Yesterday’s food porn post was a big hit, but today it is time to turn to the seamier side of the kitchen. Something so seamy that even lemon cleanser can’t clean it up. Citron is a key ingredient in fruitcakes and is not to be confused with Citroën, the French automobile manufacturer that sounds the same, but has nothing to do with fruitcake. Citron is also necessary for Cuccidati, a dish also known as Italian fig cookies. Anne has a recipe for Cuccidati that she inherited from her Aunt Fran, who doesn’t spell it this way. Maybe her spelling has been anglicized? There were several variations of it on the Internet. Anyway, she’s made it before and now she is planning on making it again.

I have shopped for her on these occasions. It requires a wide variety of dried fruits. Its most exotic ingredient is citron. Citron is a tropical fruit, sort of a giant wrinkly lemon. This fruit’s skin is processed into diced gelatinous cubes that become the ingredient citron. Previously, I just picked it up at the store. This time, neither of my shopping services supported such an exotic item and I had to special order it. I went with Nuts.com. Now, I’m inundated with Google ads for fruitcake mixes, as if. We haven’t yet tested their products, but their packaging is sure colorful. As an aside, I also regularly order lemons in bulk. They come packaged in decorative bags that on one side refers to them in English as lemons, but on the other side calls them out in French, as citrons.

Making dinner, I had thrown away one of these bags, citron side up. Anne saw it lying in the trash and I got into trouble, me an innocent man. She must of thought that sometime after midnight, I had snarfed up all of her ingredient. Now this may not sound too unseemly, but trust me, this post has undergone cycles of wash-rinse-repeat. In Anne’s defense she was tired from having done so much cooking. But this is not the first time that I have been accused of something I didn’t do. I especially hate it when I am accused of doing something wrong in one of her dreams. Roundup all of the unusual suspects! Protect the guilty and prosecute the innocent. I didn’t do it… It was on accident.