How to make Swedish Nuts

REALLY, IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN SO EASY.

INSTEAD, MAKING NUTS TASTE GOOD IS HARD.

That is, if the directions aren't exactly clear, or if the person in charge of acquiring the ingredients and then whipping them into shape as per instructions doesn't know a pecan from a toucan.

Or if he doesn't have one of those high-falutin' whipper-upper thingies.

Blogger buddy Anna sent along this recipe for Spiced Swedish Nuts, something she said her husband and everyone else raves about.

I hummed. I hawed. But being the amateur gourmet chef I am, a master of chicken stir fry, bacon and eggs and Kraft Dinner, I finally decided to try them. The first thing I did was look at the recipe.

The next thing, of course, is to get the ingredients. This is where I began to foul up. As instructed, I bought the pecan halves.

Unfortunately, because I actually tried to remember the ingredients instead of writing them down when I went shopping, I only bought half a pound. So I had to go back to the store a day or two later.

And when I did, they didn't have the pecan halves any more, they just had the pecans in the shell, a whole giant package. Unwittingly, I figured a bunch of whole nuts is better than half a thing of half-nuts.

So I bought that, leaving me with this:



Well, DOH! I've never busted nuts before (only had mine busted). And these things are HARD! I had to bring out all the artillery.

Nothing really worked all that well. Pecans are, ahem, tough nuts to crack. But I needed another half-pound of "pecan halves." So I soldiered on, through trial and tribulation.

I tried my garlic press. I tried my pliers.

My hammer worked the best, but a lot of pecans lost their lives in the process and were crushed to bits. I don't know how the professionals do it, but if there's a secret, I couldn't discover it.

And my dang nuts seemed to be laughing at me. Doesn't that look like a sly grin to you?

Anyway, I never got even close to extracting half a pound of pecan halves from that big pack of nuts. I gave up after about half an hour.

And compared to the hugely expensive but convenient pack on the left, I ended up with what's on the right. So fine, let's proceed with the recipe.

I had to extract two egg whites from two eggs, leaving the yolks behind. But what the heck was I supposed to do with the best part of the egg, the yolk?

As instructed, I heated up the pecans.

And in an amazing first for me, while I was doing that, and without the benefit of an electric mixer, I had to manually "whip" the egg whites, chili powder and all kinds of other stuff like sugar in a "large bowl."

UNTIL STIFF!

Surprisingly, I managed to do both things simultaneously.

Then all I had to do was mix all this gooey stuff together.

Back in the oven they go, for three 10-minute intervals of stirring (not one 30-minute interval, no sir-eee!)


TA-DA!!!

I'm sure I got the volumes (or is that weights) of the ingredients wrong, but they ARE good!

I thank you, Anna. And I hope the Muppets' Swedish Chef would be proud.

I'm Just Sayin'...

It's Day 1 of 2008.

And I was going to pose the question, just wondering, how we could be doing all this celebrating...

When we had all this going on in the year that just passed and which is still going on in the year we're ushering in...

But I decided not to. Kind of. Because to focus on that would just drive everyone crazy.

It would be counter-productive and pour cold water on the festivities and diminish the positivity that, well, maybe things CAN change.

It would completely ignore the reality that there ARE beautiful things and beautiful people around.

We just have to push away all that other crap to find them and focus on them because, barring some mass stream of consciousness that results in a global revolution, we can't control anything else.

So we interrupt this program to bring you images of the beauty that's all around us.

ALL THE BEST FOR 2008.

Things in my home that can kill me

YES, THIS IS JUST ANOTHER AIMLESS HOLIDAY SEASON BLAH-G POST.

IT'S OF NO REAL CONSEQUENCE, CERTAINLY, AND BEYOND THE EVERY-DAY THOUGHT PROCESS OF MOST HUMANS, EVEN ME.

But the conception point for this post was borne one day last week when I realized that probably several million things had fallen behind my fridge over the years that I've lived here.

And that I might want to actually move the fridge out and find out what they were.

Where did the lid to that plastic storage container disappear to? Whatever happened to that ticket I had been meaning to pay?

And that's when I realized...there are things in my home that probably CAN kill me.

Now for those of you who might have seen previous posts I've done dealing with the INSIDE of my fridge, well, it's already an established, documented fact that there are living and dead things in there that pose a health hazard.

So we'll spare a revisit.

After I spent a recent afternoon picking up all the items that had fallen behind my fridge and put them through about 18 cycles in the dishwasher, I moved the fridge back in place.

I found no dead mice, if you were wondering.

And then I did a home inspection for other "things in my home that can kill me."

And I believe I might have opened up a whole new field of scientific research that can do nothing but aid humanity in the long term.

My preliminary findings are below.

I've discovered that objects in my home have the capability of being quick killers with immediate and fatal physical consequences or they can be more psychological and kill over time.

This, for example, is one part of a painting called Pipe Dream 1984 that I bought on New Year's Eve, 1984, while mostly drunk. This portion depicts a nuclear holocaust (hello Pakistan 2007!).

I've walked past this painting every day, virtually, for 24 or so years. What do you think the cumulative psychological effects might have been on my brain? Unfathomable.


This is my son's bedroom -- AFTER he's told me he cleaned it up. Enough said.

This is my fridge again, clearly one of the most dangerous single things in my household.

What tiny male brain wouldn't be paralysed and rendered completely useless by this pictorial kaleidoscope of family members and friends?

It boggles the mind and is another example of apparently harmless items potentially having a scatterbrain effect over long-term exposure.

This is my aptly called storage room. I won't even try to guess what menaces may lurk behind all that crap.

And God help me if I ever need to check out my water heater or actually ride my bike.


This is the trap door in the same room, a door I've previously blogged about and, in fact, opened up to the larger world.

I believed at the time there were zombies beneath there or at least corpses, if not plenty of mice.

So in a landmark, danger-filled expedition funded in part by the National Geophysical Weird Things Society, we opened up the crypt and took pictures. We found nothing of note but I continue to hear noises.

This, I believe, could one day get me, somehow.

This is a wall-hanging I brought back from India.

Aside from reminding me of some of the pleasures in life I am not currently enjoying, the images of lopped-off heads, snakes and swords can be unnerving at times.



And it may be that that wall-hanging is having some sort of Kama Sutra effect on my washer-dryer, which is close by.

The washer goes merrily and efficiently through its cycle but then the dial on the right always stops at the "spin" cycle. And it won't spin.

The clothes are still wet and I can't put them in the dryer and then go to sleep.

So I have to fiddle with the little nob, back and forth, back and forth, like breaking a combination lock on a safe, to get the spin cycle going again...

...So it will rev itself up into that orgasmic-like frenzy towards its climax. This seems eerily like something else, but I can't put my finger on it.

Anyway, my theory is that the cumulative effect of such ongoing frustration could very well shorten my life, because the landlord has known about this problem for months and still hasn't fixed it.

Nor have they fixed my smoke/heat detector, which emits the loudest, most high-pitched "beep-beep-beep" I've ever heard when it senses the temperature in my apartment has exceeded 20 degrees Celsius.

I'm almost serious. I can barely cook an egg or fry bacon and the stupid thing goes off, forcing me to force my son to wave a towel around it for minutes on end to get it to stop blaring in our ears.

I've disconnected it, meaning that if a real fire actually broke out, I'd be dead meat.


But the most dangerous thing of all, bar-none, is this Old Ship given to me by my mom.

It's made of very light and very sharp tin or something or other. I've cut myself on it several times and so has my son.

I have dreams about it falling on me and severing my carotid artery or something, so it poses both a long-term fear and a real physical threat.

I'd love to hear what things in your home could actually kill you.