smitten kitchen

Sometimes I cook things even though I have significant doubts that they will be in any way delicious. Why is this, how is this so, you ask? Because I live in a mental place I affectionately call Hope. I wish to be surprised. I aspire to be wrong from time to time (though not, as Alex can but probably will not argue, because he is polite, too often, and certainly not if it would make him right) because if the sum of the parts that together comprise the world as I know it is all there is, I’d be kind of bummed. I’d be kind of bored.

Often enough, things exceed my expectations. There are better-than-Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soups, there is Fennel Ice Cream and Red Velvet Cake and, loudest as of late, there is brining.

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How to make orangettes: Slice ends off four oranges, score the peel from one end to the other, and remove the peels from the oranges.

Slice the peels into thin strips and trim the edges.

Using a medium size pot, place the peels in boiling water and blanch them for a few minutes. Rinse the peels, and repeat this process a second time. This is done to remove the bitterness of the peels.

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I’ve been feeling kind of bewildered this week. It started when I asked my husband if he still thought the third year of marriage was an ideal time to try to make one of those little tiny things with roly thighs and he shocked me by saying yes, and it continued when I saw him, more than once, researching two bedroom apartments in the city. “How about Roosevelt Island?” he asked and I went to go rock in the corner for a while. Nooo Roosevelt Island, nooo.

We brought in the Jewish new year with our combined families and our mothers delighting in telling us what difficult, exhausting, impossible-to-please babies we both were (our siblings were apparent delights, or nya-nya, as they put it), weeks overdue and really, it was all very funny and ha-ha until I learned that this one came out, this one I married, at over nine pounds. NINE AND A HALF POUNDS. Good god. I don’t even like lugging 5 pound bags of flour home. How could this work?

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