Sunday, August 19, 2012

Nuts To that

Back home with my family, we usually had a supply of nuts on hand. They were tasty and nutritious, as they were not all weighed down with salt or other things that were not there ordinarily. In fact, they remained in their shells, and so one had to crack them one by one. They were not the sort of nuts that you could use your fingers on. There were no peanuts or pistachios among them, which was sort of a shame. I loved both, but also liked what there was.

The easiest to crack would be hard to say. It could be the hazelnuts, which required a good amount of force but which were an easy shape to handle with the cracker and the meat of which was seldom ruined in the process. Those tasted fine, although I wouldn't call them my favorite. They were the ones I was most likely to leave while cherry-picking the better ones. Sooner or later, I ate then and found them palatable at worst, if memory serves.

The almonds were more pleasant to eat, but had an odd shape for the main cracker. You had to get it in there just right. A different sort of cracker that applied pressure with a wooden screw rather than a sort of pliers approach did a bit better, or at least it could. The almonds weren't too tough ultimately, but the effort to reward ratio wasn't quite what one would like it to be. Really I liked smoked almonds better, but the markup was considerable.

My favorite would have to be the walnuts. They were a messy operation. You could crack them pretty well, but keeping the meat inside intact was a fool's errand. It was sure to break up whatever you did, but you had to hope that the shell would break neatly so that you could extract the pieces of the meat with a pick. Something in that was appealing to me. The walnuts were already delicious, but the effort enhanced that. Boy, I wish I had some walnuts now.

1 comment:

Frenchie said...

Nice visual! I could see each nut and picture them crunching in the nut cracker!

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