![]() "Waste not, want not!", chanted my inner voice and so I pounded those hardened bits with my hand-held mixer until some were pulverized and others, well, just got smaller. Hard-headed idiocy, my friends, is what this is all about. Are you thinking that maybe I didn't? Yeah. The almond paste bits got harder and hotter and harder still.Īt this point, would you have just thrown out that bowl of almond paste bits, reached for the fresh, soft log and gotten on with your life? Yeah. I tried microwaving those, too, but that's when the process stalled. ![]() I broke the paste in half (malleability! of some kind! this must have meant success) and then again in smaller pieces. (The clanging sound it made was not promising, though I wasn't exactly listening to the signs it was giving me, was I? Don't answer that either.) I sprinkled the brick with a drop of water and put it in the microwave for one minute. I unwrapped that hardened block, paper crinkling appealingly, and put it in a ceramic bowl. Besides, if softening brown sugar was so easy, how difficult could almond paste be? (This is a rhetorical question and should not be answered, as I have already learned my lesson and amply so. Not in 2007 with my brand-new money-saving resolutions! (The fact that both logs were gifts was inexplicably a non-issue.) I had a perfectly good, older block of almond paste to use up first and that was the end of the discussion. I couldn't possibly use the fresher log when I had a perfectly good older brick to use up first, could I? (Yes. ![]() And that other log of almond paste? Soft! Malleable! Creamy, almost! Labeled marzipan, which might have meant adjusting sugar levels in the cake. Yes! I had another log of that glorious stuff lying right next to the petrified block. Because, you see, dear readers, I'm a woman rich in almond paste. Well, it might have also been my hard-headed idiocy. A murder weapon, if you will.Īnd here's where my smug thriftiness led me astray. But after a quick poke here and there, I realized that my luscious paste was no longer the yielding mass it had once been. I just didn't have any use for it yet, and I figured it would wait patiently, like a box of brown sugar, until I needed it.Ī few nights ago, when I was pulling out ingredients to make a tea cake from the pages of Tartine, which was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times before Christmas, my hands alighted upon that brick of almond paste. But I didn't entirely forget about the paste. I slipped the almond paste into my kitchen cupboards and soon it was wedged behind a few boxes of rice, some vinegar, half a sack of beans, a can of tuna. (I could have made latte di mandorla, but my mother always liked that stuff more than I did.) The thick paste yielded appealingly under gentle pressure from my thumb, but it was the middle of summer and baking was far from my mind. A note in her delightfully loopy handwriting, a pair of fishnet stockings (she single-handedly increases the stock of some hosiery companies, I'm convinced), a paper bag filled with a few pounds of sun-dried tomatoes from Puglia, and a flat brick of almond paste, wrapped in simple blue-and-white paper. ![]() More than a year ago, my mother sent over a little care package from Italy, stuffed with all sorts of lovely things. In my case? A brick of hardened, year-old almond paste. Because just when you start feeling smug about your resourceful ways, something will come along and smack you in the head. Making one casserole stretch into four days of square meals, finding breakfast in the series of half-finished oat bags (rolled, steel-cut, what have you) in my cupboards, baking bread instead of buying it.īeing thrifty is glorious, I tell you. I'd had such good intentions since the New Year - pinching pennies here, being resourceful there. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |