In our third guest post, the indomitable Anne Delano Steinert brings you her quarantine crisp. If you missed our previous posts, you can still catch up with “Forlorn Kale, Dejected Eggplant” and “A Bad Sourdough Recipe.”

I live in a two-person household — myself and a very picky eating nine year-old — so basically I’m cooking for one while he eats a bag of goldfish and a box of raspberries at every meal. I also have to cook everything I eat in just the microwave, toaster oven, or steamer since my stove and oven are currently non-functional. But you know, necessity is the mother of invention, so I can cook some pretty great stuff in those three pieces of equipment. 

One night last week I was jonesing for something sweet but not completely devoid of nutritional value. I had apples so I wanted to make an apple crisp. I was missing most of the ingredients, but the version I invented through substitution turned out to be amazing!  This would also work with pears or peaches or a mixture of fruit. 

Here’s what I did

1. Slice an apple into a baking dish (choose one that will fit in the toaster oven).

2. Cover the slices with a good squirt of lime juice (obviously it would be better to use a lemon if you had it, but I drink gin, so….). I expect you would skip this step if you were using peaches.

3. In a separate small bowl, mix 2 tablespoons of sugar (this would be better if you had brown sugar, but I didn’t), 2 tablespoons of melted butter, one packet of instant oatmeal (use a flavor that won’t taste gross with apples; I used maple brown sugar. Bananas and cream would probably suck), and a dash of cinnamon.  In a perfect world you would use 2 tablespoons of regular oats, but I didn’t have those either. 

4. Pour that whole mixture over the apples. 

5. Cover the dish with aluminum foil and bake in the toaster oven for 30 minutes at 350.

6. Then take off the foil and let it cook another 10 minutes to crunch up the top.

It’s delicious.