Weekly Dish

One true thing about having a baby: you spend a lot of your waking hours feeding your little one. Which, for nursing moms, means a good portion of the day in a stationary position with little else to do but sit still. Oh, of course, there are the times when I just stare at her ears and her faintly receding hairline and long eyelashes like her dad’s and her chubby toes. But there’s only so much staring a girl can do in a day’s time, especially when the days stretch into weeks and weeks into months, and, well, you get the picture.

Lucky for me, I happened to time my child’s birth with the publishing of the last Harry Potter book. I read the first one ages ago, but since then, my husband has been the fan in the family. He’s read all 6 of the series, while it seems like I started the second one and never quite finished it. So, I decided now would be a good time to finish the second one and read straight on through to this last one. In case you’ve never held a hardback copy of one of the books in your hands, let me tell you, that’s a lot of pages.

As luck would have it, it happens that I’ve had some idle time on my hands, perfect for catching up on the workings of the magical world. Because I’ve read them consecutively and in such a short span of time, I’ve been working up to serious anxiety about the last book. You see, I am an ending kind of girl. Not that every story has to end in a happily ever after, mind you, but it must end properly, the right way, with closure and finality. Investing so much time in Harry and his friends has meant that I could be setting myself up to be disappointed. What if the series ends badly or in the wrong way or, worse yet, with things still up in the air?

Like good books and movies, meals should have satisfactory ends as well. Not every meal needs a big finale, of course, but on occasion, a sweet finish makes even the best main course even more satisfying. Most importantly, dessert signals that the eating is over: a sweet something tells your taste buds the eating is over. Closure for your mouth and your stomach, so to speak. Since I have not the time to spend all day baking nor do I need whole cakes, pies, or other large desserts lurking in my kitchen to tempt me, my meal closure has to come in small, easy-to-make portions.

These tiny fruit crumbles are just such a dessert. As long as you have good fruit, the method couldn’t be simpler: toss it with a bit of flour and sugar, top with a crumbly mixture of butter, sugar, and nuts or oats if you like, and pop it into the oven. You really can’t go wrong, and you can make two or ten, depending on your crowd (or your appetite).

I made these peach and blueberry ones at the end of a long week of feeding Josie and building up to the final Harry Potter. And, well, without spoiling anything for those of you who aren’t finished (or who haven’t started), let me just say that both the dessert and the Deathly Hallows were immensely satisfying.

They even worked well together, with a nice cup of coffee, a comfy chair, and a hungry baby — a perfectly happy ending to these summer days of baby care. So happy, in fact, that I’m thinking of starting the books over, just so I can enjoy the ending all over again. With a proper dessert, of course.

Tiny Crumbles

2 oven-proof ramekins
Fruit to fill each ramekin 3/4 full (I used peaches and blueberries)
Zest of an orange or a lemon
1 t. + 2 T. flour
1 t. + 1 T. brown sugar
1 T. butter
2 T. chopped pecans

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Toss the fruit in each ramekin with 1/2 t. each of flour and brown sugar and equal portions of the fruit zest. Mix the butter, nuts, 2 T. of flour and 1 T. of brown sugar until it’s crumbly; sprinkle evenly over each ramekin. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, or until the top is brown and the filling bubbly around the edges.

Serve with coffee, ice cream, or a big, heavy book. Just make sure you choose one that ends well.

Posted: Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 8:29 pm Filed under: Something Sweet, Summer, Fruit, Quick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.