My fingers are a little raw from shelling pistachios for what felt like two hours at the crack of dawn this morning. Note to self, recipes that require shelling, blanching, and skinning usually take a long time.

We had our friends Merin and Rusty over for tasty crepes last night. When I surveyed the kitchen at the end of the night I saw a big bag of pistachios slumped over alongside a jar of leftover crepe batter. I thought to myself, why not make a sweet pistachio butter or paste to spread on crepes this week? I wouldn't have to go to the store for any special ingredients or anything. I could knock this out in fifteen minutes tops, no problem.

Silly me.

Have you ever shelled and skinned any significant quantity of pistachios? Wow. Who knew? My fingertips are all pink are tender to the touch and I only ended up with a single, solitary cup of the pistachio meat. Lucky for me I had almonds on hand too. They are easy to skin after a quick swim in a pot of boiling water - an assertive pinch and you are in business. So I ended up using 1 part pistachios to 1 part almonds.

Ordinarily I might skip skinning the pistachios, but I wanted my pistachio butter to have that super bright, vibrant pistachio green color. Leaving the purple/brown skins on would certainly muddle my color plan, and they might puree flaky instead of smooth. So I went the extra mile.

Taste? This butter has a nice mild pistachio flavor to it. You could opt for 100% pistachios if you want a more intense flavor. You could also split the batch in half and make one half sweet (with any sort of sweetener), and the other half savory (season with a bit of salt to get the flavors to brighten). You can also play around with the consistency of it. Less water and you are going to end up with a paste, more water and you can thin it way out.

I'm going to use it on crepes this week, but I imagine you can think of a million other ways to use it. Inside a pistachio sandwich cookie, as a colorful base layer in a sweet tart (or mini tart), in all sorts of hors d'ouvres and finger foods...have at it.



