Until very recently, I thought of pomegranates as closely akin to one of those puzzle boxes from which you can never extract the dollar bill imprisoned inside. Though I love the sweet-tart explosion of juice you get from a spooning a big bite of pomegranate seeds into your mouth, I found the thick-skinned, oddly-constructed fruits almost impossible to break apart without creating a mess that seemed to indicate that something really, really grisly had gone down in my kitchen. These attempts left me exhausted and pomegranate-shy.

And then, a few weeks ago, we were visiting our friends Martha and Vince and their lovely newborn daughter Millicent, and Vince, culinary maestro that he is, went to the kitchen to get a pomegranate and came back five minutes later, cheerful and spatter-free, with a bowl of loosed seeds. When I told him the method I’d been using (gained from a misguided trust of Martha Stewart) of sawing the thing in half and whacking at it with the back of a spoon, he looked mystified and slightly offended. “There are videos on YouTube that can fix this,” he said. And so there are!

There are so many things to like about this video: this woman’s obvious anxiety about pomegranate misinformation, her rather dorky air of confidence that she is absolutely correct, and the fact that she is, actually, right. Continue reading →