Re-use, Recycle, Reduce - A practical lesson

As my regular readers may well be aware, my partner and I are on a very low income. Which means I tend to be pinching pennies pretty hard these days. So one day, after realising that most of the fruit in the fruit bowl (apples and a few pears) was looking pretty much dead, I decided to make the best of things, and make up fruit crumble for dessert (dinner was "scrounge" - leftovers, foodsicles[1], or whatever the player fancies on toast). So I peeled, sliced and stewed up the apples and pears.

[Stewing mixture for core fruit - apples, pears etc:

Peel and slice fruit. Place in a small saucepan. Add 1 dessert-spoon white sugar, 1 clove, approx 1 dessert-spoon lemon juice, and just enough water to cover. Bring to boil, then simmer for about 20 minutes. Drain and remove clove if using immediately, otherwise store in fridge for up to a week.]

The stewed fruit went into a small casserole dish, and I made up some crumble topping. Unfortunately, my recipe for crumble topping is designed to serve about 8 people (rather than just the 2 of us), and it resulted in a lot of leftover crumble even after I'd generously topped the stewed fruit. Hmmm... what to do with it.

Well, the mixture was predominantly plain flour, brown sugar, coconut, rolled oats and butter rubbed in. Hmm... says I, that's a lot like the mixture for ANZAC biscuits. I could do something with that.

So the next day, I took the leftover crumble mix, added another helping of rolled oats, a couple of tablespoons of golden syrup, a couple of teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda, and a couple of tablespoons of boiling water; mixed everything together, and spooned it out in biscuit-sized chunks on a couple of baking trays. Cooked them for about 15 minutes at 175C or thereabouts (between 150 and 200 on the dial, anyway) and set them out to cool.

Turned out nice!

[1] A foodsicle is a frozen dinner. By extension from popsicle being frozen soft drink.