Thanksgiving

I turned 50 this year and I read a book that spoke to me. The combination of these two seemingly unconnected events led to the birth of my first blog. I believe that Thanksgiving week is as appropriate a time to start as any. It is consistently my favorite holiday, and while life to date has been far from perfect, I really do have alot to be thankful for. Today is the first of what I hope will be four Thanksgiving meals this week. We are having a pot luck at work, and I have made two of my favorite dishes as a contribution to the meal.

The first is apple crisp. We have two apple trees and our neighbor has four, and so every fall we have a veritable plethora of not-so-attractive apples that we collect up and store in a cool dark place for later use. "Organic" in our house means "pay no attention to it and hope for the best", but also includes some more standard definitions, like "no pesticides" and "organic fertilizer only for years on end". The realistic possible options for use of these apples are applesauce, apple cider, apple butter, apple cake, and so on but by far the most popular option at my house is apple crisp. As I was preparing the topping this morning, and trying to figure out how much to multiply it by to cover the pan I had filled with sliced apples, and I realized that the recipe is really a ratio of the main ingredients. There are equal parts brown sugar and oats, with half that much butter and flour. So I could make as small or as large a recipe as I wanted--I tossed the apples with less than a 1/4 c. each of flour and sugar, sprinkled cinnamon freely and for the topping:
1 c. butter
2 c. oats
2 c. brown sugar
1 c. flour
dash of salt and cinnamon
Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

I read Mark Ruhlman's book 'Ratio' this fall and loved it, and the above recipe's proportions are a direct result of what I took home from reading it.
Check out his blog: http://blog.ruhlman.com/ruhlmancom/2009/04/ratio-the-simpl.html
And now I see everything within this framework. How do the ingredients relate to each other by ratio. It makes increases in recipes that I used to get my calculator out to make simple, something that you can do in your head.