smitten kitchen

A little over a year ago, my mother and I leapt at the opportunity to make a whole lemon tart featured in the New York Times and ended up with one of the most caustic, inedible things I have yet to make on this site. And people, with an ever-growing category of “disasters,” that is no small feat.

We received a lot of comments on that post ranging from sympathy to eye-rolling (as one of this woman’s recipes had previously felled another reader) but the bulk of them came in two veins: You should have used Meyer lemons and you really ought to make a Shaker Lemon Pie next.

As for the Meyer lemons, a milder and thinner-skinned cousin of the lemons we have readily available in the U.S., these comments made me dig my heels in, oh, just a little. Because while Meyer lemons may have yielded a better outcome, this was not my complaint: my complaint had been that the recipe said that Meyer lemons were an option not a requirement and I held the recipe to this and it nearly cauterized a hole in the roof of my mouth.

But there was another reason that I knew that it would take more than Meyer lemons to save this tart, and that, my friends, is a simple matter of proportion. The Evil Tart’s citrus to sugar ratio was eight whole lemons to three-quarters of a cup. The standard Shaker Lemon Pie recipe uses two whole lemons to two cups of sugar. You don’t need to be a math whiz to figure out why that all went to hell in a handbasket.

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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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January is always the time of year when most of us get caught up in the winter produce doldrums, fueled by the dearth of flavorful fruit and the overabundance of hard, starchy vegetables. But I find if I set my mind on citrus, I can carefully sidestep most bouts of Farmer’s Market Mourning. There are few things teeming with more promise of a sunnier tomorrow than sour-sweet piercing members of the rutaceae family, and I’ve got an archive full of margarita cookies, lemon bundts, orange chocolate chunks, grapefruit loaves and key lime tartlets that should assure you that you need not feel that you are missing out just because the peaches and berries have gone into hibernation.

But I haven’t had a lemon bar in there before now, despite repeated requests and, heck, even pleading for one by various people inside my computer. You’d think it is because I’m stubborn but it actually that my bar (ha) for lemon bars has been set very high by my mother, who has an award-winning recipe somewhere in her files. Upon request, she sent it to me a couple years ago, but when they didn’t come out the way I had remembered, her response was “oh, I must have sent you the wrong one.” Tell me, if you had a recipe for lemon bars that you had won you a cooking contest, why would you have a second version in your box that wasn’t as good? Perhaps if you ask her, you’ll get further than I did.

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It must be cold outside or something because all I have wanted as of late is the kind of grub that sticks to your ribs and sends you into a food cocoon for hours. It’s an odd sensation for a girl who hates feeling weighted down after a meal, and yet, salad has seemed an insult to freezing fingers and chapped lips, thin soups a cry for help and even my favorite dumplings have seemed too bright and springy this week. Go away, you peppy foods, I declare, and don’t come back until I can feel my toes.

Saturday morning I made another of those frittatas I’d mentioned a couple weeks back, hoping those potatoes, bacon and eggs with a toasted English muffin would make the icy breeze in Brooklyn less cruel and unforgivable, but no dice. (Though we loved it, despite all that, and I encourage you to design your own favorite frittata with on-hand ingredients.) We returned in the evening with intent make a reservation at whichever fireplace-d and cozy restaurant would take us but when first through fourth choices failed to see our charms, we started reminiscing about that three-bean chili I used to make with cheddar-jalapeno cornbread and suddenly, the idea of smarting up and going to a restaurant seemed utterly ridiculous. Go out? But why? We stayed in, spiced up and let Jennifer Hudson croon a hole in our speakers with a top-secret copy of Dreamgirls, happy as clams.

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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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