(photo by wm. christman)
Christmas to me means one thing: baklava. Forget the chocolates (for the moment), forget the egg nog and the tree trimming and all that. Turn your attention to wrapping the gifts. In many ways, making baklava is like wrapping a bunch of tiny presents. You wrap up finely chopped nuts in filo sheets and seal the package up with melted butter then cut it into 30 or so packages of honey-ed joy.
I have no idea why this has become a tradition for me. I do know that one of the first cookbooks I bought was the basic Doubleday white edition and that, one day when I was marveling at the squirrel fricassee recipe, the book fell off my lap and when I picked it up the page it landed on was the one with the baklava recipe on it.
sheet o' goodness (photo by wm. christman)
Many years ago, my father did volunteer work for the annual Santa Clara County Fair. The perks of that job was that he got to bring the family to the fair for free where we got to spend the day looking at all of the handmade/homemade baked goods, preserves, quilts. When we tired of that, we walked the entire set of food booths offering everything from linguica sandwiches to indian fry bread to Orange Julius drinks. But by far my favorite was the Hun-I-Nut booth with their tooth-meltingly sweet baklava.
So when the cookbook opened to that page, I thought of Hun-I-Nut and the fact that it was mid-December and I would have to wait until the following July to get a piece of my favorite pastry. Impatience is a godsend sometimes and I dove into making baklava.
I made just about every single mistake that one could make in the process of making baklava. Didn't thaw the filo dough enough? Check. Didn't use unsalted butter? Check. Didn't have enough nuts or didn't chop them enough? Check and check. Burnt the butter while browning it for the final drizzle before baking? Check. But over the years, I made less and less mistakes, and from the requests I get each year from co-workers and friends, I can actually make a pretty good sheet of baklava. Not too sweet, a nice blend of nuts, some secret ingredients to round out the flavor...yeah, pretty good.
But I still really don't know why I make baklava at Christmas. I just do.
