I had bought a bag of lovely and very expensive pecan meats at the Farmers’ Market. They were worth every penny – fresh, tasty, perfectly-textured, without a broken piece in the whole bag.
Something that luscious deserves to be used in a special recipe, and I decided to try my grandmother’s Buttermilk Pralines. I had written the recipe directly from her dictation, and had never tried it in all these years. So I stood at the stove stirring the foamy sugar and buttermilk and two full cups of very expensive pecan meat mixture until it reached the required soft-ball stage, then dropped it by spoonfuls on the waxed paper.
After half an hour, when the candy had cooled and was still shiny and gooey and showed no sign of setting up, I knew something was wrong. Blame it on the heat, on the humidity, on my lack of cooking skills; there was to be no edible candy from that batch.
Surely the two full cups of very expensive pecan meats are salvageable, I thought. The sugar mixture coating them is water-soluble and I just need to wash it off. I tore as much of the waxed paper away as I could, dumped the rest of the mess in a colander, plugged the sink and ran it full of water, and set the colander in the sink.
The waxed paper was the first thing to come loose. It floated to the top. And after some time and some swishing, the buttermilk and sugar mixture let go and settled to the bottom of the sink.
Apparently nut meats absorb water, because my two full cups of very expensive pecan meats were more than a little soggy. Not to worry, I thought, a little heat should take care of that. I spread my two full cups of very expensive pecan meats in a single layer in a pan and put them in the oven on low heat.
In my refrigerator is a plastic container of two full cups of very expensive, toasted, soggy pecan meats. I don’t think they’re good for anything, but I can’t bring myself to throw them away.
After all, they were very expensive.
Posted by Sharon under Laughter | No Comments »
