Measurement-free Baking

I decided I was too busy and lazy to fuss with the metric baking experiment and, moreover, that I have no business eating a whole Dutch apple pie by myself over the weekend.  In fact, while I was at the store, I decided I wasn't going to do any baking at all--that I was going to be good and dutiful and spend that time reading or writing, and that I'd just eat the lovely local apples as-is.  That would have been a good choice too, but I got a hankering for hot apple goodness, and thought to replicate some of the apple crumbles I made the summer I spent in Donegal, where fresh food was limited and the house I was staying in didn't have any officially-marked measuring utensils. 

So, without further ado, here's the apple/blueberry crisp I just made:

The stove light doesn't show it off to best advantage (nor does the iPhone camera), but it sure does taste good!  The blueberries are some I'd frozen this summer when the fresh local ones were in, and as I said, the apples are also local--I can't remember which variety, but it's the one that tastes like lemon when they're first picked.  Excellent eating apples, and not shabby at all in a cooked dish, either.

Now, let's see--what did I do?  I tossed 3 thinly sliced apples and maybe 1.5 cups of blueberries with about a tablespoon of brown sugar.  I made the crumble out of maybe 1/3 cup flour and the same amount of rolled oats, with maybe 3 tablespoons of brown sugar (which was a bit much, but oh, well), and about 2 inches of a stick of butter (standard American stick of butter), and fecked in maybe half a teaspoon of cinnamon.  I'd have put in a bit more, except that I'm running out of cinnamon.  Baked it at 375F for about 35-40 minutes (who's counting?), and it's lovely.  I'm going to have a plate of it with some cream if the cream hasn't gone off.

(If you want to make this and feel better measuring, it's in Bittman's How to Cook Everything.  I looked because I was curious about how close my own sense of things was to his, and it's fairly close, though he had his baking at 400, which seems a bit excessive to me.)