If there is anything I鈥檝e learned about the turning of the year, it鈥檚 that it is about gluttony, not guilt. Santa isn鈥檛 concerned about his beltline and the food and parties are fantastic.
The sun goes down early enough to make a 4 p.m. tipple seem reasonable (or even earlier, if you live in a dark foresty part of Squamish like us), and the overall holiday cheer is impossible to avoid, so why ruin it with plans to get healthy? Get baking and eat and drink with abandon.
Every year since I鈥檝e met my husband we have embraced this time of year with open arms (and open cheese, open wine and open chocolates). He鈥檚 a little better about getting out for a run here and there, but me, I allow my layers to thicken and that doesn鈥檛 change as soon as January rolls around. We have a number of family birthdays in late January then two close girlfriends have birthdays in February, so I don鈥檛 get off the fun train until March, when I get the natural inkling to eat less, exercise more and generally start undoing the bodily excess I鈥檝e spent two and a half months building. I find this approach cathartic, and it works. While the headlines make us feel like it鈥檚 a fresh new year once January hits, let鈥檚 face it, it means we鈥檙e in the heart of winter, and I think that our winter habits should be celebrated, not banished.
In honour of deep winter celebration, and in defiance of every self-help magazine cover article that is about to sprinkle the newsstands with weight loss tips and new year鈥檚 resolutions, here is my recipe for the gooey goodness that I call Brown Eyed Susies. They鈥檙e a cross between a Turtle and a Sweet Georgia Brown and they鈥檙e delicious.
The key, as always, is quality ingredients, but if you want to skimp on the chocolate or buy Kraft caramel instead of making your own, go forth with confidence that this is a really hard recipe to get wrong.
Recipe: Melt two or three tablespoons of salted butter in the microwave, add a pinch of salt and pour more than a pound of pecans (other nuts are also good if you prefer). Toss and spread the nuts on a parchment lined baking sheet and bake for an hour at 250F until toasty.
To make the caramel, combine 录 cup water, 1 c sugar, 陆 a vanilla bean (seeds scraped out plus pod) and 2/3 c sweetened condensed milk, 陆 c corn syrup, and six tbsp unsalted butter in a heavy bottomed pot and bring to a boil, stirring constantly over medium heat until it reaches 250F on a thermometer. Add a pinch of salt after removing from heat, and plunge the pot into cold water (the base, not the caramel inside). Slightly cool and remove the vanilla bean fragments.
Melt half a pound of milk or dark chocolate in a double boiler very slowly, adding the second half in increments as you stir like a maniac to mix the melted and non-melted chocolate together. Once it鈥檚 all smooth, you鈥檙e ready to assemble your goodies.
Put small clusters of nuts on a greased baking sheet, spoon a tablespoon of caramel over the nuts to hold them together, then leave to cool. Once cooled, you can top the caramels with a spoonful of the chocolate then allow the whole batch to firm up completely. Voila 鈥� sinful commitment to holiday debauchery.
