A Delicious Experiment

Cooking can get monotonous. I have found myself cooking the same thing over and over again until it stops tasting like anything. One can only eat so many turkey burgers, sautéed zucchini, and bulgur wheat before you only taste the memory of the last time you ate it.

I had to spice things up a little, pun completely intended. I didn't have a lot on hand, but what I did have was: apples, maple syrup, butter, ground cumin, and curry powder.

I was fully expecting this to be a horrible mess, a monstrosity of a dish, a meal gone very wrong.

It was delicious.

I melted butter to sauté the apples in, as butter would go with the sweetness of the apples better than olive oil would. Once the apples started to get soft, I added in about a teaspoon each of cumin and curry powder and stirred to ensure that all of the apples were completely coated in it. Once the apples were completely soft, I added in a couple of tablespoons of maple syrup (organic! no corn syrup!). I cooked that until the apples had absorbed the syrup and caramelized.

I served the apples on top of a bed of leftover couscous and alongside an apple chicken sausage from Trader Joe's (which deserves to be named one of the seven wonders of the world).

At first, the apples were very sweet from the combination of the natural sweetness of a Gala apple and the maple syrup. But then there was an aromatic spiciness in the back of my throat and on my tongue from the spices. This spiciness nicely tempered what would have otherwise been an overwhelming sweetness.

I fully believe that this experiment could have ended very poorly. I'm glad it turned out yummy and the 26 people who liked and commented on the picture I shared on Facebook seemed to agree.