Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Nature's Bounty

The hickory trees have been very generous this year. The driveway is lined with nuts and they are falling from the trees as I drive beneath them - these nuts (encased in the green outer shell) are huge, bigger than golfballs - and when they hit the car it seems like it should be putting big dents! Thankfully, no dents yet. Yesterday Zack gathered up some of the nuts and roasted them over an open fire. He saved a few for me to try when I got home and they are delicious! Kind of tedious to extract from the shells, but well worth the effort. I'm trying to recruit him to gather and shell a lot so I can make some pumpkin-spice bread with hickory nuts :)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

How did you roast the hickory nuts?
In the shell?
Can they be kept until later on in the year?
The kids could do some inside on those cold "indoor" wwekends coming up.

Roxann said...

Zack roasted them outside, probably on a flat rock in the fire. some of them were scorched on the outside, but the meats were actually better flavored in those. he left them unshelled. unless it still had the green outer shell - those he took off. when the hickories are that fresh, where you have to take off the green outer shell, they don't taste as good as the ones which had already lost that outer cover. but roasting even those made them have a delicious flavor. we have found that the nuts from the shagbark hickories to be best in flavor. there are some others that are really, really bitter - yuck! those were shaped more like pecans, which is what i thought it was when i tried it.

Anonymous said...

Ok what is a shagbark and how can I tell?
We have lots of hickory nuts, thank God, all the animals love them , including the people!
I never tried to roast any, I don't know why I never thought of it, DUH! I just bust them with the hammer and eat some while I am out fixing fence, or whatever.So,,, can they keep till winter as well/

Roxann said...

I think they would keep through winter just fine, but I've never paid attention really. Just like you, I crack and eat them wherever I find them, usually when I'm in the woods and the only tools around are rocks.

Roxann said...

oh yes, shagbark has a really ragged looking bark. it peels off in large flakes. if you're looking at trees and see a really messy one, looking like it's having a bad hair day, that's likely a shagbark hickory :) the nuts look like the other hickories pretty much.

Anonymous said...

You owe me a box of bandaids,
Ha!
Ok, so I am haveing a teaching moment with my son, showing him how to roast Hickories in the big fire we had in the pasture. He was using rocks, but no, I was using a pair of fence plyers, the only thing I had in the ATV. After about 5 nuts it slipped and took off a good hunk of my thumb under the nail. OUCH!
I think I will get me a nut cracker:)
Be Carefull Out There!
We are going to try the walnuts next, they are even harder!