Cooking with Nuts

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald is interesting for food lovers, weight watchers and healthy eaters!

Organic Foods and Health

The link is worth exploring for anyone interested in organic food.

Walnut Verse

The walnut is a tasty nut - it’s good enough to eat -
And drowned in maple syrup becomes a special treat.
But eating nuts is one thing, growing nut trees is another,
So why on earth should anyone with any senses bother?

This verse is not a farming screed but let me share with you
A little of the heavy work that walnut growers do.
Apart from buying land in a climate which is right
And working hard from dawn until the middle of the night
Preparing the good soil for the planting to take place
Growers must pick the cultivars - a massive task to face:

There is Chandler and Chico, Howard, Payne and Red
Buccaneer and Sparrow, all of which it’s said
Have really good crack out rates but however even so
Are they any better than Franquette and than Pedro,
Plovdiski, Rita, Danube, Livermore or Wigg
Also with good crack out rates and walnuts that are big?

Not to mention Vina, Wilsons Wonder, Sauber 1
Daniels, Eureka, Serr and Rex - we’re just partly done!
Let’s not go on for ever only do the best we can
But not forgetting Tulare, Soleze and Stan.

The cultivars for Wellwood planted nearly twenty years ago
I show without attempt at rhyming in the list below:

Chandler, Chico, Serr, Franquette, Wilsons Wonder, Vina, Vibalina,

This Tree is Now Dead

This was one of my favourite local trees. It used to stand harmless, tall and kindly on the fringe of the carpark next to The Union and it has now been chopped down deaded. RIP, nice tree.

blog response

thank you for inviting me to join the blog, when i have thought up a story i shall post it. milly

Baklava Fingers

I decided to make Baklava. I'd never made it before so this was my first attempt and it was delicious! It was easier and less fiddly than i expected. One thing i discovered was that the chewy element of Baklava is caused by dried figs... Well I Never... I used a recipe by Karen Martini which turned up in this month's Women's Weekly. I suppose it might be more expedient to use recipes from our own online walnut recipe database. What made it so much fun was that I had my gorgeous mother as Sous Chef and, ahem, Quality Control Manager. See if you can pick at what stage we cracked open a bottle of wine... I thought the fingers were excellent, but i might rename them Baklava Spring Rolls. Mum would have preferred a finer grind to the nut mix and more pastry. I would use much less lemon rind next time. Too much lemon rind contributed the misleading impression that I had made a health food. Mum said they were less lemony the next day. I still need to work on my ability to not-eat-everything-all-at-once. My beautiful sister turned up just as we pulled the fingers from the oven. By that time the wine was well and truly flowing as reflected by my photography of the final stages!