We were in New Mexico last week, and on the first day it was about 90 degrees and perhaps 10% humidity. C-Boy and Z-Boy took a break from playing in the sprinkler to drip water on the sidewalk and watch it dry up.

Jonski Papa asked them “Is this what people do for entertainment in this town? Watch water evaporate?”

“Of course not!” C-boy replied, with some disdain. “To them, it’s common!”

I’ve made Nancy Baggett’s caramels three times now, with quite a bit of modifications this time around, so I feel justified in posting the recipe for my latest version.

For those of you who weren’t paying attention during the Olympics, gianduja is a concoction of hazelnuts and chocolate - think Nutella, only solid. In the Piedmont region of Italy, it is quite a specialty.

My inspiration came when I decided to compare-taste some of the varieties of Callebaut chocolate available in chunk form at my local bulk food store. They sell unsweetened, bittersweet (70% cocoa solids), semi-sweet (55%), milk chocolate, and the gianduja. (I prefer the semi-sweet to the bittersweet, but that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion!) Then a few weeks later, I noticed hazelnuts at Trader Joe’s, and decided to combine the two in a new batch of caramels. Since toasting the pecans was an improvement in the second batch of caramels, I decided to toast the hazelnuts as well. I use fewer nuts than she calls for (about 1 cup, instead of 2.5) because the littles in the family aren’t always crazy about nuts. (Then again, maybe I should use more so I don’t have to share!) This time I used half-and-half instead of whipping cream (the latter is so expensive!), and I don’t think the final result was adversely affected.

Hazelnut Caramels, dipped in Gianduja Chocolate

Ingredients:
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 cup dark corn syrup
2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1/8 tsp salt
2 cups half-and-half (or cream if you prefer)
1 Tab vanilla extract, combined with 1 Tab hot water
1+ cups chopped toasted hazelnuts [optional]
8 oz gianduja chocolate (as much as 1 lb would have been better)

Directions:

1. Line a 9×13 baking dish with aluminum foil, draping over 2 sides. Grease the foil or coat with cooking spray. Set on a wire rack.
2. In a heavy, nonreactive 6-quart pot, thoroughly stir together the sugars, corn syrup, butter, and salt. Stir in the cream until the sugars dissolve. Bring to a boil over med-high heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon.
3. Adjust the heat so the mixture boils briskly. Insert candy thermometer. Continue boiling briskly, occasionally gently stirring and scraping the pot bottom, until the mixture thickens and darkens somewhat, 8 to 9 minutes.
4. Reduce the heat somewhat and continue boiling, gently stirring and scraping to avoid scorching, until the caramel reaches 247 degrees F (soft ball stage). Note: temperature may rise rapidly at the end.
5. Immediately remove from heat. Gently stir in the vanilla mixture and the nuts (if using), just until evenly distributed.
6. Carefully pour the caramel into the baking dish. (She writes “do not scrape out the pot”, but I always do - can’t bear any caramelly goodness to go to waste!)
   My notes indicate this process took 45 minutes total, although I’m not sure where all the time comes from (n to initial boil, 9 minutes in step 3, 15 minutes more to get to soft ball - where are the other 15?).
7. After cooling (at least 1.5 hours), cut into 1 inch squares and dip into chocolate if desired.

Baggett gives very detailed directions on how to melt and temper the chocolate for dipping. Her precise details comes in very handy the first few times you try this recipe, but basically it boils down to: melt chocolate (with a little flavorless vegetable oil), dip caramels in chocolate, let it set up and then enjoy. One handy tip is that she reserves some of the chocolate to stir into that which is melted, to help cool it off. (For all I know, that’s standard practice!) She also calls for much more chocolate - 2.5 pounds! - but we’ve never needed that much.

My caramels were about half an inch thick - they seemed thinner than previous attempts. Perhaps I used fewer nuts? or perhaps it’s my poor memory? Next time I might try a smaller pan.

So how do we like them? No one objected to the ‘new’ nut flavor or the different chocolate - the boys might even prefer it this way, without dark chocolate. Personally, I consider it a fabulous combination - the flavors of caramel and chocolate really meld together well. One objection we had to previous attempts was that the dark chocolate was so distinctly contrasting with the caramel. Dark chocolate has its place, too, don’t get me wrong! I think a dynamite combination would be two batches of caramels, some in gianduja and some in a dark chocolate.

On the down side, the gianduja never really firmed up entirely. I’m not sure if that’s a characteristic of the chocolate (before melting, it was much more soft than typical chocolate) or if that means I did something wrong in the ‘tempering’. No matter, the fridge takes care of that problem!

Footnote: I already had this idea before reading this review of Sahagun chocolates over at Candy Blog, but her review only reinforced my notion that it would be a worthwhile venture.

I was browsing a database of health care providers the other day, and noticed they had misspelled “compulsive” as “complusive.” Does the fact that I wanted to send someone an email pointing out the error, mark me as a compulsive spelling corrector??

When I was growing up, I disliked guacamole. There was just something about that green combined with that texture - chunky and slimy at the same time - that turned me off. So I never ate it. Starting about 20 years ago, I experienced a few incidents of gastrointestinal distress after having meals with guacamole residue on the food I ate. (Given my dislike, I usually requested the guac be left off, or spooned it off for a dining companion.) So then I started claiming that I was allergic to avocados. It seemed almost silly at the time - who is allergic to avocados? And I think deep inside I felt like it was a flimsy excuse to hide my dislike. But those symptoms - believe me, you don’t want those symptoms.

A few years later, I began to notice that I had the symptoms after eating shrimp as well. This was somewhat devastating - shrimp had been one of my favorite luxury foods growing up! It definitely was a luxury in our house, so fried shrimp was the first thing I’d look for on restaurant menus when we were dining out. And once the “seafood trucks” started making deliveries to town, and we could have some at home - oh, I was in heaven.

Although I’ve never been formally tested, I did a few experiments on different occasions and determined that the symptoms showed up after eating shrimp. Once when dining in Boston’s Chinatown with my husband’s grad school friend, I tried a shrimp puff. “How much shrimp could be in that? It’s probably mostly flour!” I thought. Well, it was enough shrimp for an evening of misery - heightened because I was supposed to be finalizing a conference presentation for the next day. Since then, I just tell people I’m allergic to shrimp and avoid it at all costs. And without any formal food diaries, I decided that the incidents I’d previously ascribed to avocados, were probably shrimp incidents as well.

Flash forward to last month. Avocados were being served. I decided that since I wasn’t allergic, I should try it to see if I like it. After all, tastes change (as well frequently remind the boys). It wasn’t bad! Somewhat bland, but not bad. A few weeks later, I had a few more bites of avocado in a dish made by a friend.

Given all the known health benefits, I decided to dive in and buy avocados at the grocery store. They sat on the counter for a few days, then in the fridge, while I mused over what I should do with them. I still wasn’t up for guacamole, so eventually decided to just have a few slices available to go with tonight’s salad (which became tonight’s meal, when our pork roast took much longer than I’d anticipated!). As I was eating dinner, I noticed that my throat was itchy. When I mentioned this to Jonski Dad, he said I might have the same thing C-boy had earlier this week (just over a day of sore throat and fatigue). I responded that this was definitely not the beginnings of a sore throat, but an itchy throat.

Astute readers can probably see where this is going… I do have an avocado allergy. The itchy throat should have been my first clue - the gastrointestinal symptoms followed about an hour later (similar to what I experience with shrimp, but not as intense).

Apparently avocados are a fairly common allergen. Who knew? I suppose the 1% of the population so afflicted knew! And while 1% may not seem like much, avocado appears on the lists of ‘common’ food allergens (not the Big Ones, but the next tier down).

Once again I join the elite, the 1%.

There’s an awful lot of detailed medical information about avocado allergy (compared to shrimp, for example, but yet shrimp is commonly thought of as a ‘highly allergenic’ food, probably because it is commonly implicated in anaphylaxis). Apparently an avocado allergy frequently co-occurs with a latex allergy: people allergic to latex often have allergies to avocado (53%), potatoes (40%), bananas (38%), assorted other tropical fruits, and chestnuts.

But you know what? I’ve lived without avocados for most of my life, it’s not going to be a big hardship to continue to avoid them. But I see peaches in many of the lists of things cross-reactive with a latex allergy. If I develop an allergy to peaches, I don’t know what I’d do!

Update (2/22/07): links I had made to the immunocap [allergy testing] site were broken, so I fixed them.

Clarification (2/22/07): From what I’ve read, there’s no reason for avocado and shrimp allergies to co-occur, it’s just that my avocado reactions were the same as how I used to react to shrimp.

T-boy went on a long weekend trip with Jonski Dad. When we went to pick them up at the airport, he was standing near the curb, quite expectantly. I stepped out of the car, and when he saw me, his face lit up with pure joy and he started doing a happy dance. It was a nice feeling, to be greeted with such joy and hugged with pure abandon. Then he climbed into the car, saw his oldest brother, and said: “There’s C-Boy. I love him.”

Of course the lovefest ended about 5 minutes later, when he started yelling that Z-boy could not have that granola bar that dad found in the front seat, it was his and his alone. Oh well, the mood was warm and fuzzy while it lasted!

Take “beef”, “potatoes”, “carrots”, “corn”, and “peas”.

Pour into “gravy” and mix.

Top with a crust, and what do you have?

Not quite beef pot pie - but good enough for these two boys!

I saw this recipe for “Chicken Not Pie” in Family Fun magazine a few weeks ago, and knew I had a mission for April Fool’s Day. Since Z-boy was kind of in a funk as I was working on them, I decided to let him in on the surprise. About 5 minutes later, he went downstairs to inform C-boy that mom was making pot pies with candy and pudding. I was just about ready to throttle him! But the joke was on me - or maybe really on C-boy - because C-boy thought I was trying to fool Z-boy. Follow that? But he tried it nonetheless. And enjoyed it! I wonder if i could make real beef pot pie sometime, and get him to eat it because he thought it was this!

(Personally, I found the contrast of textures between pudding and chewy candies [starburst and jellybeans, standing in for peas, carrots, and corn] to be too off-putting, especially since the cold refrigerated nature of the pudding served to harden the candies. The chocolate [beef] and banana [potatoes], on the other hand, were nice and tasty!)