2009 One Hope chardonnay

Robert Mondavi Jr. helped make it, much of its proceeds go to charity, and it is a caramel-covered, toasted marshmallow in a glass. Oozy-sweet, and exactly what the ladies want in a breast cancer chardonnay in October.

Do I sound snippy or unappreciative? I don't mean to. I would prefer a chardonnay that is a little more subtle -- a fine, tart apple dipped in just a little oozy-sweet, gourmet caramel -- that's all. But One Hope is perfectly formulated. I would pair it with some sort of guilty-pleasure snacky-wacky. Remember a long time ago, when we were having chips and dip and a seven-dollar (Liebfraumilch) riesling, and watching Die Hard?

One Hope chardonnay simply cries out for similar treatment. Popcorn popped in bacon fat and dusted with black pepper, and a night spent watching The Birds? Katie's fruit crisp, and an afternoon enjoying the big game? All the lush offerings of a Sunday brunch, like ham, hash browns, waffles, fruit salads, muffins, and cookies, and a morning of good gossip? Your decision.

One thing though. Isn't the label a bit dreary for something to do with hope?

Braised pork chops (with that divine gravy)

I am tempted to ape the Chocolate Priestess, who refers to her readers as "brothers and sisters." Though come to think of it, I still like Lucia's "dear things" better. Brothers and sisters, dear things, is there, is there any food more divine than mashed potatoes with pork chop gravy? Answer comes there none.

Or rather, answer comes there far too many. Many foods of course are just as divine, which is why there are so many cookbooks and food blogs and good things in the world to eat and drink.

The making of this dinner is very simple. Take four or five thick pork chops, sear them brown in just a filming of olive oil in a heavy skillet, sprinkle on a little salt and pepper to each piece of meat, and add 1 clove of garlic and a scant 1/4 cup water or wine to the pan. Cover the pan with a tight fitting lid, and place in a 300 F oven for about an hour.

Unfortunately, the tenderness of your pork chops may be an iffy thing. Is is just an urban myth, or has pork has been raised so lean for so long now that it is difficult to find a chop that will cook up really tender? The meat still gives off a good amount of delicious juices, but it's those you must be careful with, if you don't your dinner to boil madly and toughen while it "bakes." Try pouring them off several times during cooking -- this juice is your gravy anyway -- so that the meat steams more gently, and adjust the oven heat if need be. Old fashioned, bone-in pork chops may be better than the boneless kind in any case.

When the meat is done, set it aside for a few minutes while you thicken the pan juices in any style you like -- make a roux first and add the drippings to it, or pour in a few tablespoons of a flour and cold water slurry, or, if you need to make your gravies gluten-free, sprinkle rice flour directly on to the simmering surface of the juices, a half teaspoon or so at a time, and stir until it is all of the right consistency.

Then, then you will ladle this gravy over your mashed potatoes and serve it up beside the (let us hope, dear things), succulent pork chops. The wine you choose to drink beside it could be anything you fancy. A dry riesling. Why not something simple and sparkling -- a cava from Spain? Or why not that bottle of Ornellaia that fell from the sky right into your lap the other day? You know, the 100-point, Wine Spectator Wine of the Year Ornellaia, made by the same extended family that makes the equally legendary Sassicaia in an adjacent valley in Italy? Why not indeed.

2006 Geyser Peak merlot

After a month and a half of Chiantis, all very good, one wants a respite from their prickly, horsy, olive brine and raspberry-patch flavors. So, one chooses a California merlot -- calm, just a touch of spice and a touch of mashed dark berries, and a touch of cedar. Very delicious.

Retail, about $12.

Lily Haxworth Wallace and "natural" wine, 1941

Little did she know she was seventy years ahead of her time. Lily Haxworth Wallace -- and really, with a name like that, what else could she do but write a book called The New American Etiquette (Books, Inc., 1941)?-- does not define natural wine as in-the-know people do today. She doesn't define it at all. In chapter 50, "Sensible use of Wines and Liquors," she simply catalogs the wines that her readers are likely to encounter at table. They are:

Sherry
Madeira
Port --

• vintage 
• tawny 
• ruby

Claret and the wines of Bordeaux --

• the Médoc
• the district of Graves
• St. Emilion
• the district of Sauternes

 Burgundy

Champagne

Hocks and Moselles

the Rest --

• Alsace 
• Hungary (Tokay)
• "the rich, fine white American Catawba"
• Chianti
• Muscatel
• Marsala

Throughout this short chapter, "natural" is only just inserted as a descriptor (like "red" or "white"), very casually, first in the paragraphs on Claret and the Wines of Bordeaux and then afterward whenever appropriate. She assumes we understand. Since Claret follows upon sherry, Madeira, and port, we must infer that a natural wine was the opposite to these -- a wine untampered with, so good and pure it needed no blending or additions of extra alcohol to make it drinkable. Sherry, madeira, and port are all blended and fortified and, in Madeira's case, nearly pummeled to death with heat and exposure to air, because experience hath shewn that mankind must so treat these wines to bring the humble grapes making them to their full, bedizened glory. The same is true of Champagne, which is not only "artificial, fortified, and blended," Miss Haxworth Wallace almost sniffs, but also " 'superficial and gay.' " Natural or "true" wines went straight from their own vines to the press to their own barrels to bottle, and that was all.

Today's "natural" wine enthusiasts seem to tout similar virtues in their production lines, but when they praise a wine as un-tampered with, they are talking about its being organic and eco-friendly. They are talking about avoiding the use of technologies that keep the product hygienic or uniform in (often heavy-bodied, jammy) taste and mouthfeel. Probably a modern natural winemaker could still make a "natural" port or sherry, eschewing pesticides, sulfur, or weird enzymes, or at least he could understand the attempt. Lily Haxworth Wallace would merely look quizzically at the suggestion, and say, "No. Your touriga nacional grapes could never become port on their own. By definition it is unnatural."

All this reminds us how iffy a thing good, fresh wines were for our parents and grandparents, not to mention remoter forebears. Port, sherry, Madeira, and Champagne were all lovely, but what did you drink when you tired of their pungency, high alcohol, heaviness, or even their gay and superficial bubbles? Reading Miss Haxworth Wallace, it looks as though you turned in hope to the two great regions of France, Bordeaux and Burgundy, and you sighed along with her and her experts: Mr. H. Warner Allen, or Professor Saintsbury. (Incidentally, she freely admits that most of the material in Chapter 50 comes from something called "Notes for an Epicure," published by the Libbey Glass Manufacturing Company.) You sighed for a taste of these regions' Clarets, Volnays, and Pommards. You sat up and took notice at her vocabulary: these natural wines are delicate, harmonious, subtle, balanced, "generous and splendid." Or, at the very least, "wholesome." After all, "only a vulgarian would desire to drink the great wines at every meal. Even the greatest would pall ... therefore, the connoisseur thanks the gods for the sound wholesome wines of St. Emilion [a notch below the great Médoc or Côte de Beaune]."

Interestingly, Miss Haxworth Wallace also stipulates that the name and vintage year of a natural wine must be "considered before its perfect place in the meal can be decided." Not so, it seems, with the artificial heavyweights; Grandpa and Grandma and everybody knew sherry accompanies the soup, champagne the roast, and port or Madeira follows dinner in all the R months. Pure wines, delicate and "absolutely individual," demanded more thought. We can easily imagine the advocates of today's eco-friendly natural wines claiming the same thing. Pairing a steak with a Napa merlot might be child's play, but to find some entrée to show off an organic Sagrantino would be a much nicer challenge. Bless us all, how far ahead of us Lily was. She is even up on her wine-as-health knowledge, and she is frank about it. "...for wine acts as a mild stimulant on the digestive organs and is a solvent for pasty accumulations that are prone to clog the intestines and retard elimination."   

And never once in Chapter 50 does a single grape variety rate a mention. Our authoress knows nothing of chardonnay or pinot. Perhaps seventy years from now, it will be the same. Then again, "the dry cocktail of simple mixture such as gin and vermouth or gin and bitters" is also not even granted its identity as a Martini. If we read carefully we may pick up a few other truths, as that pork is not a part of formal dinner menus (too peasantish?), whereas ham may be, and of course for dessert, one calmly enjoys sweet wines, fruits, and nuts. "The majority of sweetmeats, confections and preserves are considered dull by the ardent connoisseur."

If ever you encounter The New American Etiquette in an antique store or library used book sale, by all means treat yourself and pick it up. Published by Books, Inc., "endorsed by the National Institute" (and why ever not?), it is a sharply written and sometimes wise encyclopedia of any and all possible behavior among any people doing anything anywhere in 1941. Here you will learn how not to be cheap, how to write letters to the Pope, how to stroll in the country, how to word a wedding announcement issued by a married sister and brother-in-law ("Mr. and Mrs. Walter Phipps Snow announce the marriage of their sister, Madelyn Ethel Fisher, to Mr. Norman Russell Forester").You will learn the right color scheme for a Formal Regency living room -- lemon ice, black and gold, silverglow, olive green, and faded amethyst -- how to get ready for bed in a Pullman sleeping car and how to go gunning. The photographs are marvelous. The bride-to-be admires her new towels, young couples dance on the yacht club porch.

And you'll even learn bits of wisdom for life. Etiquette books seem to have a surprising amount of wisdom in them, because even though their authors may be no wiser than we, the best ones have done their research into the human comedy and have found rules which served previous generations well in bluffing their way through the performance. Some of the good advice is practical. Don't be a "plinker" at a shooting party; no such party "can thoroughly enjoy a day's activity when it must always be concerned with the antics of some totally ignorant, careless, or 'smart' member." Some of it is moral. Don't mope. "Chronic sad thinking signifies an almost constant thinking of self -- a definite bar to poise." Do not be critical of a man (bold print in the original). "Never make him the target of your jokes or barbs of sarcasm. Every man has a feeling of superiority to women and jokes and sarcasm directed at him, while they may seem funny when they come from men, always hurt if a woman fires the shot."

Ah, there we are. You have only to open the book to the frontispiece, a color photograph of a magnificent bride sitting at ease on a striped sofa, to sense that the heart and soul of The New American Etiquette is the careful guiding of female readers  to the great goal -- the wedding day. Well, and why not?

Katie's Passion Kitchen fruit crisp

I am indebted to fellow food blogger, photographer, and (adopted) hometown-er Katie, of Katie's Passion Kitchen, for this delectable fruit crisp recipe. She watches the cable cooking shows so I don't have to, and cooks far more sophisticated things than I usually attempt -- I must, for instance, try the Polpette di zucchine (breaded, fried zucchini-and-cheese balls) that she got, in turn, from "David Rocco's La Dolce Vita" (I ask you). She grills scallops and things, makes her own limoncello, bakes and hand-decorates cookies at 1:00 in the morning, special orders French bread from the world famous Poilane bakery in Paris (I ask you), and knows about hibiscus-infused tequila. I could go on. One can only bow the head, Jeeves.

Now the fruit crisp. I adore pie or anything resembling it, and we already know I look meaningfully at the displays of fresh fruit in the supermarket, though we know how disappointed those bright, heaped riches usually leave me. So sturdy! So cold! So shippable! So sour. Here then, in Katie's kitchen in March of this year, was a recipe combining fresh fruit, lots of redemptive sugar and butter, some crunchy oats, and complete ease of preparation. She credits a Betty Crocker cookbook of the '70s, which is probably the only remotely standard cookbook I don't actually own. This March post only fell under my eye the day before yesterday, but I jumped at it.

"Katie's Passion" Fruit Crisp

• 1 cup rolled oats
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1 stick butter
• handful nuts
• pinch cinnamon
• "pinch of" salt (let's use more --  1/2 tsp)
• 4 to 5 cups fresh or dried fruit or berries, or any combination (Katie forgets to tell us how much fruit, but I guess at 5 cups based on the quantity specified for Marion Cunningham's apple crisp recipe in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.) 

Mix the dough ingredients with your hands until all feels rich and crumbly. Place the fruit in a 1 and 1/2 quart baking dish. Pile on the topping and press gently. You may want to sprinkle on 1/4 cup water if your fruits are very hard, so that they will soften in cooking; Katie says you may also want to add some flour to thicken any juices, especially if you are using a lot of fresh berries. Bake in a preheated 350 F oven for about 35 to 40 minutes.

Serve with ice cream, a spoonful of heavy cream, whipped cream, or plain yogurt.

Delicious. By the way, I used 4 fresh peaches, 5 fresh nectarines, and about 7 little green-fleshed, sticky Italian plums. Any combination of fruits would answer. Yes, almost all of it started out as hard, dry, and sour as you might be accustomed to, unless you shop at an absolutely local farmer's market every day, or harvest Italian plums right in the ruins of the Forum or peaches right off the trees in Georgia (I'm told they are a-may-zing). In any case we have that redemptive sugar and butter and accompanying cream. And don't forget a little more than a pinch of salt.

Pausing

It sounds trite to say evil takes many forms. But certainly, here is one.

The second plane approaches.

Image from today's Yahoo news feed, "the 25 most powerful photos of 9/11."

How perfectly extraordinary --

-- that Lord Peter Wimsey should drink Liebfraumilch. In 1928, in London, in Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Here is his meal:

So he turned in to one of his numerous Clubs, and had a Sole Colbert very well cooked, with a bottle of Liebfraumilch; an Apple Charlotte and light savoury to follow, and black coffee and a rare old brandy to top up with -- a simple and satisfactory meal which left him in the best of tempers.

I've only begun the mystery of General Fentiman's death and his estranged sister's devilishly complex will, but already the novel is a mine of delicious quotes. Why does it seem that every third sentence in old books cries out to be a modern-day blog motto or Facebook status update? Maybe we're all just too clever and ironic by half. Anyway here are a few gems from another world.

" 'Didn't want to hang about the entrance. Too many imbeciles coming in and out. Exchanging silly anecdotes.' "

" 'I suppose she thinks if she can't be a success as a woman she'll be a half baked intellectual.' "

And, the best so far:

" 'Why a solemn national occasion should be an excuse for all these fools meeting and talking rot, I don't know.' "

Oh dear

I'm reading a book and drinking a wine, and I don't like either one of them. Of course it may be that my opinions are dopey, and so you may ignore all that follows.

The book is Alice Feiring's newest, Naked Wine: Letting Grapes do What Comes Naturally, published on September 1st. The good  people behind the book's marketing efforts were kind enough to offer me an advance copy, and I was flattered and delighted enough to say yes, please.

The wine I'm drinking -- or was drinking, until I put it on the shelf to cook with -- is no less than Stag's Leap Cellars "Artemis" cabernet sauvignon. The two go together, book and wine, because both come from famous and admired sources, and because the wine happens to be exactly the sort that the book rails against. Ms. Feiring is a well-known wine writer and blogger (The Battle for Wine and Love, or How I Saved the World from Parkerization, The Feiring Line) whose niche is precisely the railing against syrupy, high alcohol, berry-jam "global reds," how superbly crafted and Stag's Leap-ish soever they may be. And Stag's Leap is, well, Stag's Leap. We have met the winery and its legendary products before, and learned all about where to put the vital apostrophe.

Alice Feiring's reputation comes from preferring and promoting what she calls "natural" wines instead, which are made without all sorts of preservative sulfur, extra yeasts, enzymes, and doses of oak essence to boost uniformly toasty-buttery, Robert-Parker-pleasing flavors. Natural wines, it would seem, tend to be light, acidic, European, of iffy longevity, and rather obscure. Their devotees also claim that by definition they must be "tastier and healthier," but really -- we must plunge right in -- why should this be? We've met the organic cult before, and we were forced to shake our collective head and tut "shmorganic." There's no reason why a grape (or a carrot or a blade of grass) raised in pre-industrial conditions should boast different properties than a grape (or a carrot, etc.) raised otherwise. It's a little like expecting that a human being raised Amish will be purer than another brought up among the moderns in Manhattan today. Then again, possibly for the environmental cult, aping the Amish is very much to the point.

Anyway in the first part of Naked Wine Alice recounts her efforts to create her own "natural" wine from a favorite grape, the Sagrantino, "in the style of the Umbrian town of Montefalco." She literally does crush a vatful of donated fruit with her feet and then leave the mess alone to see what develops. It's a good lesson: we grasp that the nice people at Gallo are not doing that.   

I'm all for such experimentation and I'm all for less gloppy, monstrous reds. Even though I've liked my share of Apothics and Sandholdts, essentially chocolate-coated cherry caramels in a bottle, after a while they do so resemble a glass of Robitussin that they can turn physically sickening, sitting like a painful lump of lead in the stomach. I regret to say, Stag's Leap Artemis was like that, which is why it is going to end up in my first beef stew this fall.

So I am on Alice's side. The trouble is, one would have to already know all about this long-bubbling wine industry argument -- jammy, high tech California versus spiky, low-maintenance Europe -- before one could begin to decipher what she is trying to say. This is not a book for the newbie, and that's too bad, because wouldn't a wine writer of such passion want to reach the newbie?

In organization and in prose, Naked Wine is a hash. Everything seems to begin and end with personal anecdote; as a storyteller her right hand seems not to know what her left is doing. Though I'm glad she's well connected and has interesting information to provide, indeed I'm glad she "decided" to become a wine writer full time no really, the name-dropping, whether of places or people, never ends. Good luck keeping track of Kevin, or Bea, or Ridgely, or Montefalco in Umbria, or Filippo, or Pascaline. Oh, and it was a different Robert who got really mad at her when his Sonoma reds didn't show well at that exclusive private tasting in the eleventh-century monastery in the Loire. (" 'I could have saved myself a lot of trouble,' " Mr. Kamen railed, " 'if I had known what the group really was looking for -- bacteria-ridden wines that were so natural, six bottles out of twelve had to be thrown out. I don't make that kind of wine. I have a business to run.' ") Even her analogies are odd: likening the organic movement to the Weather Underground and the natural movement to Students for a Democratic Society, or was it the other way around, is not going to help young twenty- and thirty-something consumers and book buyers, a good portion of the market, understand what she is talking about.  

For all the travels and the anxious research on the use and naturalness of sulfur (it's an element) and the sophisticated meals, Naked Wine left me feeling adrift in the company of some very provincial people. That sounds rude, but what else can we call industry insiders who are not aware that the organic/biodynamic/sustainable/drowning polar bears, etc., ship has sailed? Granted, these same people who, bless their hearts, think that the air routes between New York, Napa, and the Loire make up the navel of the world, will in turn find me desperately provincial. (Never mind me. Alice suspects that her professional nemesis, Robert Parker who loves thick jammy reds and developed the 100 point scoring system to reward them, must be too "sequestered" to know what good things natural winemakers are doing simply in their capacity as farmers earning a living.) But the sales activity in my corner of retail is not unimportant. After all, guess who is buying and selling all that moscato? And it seems to me that around here, nobody cares about green-friendly wines. "Natural," less Robitussin-like wines could be valuable, a fact which should please Alice. Only wherever they are, they can't help but be caught up in the same silly net with organic and sustainable, etc. This is why Alice has to hunt for careful analogies to clarify them all, though it's no help to turn to the campus news of forty years ago to do it.

She might have saved herself the trouble. If I am right to say wine buyers are not listening, it may be because they have heard of little matters like Climate-gate. Winemakers might save themselves the trouble and the money, too, especially since it's apparently not just the search for health and taste that is inspiring them. Incredibly, Naked Wine specifies major players who are actually making costly business decisions, in field and cellar, based on viewings of An Inconvenient Truth. Minor players pout that " 'all the cool kids are into sans soufre [without sulfur], and if you want to be cool ...' " (p. 112). And they are most unwisely passing their costs on to the consumer, who looks at the bottles and boxes with pretty ecru-colored labels stamped in butterflies and bees, looks at the price, and moves on. I recently put another ominously bulging ecru-colored box on the closeout rack, and the thing was only a 2009 merlot. Someone bought it, thankfully. I hope all those unsulfured microbes, careering heedlessly from one foam party to another, didn't entirely spoil the taste of it. 

If she had written a clearer book, Alice could have led us all to the nice, zingy tipples she knows about. Two paragraphs for the Robitussin thing, then a list of putative natural producers, plus SRPs (suggested retail prices, $7.99 being the sweet spot for most), would have done the trick. Instead, after much hard thinking, she wrote a woozy, frustrating diary/catechism that makes the consumer want to bail. I'm sorry to say I bailed at page 83: "Desplats had given up biodynamics for a fascination with the farming philosophy of the Japanese master Masanobu Fukuoka ...." You might be able to last until the revelation about An Inconvenient Truth (p. 134), or possibly till this: "I had thought I was so damned clever the night that I had blurted out to Eric that at Ten Bells, the Chauvetists were really Néauportists. It looked as if I was wrong..." (p. 164).

Harrumph. So what am I reading for pleasure? Sleight of Crime: Fifteen Classic Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Magic, 1977 -- Alice, by the way, reminds us this was the year Bob Dylan's first wife, Sarah, divorced him -- compiled by two men one of whom used to be the official Magician to the British royal family. No kidding. Did the house of Windsor also used to keep a dwarf as late as the '70s?

And what am I drinking for pleasure? A Frascati D.O.C. (white), "Le Contrade," and a Velletri D.O.C. (red), "Terre dei Volsci," both made by Cantine Co.Pro.Vi. Deciphering Italian labels is still a challenge, but I was told that with both these wines, we are in the vicinity of Rome. Both delicious. I have no idea whether either or both are natural, or yeasted and sulfured and enzymed and 90-pointed to death. Help us out, Alice, and never mind the rest.

Southern Living's "Mama's way" peach cobbler

Or, peach pie and hubris. Or, ye gods, where does the time go? The recipe is from Southern Living's June 2010 issue. I did not make the cobbler until that October and now here we are, almost a year on from then

Sixteen cups of peaches, three cups of sugar, and four pie crusts seemed an incredible amount of foodstuffs to fit into a 13 x 9 inch baking dish, so I revised this opulently summery recipe before having at it one autumnal Sunday afternoon. The more fool me. Here are the ingredients for the original:

• 12 to 15 fresh peaches, peeled and sliced (about 16 cups)
• 1/3 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
• 3 cups sugar [good grief, how sour are these peaches? Won't half this amount do?]
• 2/3 cup butter
• 1 and 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 (15 oz.) packages refrigerated pie crusts
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans, toasted
• 5 Tbsp sugar, divided

You'll perceive that the editors at Southern Living opted for fresh peaches -- the June issue, you know -- but store-bought pie crusts. I reversed the plan, making homemade pie crusts but buying (not enough) Libby's plastic-jarred peaches, which were actually very good. They surely did not require sweetening with three cups of sugar. Though I spared them that indignity, I almost think that in my tweaking of the recipe, all I accomplished was in the end to ruin them. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Mama's cobbler is not too difficult in theory. First, you preheat the oven to 475 F. Then you stir together the peaches, flour, nutmeg, and some sugar -- let's try a cup and a half -- in a big pot, bringing it all to a boil over medium heat. Stir and simmer for 10 minutes, and then remove from the heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. Spoon half the peach mixture into the lightly greased 13 x 9 dish.

Next, unroll two of the store-bought pie crusts, or divide and roll out your own homemade dough. You will need four crusts, so double an ordinary two-crust pastry recipe and create from it the four balls of dough required. Keep two of them refrigerated briefly while you work with the first set. Sprinkle on to one of the rolled crusts half of the pecans (1/4 cup) and half the 5 Tbsp. portion of sugar (2 and 1/2 Tbsp.). Roll out the second crust and lay it on top of the first, making a sort of pie-dough-and-pecan sandwich. Trim the whole thing to fit the baking dish, and drape it carefully over the first helping of peaches in the dish.

Bake at 475 F for 20 to 25 minutes, until it is lightly browned.

But hold! This is a cobbler. (I guess they're different.) So after having half-baked the pie, remove it from the oven and repeat the entire process. Go ahead -- pile all the rest of the peaches right onto it.

Roll out the third and fourth pie crusts. Sprinkle the rest of the pecans and sugar over one, and lay on the other to make a second dough-and-pecan sandwich. Cleverly cut this one into lattice strips. No joke. Well, maybe yes, a joke.

Place the pecan-sandwich lattice strips onto to the second layer of peaches, tuck and pinch them to secure them to the edges of the dish, sprinkle another tablespoon of sugar over all, and return everything to the oven. Bake 15 to 18 more minutes, until all is slightly and beautifully browned.

The picture in the magazine is gorgeous -- you can just see the peaches burst with sunny June flavor, and the cobbler crust flake delicately under the big spoon. You can almost taste the nutmeg. My picture, not so much. It tasted like an awfully big helping of gooey wet dough and not nearly enough peaches in a too-small dish (see hubris and tweaking, above). 

By the way, the little brown bits on top are singed extra pecans, not mouse droppings. I was afraid you'd worry.