Get to Crackin'

Hey, everybody. Guess what. I've been given a a bag of hickory nuts. Can you believe that! What  a great email it was to recieve a message that a coworker of mine and his wife had been to the pecan festival in Brunswick and ran across a fellow selling hickory nuts. My coworker's  wife apparently is following the blog and knew we were having a hard time finding hickory nuts  so she bought a bag of them for me. How cool is that? Muchos thank yous, Diane. And, these are not just any hickory nuts. They are from the coveted shellbark hickory, the ones I told you about in an earlier post that make larger nuts than other kinds of hickories in Missouri. I feel like what Julie in the Julie/Julia Project must have felt like when her fans started sending her money to help  her pay for the expensive ingredients found in  Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

I spent about a half hour cracking the nuts. And, I'm up to about 2 tablespoons of nut meats. Clearly, I'm going to need to take a lesson of work efficiency, here. They are such a prize possesion to me now that I can't bear to waste any speck of nut meat. How am I ever going to be able to happily to dump handfuls of them into a recipe? It's a bit unfair for any recipe to have to be worth all that. Except that cracking nuts is a perversely satisfying task, like what knitting must seem like (not that I'd know, haven't ever really tried knitting much). The monotony and detail work is  . . . almost meditative. So, I'll be meditating away on this lovely Friday night cracking and picking away at my hickory nuts.