Holiday Yum: Spiced Pecans

Welcome to our Holiday Yum series!  From November 17th to December 31st, a group of us bloggers will be posting our favorite holiday recipes for you to try out and enjoy.  We’ll have everything from cookies and candy and cakes to appetizers and roasts and mocktails!  For the full schedule so far, click on the Holiday Yum page tab.  As I get the hyperlinks to each post, I’ll insert them on that page.

Jenny Hansen started us off on Saturday with her post, A Gluten-Free Thanksgiving Made Easy, which includes terrific tips on adapting traditional recipes to make them gluten-free, along with a warning about sneaky places where gluten can lurk!  I have to say, I never even heard of cranberry fluff before.

Today, I’ll be sharing one of my favorite holiday appetizers: spiced pecans.  Every Thanksgiving, I bring them to my sis-in-law’s house for us to snack on as we all pitch in on the meal preparations, and I make more of them later in December to add to my Christmas cookie gift tins.  It’s just a few ingredients to toss together, and the cinnamon-y aroma fills the house while it’s baking.  A win-win!

Spiced Pecans 

Prep time: 15 minutes

Baking time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

1 egg white

1 tbsp cold water

1 pound of shelled pecan halves

1 cup sugar

1 tsp salt

1tbsp cinnamon

Directions:

Preheat oven to 275 degress Fahrenheit.  (That’s not a misprint: it’s a low-heat oven)

Line a cookie sheet (the kind with a rim around it, also known as a jelly roll pan) with parchment paper.  This is an important step, because the coating for the pecans is sticky and even a non-stick surface will give you a hard time.

You’ll need two mixing bowls: one for the wet ingredients, and one for the dry.  If one bowl is larger, mix the dry ingredients in that one.

In the “dry” bowl, mix the sugar, salt, and cinnamon, and set aside.

Before we move on to the “wet” bowl, here’s a trick for separating egg yolks and whites:  crack the egg, then hold it on the vertical over a bowl as you detach the top.  Just let the white drip into the bowl, while cradling the yolk in the bottom half of the shell.  To get the rest of the white, “pour” the egg yolk back and forth between the top and bottom halves of the shell, allowing the remaining white to slosh over into the bowl.  Here’s the picture I tried to get, LOL:

Beat the egg white and water with a fork until frothy.

Stir in the pecans and coat them well with the egg mixture.  They should like nice and shiny-slimy, like this:

Dump the wet pecans in the sugar-cinnamon-salt mixture, and toss it all together until well coated.

Spread the mixture in a single layer (or as close as you can get) on the parchment-paper-covered cookie sheet.

Bake for 15 minutes, then pull them out and turn/stir them in the pan, re-spreading them in a single layer.  This part’s a little awkward, because the paper slides around a bit.

Bake for another 15 minutes, then stir/re-spread again.

Bake for a final 15 minutes, then remove from the oven.  Let cool completely before storing – if they last that long!  😉  They should keep for a week or more.

Do you have a favorite recipe you’d like to share?  What food are you looking forward to this Thanksgiving?  Drop me a line in the comments – I’d love to hear from you!

Next recipe, Monday Nov 26th:  Ellen Gregg’s The Chocolatiest Chocolate Cake Evah (with lemonade!)

Wishing you and your family and Happy Thanksgiving, and safe travels.

Kathy

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