Blasted Church and Apple Crisp

The title of this post might raise an eyebrow, as might the rather unusual content. This isn't quite what I thought I would be writing about when I began the blog.

My fridge is rather bare, but the fruit drawer always seems to be full. This is not because I buy fruit that often, but because I tend to buy fruit and then not eat it.... for a long period of time. I do find it amazing how well apples can keep in a cold, moisture controlled drawer. In that cool little drawer, I had a 1 lb bag of small apples (maybe mini Gala, or something similar), as well as a couple larger red ones and a few Granny Smith. Both the small apples and the larger reds, at about six months or so sitting in there, were getting to a rather not-quite firm stage, however the Granny Smith, perhaps my personal favourite, had been in there for anywhere from nine months or more, and were still fresh and firm. I determined that I had to use up the red apples as opposed to letting them go to waste, so I peeled, cored and sliced them, together with one of the Granny Smiths, and decided to make an Apple Crisp. As usual, I didn’t follow any set recipe, so I dumped some lemon juice in the bowl and added some old white wine that had also been sitting in the fridge for quite some time.

The wine is from Blasted Church Vineyards, a small BC estate winery, and is called “Hatfield’s Fuse”. I have to admit that the very creative labelling and marketing, together with an interesting story about the vineyard’s name, drew me to the label. Anyhow, wine ends up in my fridge much like fruit does. Not that I tend to buy a lot of wine, but when I do, I have a taste and then it goes in the fridge where it sits for months until it ends up being not quite what it was intended for in the first place.

So.... back to the Apple Crisp. With the lemon juice and wine I added some sugar, a lot of cinnamon, a little ginger, nutmeg and cloves. For good measure I added some frozen blueberries as well. For the topping, I used rolled oats, which by the way had also been sitting in a jar in the fridge for perhaps years (yes, years), brown sugar, some butter, and I think that was about it. Oh, I might have added a touch of lavender honey as well. Off it went into the oven and about an hour or so later, out it came, bubbling and golden, but a little too sweet for my liking...... so I added some hot pepper flakes from red hot peppers that I had dried last year and ground up. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t fantastic..... until the next day, when I ate it cold, right out of the fridge, after all the flavours had a chance to fuse, touched off by the added spice of hot pepper.

Ice cold, sweet and hot... could there be anything better? I'll get back to you on that.