Peanut Brittle (or I Am Not a Cook)

I do not consider myself to be much of a cook. There are some things I manage well. In the past two years, I have made an effort to make some new recipe once a month.

In December every year, I make fudge. Chocolate fudge, white fudge, butterscotch fudge. I take it around to my various clients and hand it off to friends.

It is one thing I do well.

This year, I thought for my new thing that I would try peanut brittle. I had never made it and a friend told me it was really easy. In fact, she listed the ingredients as I was on my way to the store and without looking at the recipe, I purchased what she'd said.

She neglected to mention I should use raw peanuts. But from the recipes I found online that was okay; you just didn't add them to the corn syrup and sugar until the very last.

So today was fudge-making day, and I decided to do the peanut brittle first. I gathered my ingredients, buttered my pan.

My good candy thermometer, to my dismay, was broken. I didn't trust the other one I had so I called my mother-in-law to borrow hers. She lives just across the farm. I raced over there and back again.

Corn syrup, water and sugar in the pot. Stir, stir. I put the two thermometers side by side. Mine seemed to be 10 degrees off. Hers was registering hotter, but then sometimes they matched. It was kind of weird.

It took a while to get to soft ball stage (234 degrees F.). I had to get to hard crack stage - which was either 290 degrees or 305 depending on the thermometer.

The ingredients, clear at first, began to yellow. Then they turned a dark golden color. It was fascinating to watch.

Stir, stir. Eye on the thermometers.

Stir, stir.

Yes! It was at hard crack stage. Time to take the pot from the heat and add the peanuts.

I dumped the peanuts into the pot and began stirring. Suddenly black stuff swirled around the golden yellow. At first I thought I'd not been fast enough and scorched something.

Then I looked down at the utensil I was using:

I was using a plastic spoon. It melted off into the peanut brittle.

You may all laugh now.

Can you say "devastated idiot"? I stood there, mouth agape, looking at the pot and the spoon. I moved to the refrigerator and slowly beat my head against it.

Then I realized if I didn't get that stuff out of the pot, it was going to harden. I grabbed potholders and flew outside with it.

The air, cold enough to snow as we wait for an ice storm, quickly cooled the ingredients.

It was almost too hard to remove. I took a handy stick and got chunks of it out, but quite a bit remained around the sides of the pan.

I took it back in the house, dumped water in the pan, and put it back on the stove eye to heat so I could scrape the pan.

The candy thermometers gleamed with coats of hard thin candy. The peanut brittle would have set up nicely had there not been a spoon mixed in...

To top it, as I began to clean the thermometers, I actually sliced open my thumb on the thin sheen of peanut brittle mixture. I bled like the James River after a rain.

I really am going to make fudge this afternoon. Really I am.

But I will be using a metal or wooden spoon.