Guava-Apple Crumble Pie

On a little island in the Caribbean there is a quaint little cement house with my name inscribed in the concrete of the back porch. My grandfather wrote it there many years ago, perhaps thinking that I would live there someday, or at least visit often. Well, I no longer live in the balmy Caribbean and most of my close family has settled in the US. The house has largely become a distant, dreamy memory.


What does all this nostalgia have to to with this blog? Well, the back porch that I mentioned is surrounded by fruit trees and other tropical plants. Guavas, acerola cherries, sugar cane, plantains, limes, oranges, avocados; you name it, it grows there. Those are the flavors I grew up with, even though I spent most of my life in the US. And now that I'm far away from my mother's kitchen, I'd like to bring those flavors into my own.


I like to think that by working on these recipes I'm melding two culinary traditions that are important to me; something in between what I would have eaten at the little cement house and what I learned when I first started baking in college...and it tastes a little something like this: