When using both NEI and AppleCore client side, NEI has no items or recipes loaded, and trying to look up a recipe regardless causes minecraft to crash with a nullPointerException.
Confirmed using AppleCore v 1.7.10-1.0.0 and NEI 1.7.10-1.0.4.105-universal

Sorry, further experimentation confirmed applecore was not the cause of the issue. Again, my apologies to jumping the gun.