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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We’ve torn into so many grapefruits this month, our fingertips have a near-permanent zest scent, I keep finding tiny juice capsules throughout the apartment and more pertinently, I have become fixated on finding a way to bring their bitter, sour-sweet flavor to a baked good. Unfortunately, my husband was convinced it wouldn’t work, and that it would be “weird.” Fortunately, I never listen to him.

In her latest cookbook, Ina Garten takes what I consider her best recipe yet — her lemon pound cake — and tries to lighten it up. As I’ve already expressed my disdain for Food Networkian notions of “light food,” I’ll skip the there’s-no-hope eye roll and simply state that in comparing the new and the old recipes, the butter is replaced with an equal amount oil, one-third of a cup of buttermilk is replaced with one cup of whole milk yogurt, and an extra egg is added and in the “lighter version.” That said, just because it may not exactly mesh with whatever your notion of diet food is doesn’t mean that yogurt does not a wonderful cake crumb make.

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