Berry Crumble

I recently met a woman who apparently gives parties that would make Martha Stewart hang her head in shame.  Example: a black and white theme dinner. So all the food had to be only black or white.  I am in awe that she got past the first course.  I wonder if burnt chocolate granola would qualify? Because I totally figured out how to do that last week.

Meanwhile, dinner parties  around here usually go something like this with our next door neighbors:

(via text) Hey.  You guys home tonight?

Yep.

Wanna do pasta and PJs night?

We’re in!

Our theme is usually: what do I have in the fridge that is about to go bad if we don’t eat it within the next day or two? (we’re not sticklers on the whole pasta thing, but we do try to enforce the PJ rule.)

So a few weeks ago, I was the one who needed to clean out the fridge.  For some reason, I had bought a crazy amount of overripe berries (world wide shortage of blueberries??!!  Acccckkkkk!  Too bad someone couldn’t come up with a way of preserving fruit; maybe putting it in a large, cold box until ice crystals formed?  Nah.  Crazy idea.  It’ll never happen.)

I decided to up the degree of difficulty by making dessert.

Rule 1: no time to run to the store, so I had to use whatever I already had at home.

Rule 2: see rule 1.  Seriously, it was like 4:30 and they were coming at 6:00

I threw the berries into a pie dish, made a version of my granola (Not the burnt kind.  I decided to save that as a special treat for another occasion.  Maybe someone’s birthday), stuck it in the oven and hoped for the best.

Fortunately, it all worked out better than I hoped, and Ive made it again since.  The only issue was with a certain person in particular (Tim) who always suspects me of smuggling either tofu or coconut into everything I make.

About 2 bites in, his coconut detector went off (if bombs were ever made of coconut, he would put a lot of dogs out of work) and he refused to take another bite.
“You know I hate coconut!” he declared, scraping off the vanilla ice cream and carefully spooning it onto a safe, uncontaminated plate.

“Fine, then don’t eat it.  The rest of us will finish it off!”

“I’ll eat my ice cream though.  At least you didn’t poison that.”

And I watched him eat his vanilla, coconut milk ice cream, while I ate my yummy berries. (Okay, so maybe the dogs’ jobs are safe)

I told you I didn’t have time to go to the store.

Ingredients:

• 1 (8 oz) container of raspberries
• 1 (16 oz) container of blueberries
• 1 (16 oz) container of strawberries
• 2 cups of rolled oats (they make a gluten free version!)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 Tablespoons coconut oil (they make unflavored if you need it)
• 3 Tablespoons maple syrup
• 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• **If your berries aren’t very sweet, you may want to consider adding a bit of sweetener to the mix.  I like mine a bit tart, since I think the oats are sweet enough, and if you top it with ice cream, it becomes very sweet)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350
2. Wash berries.  Hull the strawberries and cut them into smaller pieces.  Put all of the berries into a pie dish.
3. In a bowl, combine the oats and salt and give it a good stir to combine.
4. In a small bowl, combine the syrup, oil and vanilla.  Beat it to combine, then pour immediately over the oats.  Stir well to coat all of the oats.
5. Spread the oat mixture evenly over the berries, then put the dish on top of a pan to catch any overflow.
6. Bake at 350 for 40-50 minutes or until berries are bubbling around the edges and the oats are slightly golden.
7. Let the crumble sit for a few minutes before serving.

Enjoy!