. This Saturday morning, this motley crew stared at me woefully as I sipped my coffee, as if to say, “We know you’re going out of town later in the week and there’s no way we’re all going to get eaten by then.”  They know me so well.
3. Our dustbunnies had morphed into dustbears, and the most solid excuse I could come up with for ignoring them involved apples and oatmeal and cinnamon and nutmeg.
4. Smitten Kitchen offered this idea some weeks back, and I was instantly onboard.  But then, you know, I don’t plan.  While our kitchen is well-stocked, it’s well stocked according to moi (capers! fillo dough! chutney!); that means that there’s no shredded coconut, for instance, at any given point in time.  Almonds?  Ditto.  This also gives you some insight into the main reason why I can’t follow recipes: I typically decide to make something at the very last minute, once it’s dark out and I’ve had a glass of wine and no one is about to go out again.  Or, it’s Saturday morning and I’m squinting and yawning and scratching my chest in my jammies.  So, you know, I wing it.  A lot.

This particular version of winging it goes something like this:

• 5-6 apples (see picture above to get a rough idea of just how much room for experimentation you have here)
• juice of a 1/2 small lemon
• dashes of cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp butter
• 3 tsp honey
• 1 + 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1/4 cup flour

1. Cut up the apples into any kind of slices; coat them with lemon juice, brown sugar, spices.
2. In a small pan, heat the butter and honey until combined.  (Thanks, Smitten Kitchen!  Turns out it’s honey that my crisps have been missing all this time.)  Add flour and oats; stir to combine.
3. Spread the apples in a baking dish and cover with the crisp mixture.  Bake on 400F for ~45 minutes; check the crisp around that time to see if the apples are blissfully gooey or need another 5-10 minutes.

Ta-da!  Edible air freshener.

Oatmeal interpretations: apple + cinnamon + brown sugar + nutmeg

This is a bit more labor-intensive than our typical oatmeal interpretations, since it exceeds our maximum allowed breakfast prep time limit of 3 minutes.  It also requires a certain degree of wakefulness, which Mr. Onepot and I rarely achieve on weekday mornings as we stumble blindly and grumpily around the kitchen while assembling the, um, most important meal of the day.  After all, a knife and a grater are involved!  But oh, it’s worth it.  Once the oatmeal is done, just pile up half a grated apple and heap it with brown sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg.  What’s not to love?