smitten kitchen

I am, without a better way to put it, swimming in nuts.* Appalled by the price of nuts everywhere around here but insisting that it wasn’t going to keep me from baking with them, I asked my mother out in the ‘burbs — a place where people are less confident they can get away with swindling $9.99 for 1.25 cups of pecans — to see if she could do better. She came back with fifteen pounds for about $30 from Costco, five of walnuts, five of pecan and five of almonds. It is, in a word, awesome.

And yet, despite the fact that many of my favorite recipes involve them in one way or another, I had not made even the slightest dent in the almonds and only a paltry one in the pecans as of last week, and they’re taking up a lot of space in the pantry and freezer. (I believe this is called The Costco Effect.) Obviously it was time to break out the big guns, a recipe sure to be so addictive, pounds would disappear (from the pantry, not our guts, that is) at a breakneck pace and the only thing left to do (besides sit-ups) would be to ask my mother to go back to Costco again.

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Saying that you don’t usually care for brittle because it is, well, awfully brittle is definitely grounds for mockery.

But it’s true! I can’t tell you how unappealing I find stained glass-like sheets of amber caramel that you’re supposed to willingly bite into. You either get alarmingly sharp shards that stab you like a serial killer on the loose in your mouth, or it gets so gunked into the scoop of your molars, it takes a chisel to extract it.

Right, so where were we? My grievances with brittle in no way mean it can’t be good, just that it’s usually not. And previously, I never liked the stuff enough to find The Recipe, the one that will be all you need. Fortunately, with such inspiration as Luisa and Karen Demasco, this was perfect on the first try: buttery with an awesome depth of flavor that came from some accidental slightly overcooking and sea salt. Taking a bite, the pepitas just crackle within the caramel, and not so hard that it shatters everywhere.

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People, these things are nothing but trouble, so whatever you do, don’t do this:

Do not start with a bowl of vaguely healthful and intensely fortified bowl of Snap, Crackle and Pop.

Do not boil some sugar, because obviously unsweetened cereal will not do.

(Try not to do this to your lens, either, when you take a picture.)

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This all started with Homesick Texan. No wait, this all started with last year’s orangettes, to this day one of the most popular posts on this site. No wait, this all started with a lifelong (can you say that? when you’re just 31?) love of grapefruits. My favorite way to eat them is the same exact way my mom showed me, halved in a bowl with each section loosened with a arched, double-serrated grapefruit knife. First, I’d pop all of the sections into my mouth in probably under two minutes flat. But then, then came the “grapefruit soup,” I’d call it. Mom would help us scrape all of the residual grapefruit bits into the bowl, then squeeeze every last bit of juice, discard the empty shell of a peel and this, this my friends is the best grapefruit juice you’ll ever drink in your life. You must drink it straight from the bowl. I could live on it, and it alone.

Which brings us to the Homesick Texan, who mentioned in December that “everyone knows the juiciest, largest and sweetest ruby red grapefruit comes from the Rio Grande Valley” and it was funny, because I hadn’t known that at all. But given the price of the grapefruits we’d been seeing in the stores ($2 a pop), their sorry state (dented but still appallingly shiny with wax) and their flavor (average at best) I was just itching to find out. So, we ordered ourselves a little sampler from South Texas Organics and quite a few days later were presented with exactly what we were promised: the very best ruby red grapefruits, from South Texas.

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My obsession with Robert Linxe’s truffles started as a matter of coveting. My roommate at the time had more suitors than she could count on two hands and both feet, thus I didn’t even bother trying to keep up, but there was this one–and I never met him, but still called him my favorite–who insisted upon “borrowing” her for the afternoon of her birthday and at Metropolitan Museum presented her with two items: Kissing in Manhattan and a box of chocolate truffles from La Maison du Chocolat.

Kissing in Manhattan was gorgeous–the rare book in Alex and my towering bookcases that we both, two years later, came with a copy of–but the truffles were something else. Not only were they the most rich and hands-down putting to shame any and every chocolate I had ever encountered previously in my life, they were painfully expensive. It just wasn’t fair.

In an effort to build my karma they became my go-to hostess gift and it was because of this that I learned one year at a holiday dinner where a Gourmet editor was a guest that the secret of the Robert Linxe’s La Maison du Chocolat Truffles were not sealed in an offshore vault along with the original Coke recipe and the location of Jimmy Hoffa but free for the clicking on Epicurious.com.

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