I say nuts to that.

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my hand doing pretty okay. How’s that for a resounding   endorsement as to the state of my affairs. The Sharritt’s do feel a bit under attack. Last week, I wrote of the effort to spy on the lovely Miss Beverly and me by the Assassin Deer and one of his minions, Ricky Raccoon. As you can read in last week’s blog, it did not end well for our enemies. This week saw a direct frontal attack. Not to worry, no one was injured. Although the Subaru received a bloody nose and is a bit dinged up.

The lovely Miss Beverly was heading for work on her usual route. (I know; routine is the enemy of personal security. This fight will take constant vigilance.) At the bottom of the hill, a quarter of a mile from the front door, a doe comes streaking in at an oblique angle from the northeast. Bev’s fast reflexes kick in. She slams on the brakes and takes evasive maneuvers. Stupid antilock brakes lengthened the stopping distance. Consequently, there was contact. However, the damage was minimal. Unfortunately, the terrorist perpetrator was able to limp off. Actually, the doe went over to the nearest fence and leapt over it without any sign of lasting hurt. Bev returned to the house and we examined the damage.

The damage was not too bad, I peeled off the chrome piece that advertised to the world that we drove a Subaru Forester. I should not be too surprised that the Assassin deer would attack an icon of encroachment; the Forester. I have kept it for a souvenir, and am waiting for the opportunity to tack it on to the Assassin deer head that I am committed to mounting in the man cave in our home. (I have been informed that that act of vengeful home decoration will require the lovely Miss Beverly’s dead body. I can always mount it to the radiator of my wood hauling tractor.) The right front head light might shine off a bit more to the right now. Which is a good thing, it gives a great view of the side ditches in rural South Madison County; side ditches that are the staging ground for Assassin Deer attacks. The Side Ditches of Madison County: wouldn’t that be the title of a great book and follow on movie with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood? Meryl could play the lovely Miss Beverly and Clint (after extensive make up) could play the bitter Assassin Deer. Somebody call my copy right lawyer.

Like the Assassin Deer driven by the change in day length, temperatures or the calendar, I am feeling the change of the year. My life is definitely in the gathering mode. I am gathering wood to burn for heat in the winter and this year I have been gathering walnuts. Like a ground squirrel on meth, I have been scurrying around picking up all of the walnuts that I can find. I literally have more than 10 gallons of hulled nuts stored up for this winter.

I find myself having to give a walnut primer at this point. Walnuts, when found in the wild, have a green husk that grows around the hard woody shell that encases the nut meat. When the walnut falls to the ground the green husk turns all black and gooey. They are nasty things to look at, and nastier things to touch. That black and gooey part has tannins that will permanently stain whatever it touches a dark brown to black. Your ancestors when they became tired of looking at clothes that were the natural white of cotton or wool, realized that they could change all of their cloths to a dirty brown color by soaking them in a tub of water with plenty of walnut husks mixed in. The puritans were a dower, sullen looking people for a reason. They had just stained their cloths a depressing color and it wasn’t coming out. They were stuck with it.

This husk has to come off. Once discarded, you still haven’t reached to good meat on the inside. A huskless walnut is a wooden structure that is hard to break. You can run over them with a car and they don’t break. You can squeeze them with pliers and unless they are the huge channel locks, you aren’t going to open them up. You can hit them with a hammer but you had better wear eye protection because they produce some serious shrapnel. The hammer method is too much of a good thing. Sure the nut is open. However the good stuff is smashed to smithereens and infused with splinters of the shell. No walnut cracking is an exercise in physics. You want a long lever to generate a lot of power with a short throw so that power is limited in the damage that it can to. Once these attributes are finely balanced and in harmony, the nut is opened revealing the tasty nutmeat.  

I have the nut guy to blame for my walnut obsession. It is an obsession. Two weeks ago, I had cleaned up all of the walnuts around our place. We went to a friend’s house and walking between their drive way and the back door. I went in and asked if he had a 5 gallon bucket that I could use to take some nuts home. The nut guy is a friendly retiree at the Pendleton Farmer’s market who promised that “these walnuts are the best you have ever eaten.” That is a lie. His walnuts taste like any other walnut in the world. But I believed him and bought a couple of quarts last year. After breaking a couple of store bought nutcrackers, smashing my fingers using channel lock pliers and having several nut shrapnel slivers removed from my face, I still had a quart and ¾ left and still had no nutmeat to show for it.

Like the one tracked minded person I can become from time to time, I turned to the internet and found the best walnut cracker ever. Most of the time when you look for the “world’s best”, the selection is simply narrowed down to the top 100. Not so with walnut crackers. There appears to be one claimant to that title. The owners of that title are a small mom and pop business in rural Iowa. They have harvested the laws of physics. The cracker is about a foot tall, it has a handle about two feet long and it moves a steel piston approximately 3/8 of an inch; “just enough to crack the walnut and not damage the meat.” And it costs $100.

Sure, I could have just thrown away the $3.00 of walnuts gone to Trader Joes and bought all of the $12.00 a pound shelled walnuts I could ever have wanted. But no, I had a problem that needed solved. I had 25 walnuts that could not be cracked. I had found a solution; a $100 nut cracker that took up 3 feet of counter space in the lovely Miss Beverly’s kitchen. It seemed that my path was clear. I would convince the lovely Miss Beverly that fresh cracked walnuts were better for you; the nut guy’s walnuts were much better than store bought walnuts, and never let her see the receipt for the $100 nutcracker until I had cracked enough nuts to get the price per nut below the store bought nuts. So the nutcracker arrived in December. I cracked my 25 walnuts at a $4.00 a nut rate, and waited for this year’s nut crop to come in.

After collecting, hundreds of nuts this fall, husking the nasty black hulls and staining my hands, I am set. By next September, after cracking 4 nuts a day, I will be nearing the ½ way point to bragging about how cheap the world’s best nut cracker is. Like all of the rest of the squirrels, I know that life is good when it is November and you have 25 lbs of nature's free goodness stored for the long winter ahead.

Take care.

Roger.