Apple Betty pie

These past days we celebrated Rosh haShana, the Jewish New Year. Rosh hashana is a serious time of soul-searching and introspection, but at the same time it is a very happy holiday on which we welcome the new year with a strong belief that it will be a blessed one. Special dishes are prepared to underline this double character of the holiday. We eat pommegranate, uttering the wish that in this coming year our good deeds will be as plenty as the seeds of this beautiful fruit. We also eat apple dipped in honey, to symbolize our wish that the upcoming year will be a sweet and happy one. Some families prepare a dish called 'tzimmes', which is a dish made of carrots, prunes, raisins and honey. The Yiddish word for carrots is mehren, which also means 'more', thus expressing the wish that our good deeds will multiply this coming year.

I want to share two of the dishes I prepared this year. They are extremely easy to make (I had no time for extensive haute-cuisine ) and very tasty, plus they add a nice sweet flavour to the new year (without adding too many pounds :-) I guess this will be my submission for the next teachers' potluck carnival.

Apple betty pie

Ingredients

4 cups peeled and sliced apples
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup margarine

Preheat oven to 375F. Put apples into greased 9-inch pie plate. Sprinkle with orange juice. For the crumb topping, combine salt, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Cut in margarine. Mix until mixture is crumbly. Cover apples with crumb topping. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Cool.
I slightly adapted the recipe. I used only half of the ingredients, and put them in a prepared graham-cracker-pie crust.