The Baked Apple Experiment

Or, How Befriending Fruit is a Benefit of Aging

It's an interesting study noticing how my personal tastes in desserts and in food have evolved over time. I'm attracted more and more to regional flavors of greater intensity. It's a distillation, not deliberately exclusionary, of a set of flavors I'm really interested in working with.

Those preferences also extend to savory versions of historically sweet dishes and accoutrements.

My friends' tastes continue to evolve, as well, sometimes out of a new requirement to befriend the small, unauthorized revolutions in the body. I maintain aging bodies are the great cosmic joke, so we’re befriending wry humor as a new management tool, as well.

The goal of this baking exercise was simply to take a readily available, high-quality fruit product and open it up to other (endless) iterations you may prefer - that it might become a staple in your repertoire.

Along with berries, one of the gems of the Pacific Northwest is the apple. The region's mild climate, warm summers and cool winters (which allow f…