smitten kitchen

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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As much as I have said more often in the last couple months than you should ever let me get away with that I am so busy! and no time! the truth is that really, truly having no time for the things I really want to have time for terrifies me. I always wonder: are we really so busy or are we just busy being busy? Are there truly ‘not enough hours in the day’ or are we just not using the ones we have well enough? I feel if I allow myself to sorry can’t, too much going on right now I might fall down a slippery slope wherein I start saying that even before I have considered what I am busy with. Come on, surely you know the type.

What I mean is: there is a woman with two children, one under a year old, in our west coast office that wields our interoffice overnight mail for the very best of causes: baked goods. Got a promotion? New employee? Had a bad day? Leaving for greener pastures? Any and all events, no matter how small or mighty, are greeted with a bundle of butter, sugar, chocolate and… well, I haven’t figured out all of the ingredients yet, so I just call it “crack” and you will hopefully know that I mean that it is a very good thing.

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I confess that I roll my eyes a bit at the overhearing of some new truffle recipe. I don’t mean to over-simplify them — yes, fabulous chocolatiers from time to time find new ways to flavor, construct or adorn these decadent orbs of Awesome — but it all simmers down to the same thing: they’re just firm ganache, and ganache is just melted chocolate mixed with cream.

If you, like us, feel that tiny truffles are nothing short of the most transcendent and uplifting vehicle for chocolate consumption, you should make them because they’re ridiculously easy. Plus, unless you’re buying yours at $2.50 apiece, they’re pretty much always better homemade.

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Some people — like my husband who claims it “tastes like medicine,” — fail to see marzipan’s charms but you won’t find any of these misguided souls on my side of the family. My mother loves marzipan, and not those little food dye brushed animals and fruits; she does not wish to eat miniature sculptures, just rolls and rolls of marzipan swaddled in bittersweet chocolate.

Whenever she makes it into the city, my mother gets her beloved Marzipan Rolls from the esteemed Li-Lac Chocolates, a place so old, my parents went there back before they were married in 1968. (Don’t you love making jokes about how old your parents are? It’s like clinging to that last thread of evidence that you could possibly still be young.) Li-Lac is one of those Village gems, a place that’s been making chocolate the same way since 1923, from a big copper kettle in the back, on marble countertops, by hand and with minimal brouhaha. There’s no color-schemed boxes lined with velvet or gold, nothing is ever pre-packed, and yes, you can actually buy one piece at a time for those of us that love quality but fear quantity. Two years ago, after the rent on Li-Lac’s Christopher Street location of 81 years was tripled, they moved eight blocks north to Jane Street, which has really only made it easier for Alex and I to sneak down there. We love the place so much, we gave out boxes of their round flavored truffles as wedding favors. They were better than the cake, but shouldn’t that go without saying?

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