Christmas

I went to Houston over the holidays, and there - in addition to playing with my adorable niece - I had a gustatory revelation: pomegranate.

I had only tasted pomegranate juice, previously, and was a trifle confused when my epicurean sister presented me with a fruit salad one morning at breakfast. Contained therein were the little fleshy pips of the pomegranate.

After a confused silence on my part, followed swiftly by "How do you eat these?", I launched into tasting my first unadulterated pomegranate pip.

It was heaven, Dear Reader!

When I finally returned to my own little home - thankfully migraine-free - I realized that I had absolutely no food to eat, so I sashayed over to Whole Paycheck to pick up some artisan cheeses and pita bread and apples and... Lo and behold: pomegranates!

Of course, I bought two, not realizing just how difficult they are to cut.

For a few minutes after the cutting ended, my kitchen resembled the shower scene from Psycho, with me in the role of blood-spattered shower curtain (I wore an apron).

One thing About.com forgot to mention in its "How to Cut a Pomegranate" article: lay down tarps and drop-cloths everywhere that you don't think pomegranate juice will reach, because that is exactly where it will go.

There is probably pomegranate juice on the ceiling along with last year's spaghetti sauce.

I also miscalculated the number of pomegranate pips in a relatively small pomegranate.

In case you're wondering, there's a bazillion. That's a lot of pips, people.

I couldn't eat all of them (my tongue is sore, as it is, from sucking the flesh off the seeds of 1/4 cup of pips), but I couldn't let all that yummy goodness go to waste.

So I broke out a sieve, a metal spoon, and a bowl, and proceeded to manually juice the pips, according to About.com's instructions (again, sans tarp warning).

Fresh-smushed pomegranate juice is so much better than anything you could ever buy at the grocery store, fancy schmancy or not. By the time I was finished, I had about 6 oz. of juice, and that was with my lazy crazy way of juicing them and giving up because I'm a wuss and my wrist was tired.