What do you do when all of your relatives are far away for Christmas, and you have the busiest two months of work you have ever ever had? Well, you miss out on some Christmas presents. And what do you do when you miss out on some Christmas presents? Once you've missed Christmas, you can't just send any old thing off the internet. When you miss Christmas, you have to show the people you missed that you missed them because you loved them MORE than everyone else, and therefore you waited until they were back so you could send them something made by your very own hands.
You make them a present. Perhaps ... you make them biscotti. Biscotti that might just save their life. Because when they are sitting around drinking wine or beers, if they didn't have something to munch on, then they would just be drinking and that could lead to some very dangerous stuff. So you make your loved ones snacks, snacks that show you care and snacks that will keep them from dancing around with lampshades on their head. Snacks that will keep them going in the long hours between lunchtime and dinnertime.
Of course, you can't just send your loved ones snacks that are untested, so you have to make yourself some biscotti too. And you have to test the biscotti with wine, and test the biscotti with beer. Just to make sure that they work and are okay. And you might have to have some biscotti for yourself because it might just be that when you are making them, your oven rack falls down multiple times causing multiple near disasters with the biscotti and maybe after the second oven rack comes crashing down, you may have to finish the biscotti by painstakingly toasting them in small batches in your toaster oven. If that happens, then you definitely deserve to have some for yourself.
As it happens, these biscotti are savory with a definite flare of heat from the pepper. They go nicely with a red wine, but even better with a beer. Just make sure not to mess with them too much when they're in the oven and be careful while flipping them because take it from someone with experience--you do not want your oven rack to come crashing down in the middle of baking. Not even once, but definitely not twice.
Click here for the recipe from the December, 2006 issue of Gourmet.
Comments
P.S. What's up with your oven rack?
I think it was more me than the oven rack, though. I was pulling the rack out to try to flip over the biscotti and in the process of my flipping would overbalance it and tip it, sending my baking sheet on a little ski trip. Luckily, it would get caught by the oven door so there were very few biscotti deaths, but it still made me yell quite a bit.