2004-02-24 - 7:08 p.m.

Domestic Goddess? I think not.

Ina Garten makes making homemade apple crisp look like it's no effort at all. of course, she's a caterer and it's her job to make stuff like that and make it look easy. I watched her on Barefoot Contessa yesterday and saw the rerun with the roast duck and old fashioned apple crisp. I thought to myself "That doesn't look too hard." Little did I know I was fooling myself.

The recipe was frighteningly (and misleadingly) simple. What they don't tell you is that this recipe is easiest when you own a KitchenAid mixer and a super deep bowl, neither of which I own. So, I ventured off on my apple crisp adventure.

It called for McIntosh apples. Yeah, no one in Omaha has these right now. Pink Lady apples? Yes. Braeburn apples? Naturally. Red Delicious? You betcha. McIntosh? No way in hell. I ended up with Galas only because mom uses them when she makes chutney and they hold up to cooking pretty well and are very tasty. So I brought my five pounds of Galas home and began to peel, core, and slice them. The recipe says the prep time for this crisp is twenty minutes. It took me at least thrity five minutes to just deal with the apples.

Now, at this point in the crisp process, I have a completely full bowl of apples and no room for sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon juice and zest and orange juice and zest. I made the best of things and got it all stirred together and only managed to drop one apple slice onto the floor while transferring it into the dish for baking.

Next step...the "crisp". I had originally left two sticks of butter out to put into the mixture but it got melty being too close to the oven, so I had to put them on a plate and get two new sticks of butter from the fridge and dice them into a mix of brown sugar, granulated sugar, flour, oatmeal and kosher salt (yes, I bought kosher salt). At this point, you are supposed to use the paddle attachment for the mixer to blend it all together until the butter is pea sized. Yeah, right. My mixer shot butter and oatmeal all over the counter and made the flour poof up into the air making this huge white cloud for me to inhale. I tried the potato masher. Weak effort. I don't own a pastry cutter so I dug into my memory banks and pulled the one thing I learned from eighth grade home economics: two knives! I cut that butter into tiny pieces and slowly poured it over the apple mixture. Some of the brown sugar hadn't broken up so I had to use my fingers to break up the rocks.

It took a little longer than an hour to bake but it sure smells heavenly. I've got some Coney Island Vanilla Waffle Cone in the freezer that might be mighty lovely over the apple crisp. I'm not waiting long to find out, that's for certain!

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