Nice to meet ya, Granita

I bought the Zuni Cafe cookbook a few weeks ago. The first thing I made from the cook book was a delicous blood orange granita. Just fresh blood orange juice, some sugar, water and some time to freeze.

Today, I found these great step-by-step photo recipe over on Amature Gourmet. I have just one suggestion to optimize their recipe: As the Zuni cookbook suggests, rather than scraping the granita with a fork, chunk it up using two pastry scrapers. The edge is just sharp enough to crystalize the ice without smasing it down.

I just bought my pastry scraper at Cook's Companion two weeks ago, but I'm already finding a lot of uses for this tool. I use it for moving chopped vegetables from cutting board to pot, to roughly chop herbs for a marinade, to smash garlic. The ruler on the end is useful too.

Oddly, this jack-of-all-trades tool didn't make it to Martha's list of Top 22 Kitchen Tools. It would certainly make mine.