One of my favorite desserts in the world is apple crisp (and really, that’s a bit of a fib, as dessert in almost any form is my favorite dessert.) My sister had bought a bag of apples that turned out to be too tart for her to eat straight, so she’d passed them on to me, figuring that we could do something with them. I turned half the bag into a batch of apple crisp on Tuesday, when she was over for dinner, and so wanted something a little bit different last night. A friend of mine had a mildly infamous apple cake recipe that I’d never tried but had heard rave things about, so on the menu for last night it went. And, of course, it was really, really good (I’ve never had anything bad from Heather’s table). We skipped the apple jack in favor of a little lemon juice (though now I want to try it with whiskey, because I think that would be very tasty), and I made up snickerdoodle dough instead of sugar cookie dough, since Betty Crocker’s recipe for sugar cookies called for powdered sugar, which we didn’t have on hand (and which, in retrospect, I suppose I could have made with regular sugar and the food processor). The result was a fairly light (for what it is) dessert. The cookie layers were much more cake like than I expected. It wanted for a bit of whipped cream (but then again, what doesn’t?) So, if you have extra apple on hand, and you’re tired of pies and crisps, this is something else tasty to try.

Meal: Orecchiette with red sauce, apple crisp
Preparation time: about an hour, with about 15 minutes hands off, plus thirty minutes for the crisp to bake
Cost per person: $1.80
Local ingredients: butter, egg, Italian sausage, cheese
Organic ingredients: apples, oats, flour, tomato puree
Leftovers: half a serving of apple crisp, a lunch serving of pasta

Friday night we had out of town guests again, and I went with pasta. The sauce was a standard sauce - half a 28 ounce can of tomato puree, a little water, some garlic powder, dried thyme, dried parsley, salt, and pepper went into the crock pot while I was getting everything else going. I cooked half a pound of Italian sausage in a separate pan, and we shredded a little cheese for an another topping.

I had decided to try my hand at making orecchiette Friday night. I made up my normal pasta dough from Betty Crocker in the morning (I didn’t get it together to make it up Thursday, so that they could dry overnight, so I just went with early in the morning.) Here’s where I made my first mistake - the recipe calls for chilling the dough for half an hour. I skipped that step. I’m not even sure why, as letting it chill in the refrigerator for half an hour would have been no more trouble than letting it rest for half an hour on my counter.

So I came back after half an hour to slice up the coins, and predictably, the dough was a bit soft. I ended up with fairly large coins - I didn’t know it at the time, but too large. I always forget that fresh pasta poofs up when it’s cooked. However, slicing them up was easy enough, and I had all the coins sliced in under 15 minutes. It was definitely easier than having to roll out thing sheets and then slice them up for spaghetti. I covered up the coins and let them dry for the day.

And that was pretty much it. The coins were too thick, so they turned out more like dumplings than noodles. They still tasted great, but they were heavy. Next time, I’ll chill the dough, and I’ll slice it as thin as I can manage. I tossed together the apple crisp while the noodles were boiling (about 14 minutes). For fresh pasta, this was totally easy, and everyone liked it.