Booze & Crack, or "What I Did on Sunday Afternoon," an essay by Kat

We're planning at trip to MJ's brother and sister-in-law's place up in Dallas this weekend.  They love good food and good wine and treat us well, and we usually end up going home with some of their chickens' subdivision-fresh eggs.  In return, we wanted to bring along some of the one natural resource we have in abundance: pecans.

I feel it's far more thoughtful to show up with cracked pecans (though the opposite is true of the eggs), so that means a couple hours of standing at the bar in the kitchen, shelling away.  It's been my experience that a gentle little buzz really makes this time pass far more enjoyably.

With that gentle little buzz in mind, I made a cocktail of gin, orange juice and ginger ale; a bit of fizz, some vitamin C for my good health...  I don't know if there's a name for this (if you do, please comment), but it seemed to work out pretty well for the task at hand.

I ended up with a pint bag of halves and a pint bag of pieces to bring (along with some empty egg cartons) for bartering.