Delicious Hot Spiced Grapefruit

Today, I'd like to pass along a favourite recipe of mine. (What, me, with a recipe? Truly, the end-times are upon us! That streak of rose on the horizon is not the sunrise, but a cloud of blood and dust! That roar, so like the traffic on the highway, is the thunder of hooves. War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, folks--here they come. But, hey, we've an hour or two before they arrive. Might as well have a nosh.)

A lot of folks don't realise you can eat grapefruit hot. They think the membranes'll pop like a brain in the microwave, leaving a sort of boiling mush. Technically speaking, that is one potential result of sticking citrus fruit in the oven, but you'd have to leave it there for ages. If you follow the recipe, it'll come out nice and firm, with a subtle crispety bit round the top. You'll like it. (Unless, of course, you don't like grapefruit, in which case you can just sod off.)

Ingredients

One large grapefruit. A pink one will do, in a pinch, but you should try for the white kind. The idea is to enjoy the contrast of tart and sweet, see, and the pink ones are quite sweet already. Once you add in the sugar, you might as well be having a hot spiced pomelo, or--or a piece of Turkish Delight. No, try and get a white one, eh?

Brown sugar: two tablespoons if you're a nutter who loves your dentist; one for the rest of us.

A sprinkle of tasty cinnamon

A pinch of powdered ginger

NO BUTTER! Some folks like to ruin their delicious baked grapefruits with horrible, sleazy pats of butter. This is a terrible thing to do. An atrocity, really. Anyone found buttering a grapefruit ought to be ejected from the kitchen, with my bootprint on their breeks. Same goes for anyone contemplating adding raisins, cocoa, or maraschino cherries. This is not some cheap confection. It's a delicate fruit dessert.

Instructions

1) Pre-heat your oven to three hundred and fifty degrees. (Remember to take the baking sheet out first, if you're one of those people who keeps it in there.)

2) Cut your grapefruit in half, mindful of grapefruit anatomy*.

3) Gently loosen the fruit-segments from the membranous bits, using your grapefruit knife. If you forget this step, the sugar and spices won't melt in properly, leaving uneven pockets of tart and sweet.

4) Spread brown sugar over the tops of the grapefruit-halves.

5) Sprinkle on cinnamon (one generous pinch per half) and ginger (one tiny pinch). When sprinkling the ginger, be careful not to leave any great clumpy bits anywhere. If there's too much ginger in any single bite, it'll taste savoury instead of spicy, and ruin everything.

6) Bake for fifteen minutes.

7) Get out the grapefruit, and let it stand for a minute or two. If you try to pick the grapefruit up too soon after baking, precious juice will bubble up over the edge, and be wasted. The juice is the best part, next to the crispety bit round the edges. You don't want to waste any juice.

8) Eat it.

Acceptable Variations on the Recipe

If you're feeling particularly adventurous, it's all right to add a bit of grated nutmeg. And if it's Christmas Day, you might even try a few currants. (That's currants, mind you--no raisins or sultanas.) Some folks have reported tasty results involving candied peel, but what is candied peel, when you get right down to it? Fruit-wrappers, that's what it is. Dirty, filthy fruit-wrappers. The stuff that keeps birds and insects away from the paradise inside. If you're the sort of person who likes pork rinds and fritolli, I suppose candied peel might be all right for you, but us rats find it plebeian. Food for the roiling proletariat. Oppressed masses, sort of thing. Ptooh.

* That is to say, don't cut through the scar where the stem was. Cut horizontally, through the slices, not alongside them.