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!

The Family of the Tree - by Wendy

The Werewolves look terrific, as trees age they acquire shapes that prompt people with imagination to recognize many mythical and scary creatures, werewolves, maybe even dragons. The magic of trees contribute to many myths with the rustling of their leaves; their dark shadows at night and the caressing cool of their shade in the summer, not all myths are scary. Throughout time heavily timbered forests have been places of the genesis of many a mythical tale.

Some werewolves may be lying low around Wallace even today; after all it used to be a heavily timbered area, before being cleared for agricultural use in early European settlement. I understand the area around the walnut orchard was first planted to cherry orchards but a pest called the cherry slug, perhaps a small dragon, ruined the orchards many years ago. The cherry slugs still hang around and share the cherries with various local parrots. To my knowledge, although there were some Welsh people, there have been no reported dragons.

Walnut trees have been historically recorded as growing in a range of climatic zones over a number of continents and cultures, and like dogs and cats have long been friends of humans. Walnut trees contribute to human wellbeing in a number of ways, by providing a healthy food, and along with all trees, they to keep the air clean. Walnut trees live for hundreds of years producing nuts, oil and from the shell abrasives or mulch material, the dried husk can be used to make a permanent dye that does not need a fixative. Also, the longer the trees live the more valuable their timber becomes, which you may think creates a dilemma but given their great contribution and beauty its better to leave them to their natural time.

While walnut trees may look as though they are just standing around with nothing much to do while nuts grow on them and they clean up the air; they are in fact very busy trees. They have two growing periods a year, one in the spring, and one in February. The spring growing period could be the busiest time as they are growing new shoots to become branches with lovely new season leaves, they also grow very tiny flowers to catch the pollen from growing small catkin buds formed on the branches by the end of winter. In early spring after the wind borne pollen from the grown catkins fertilizes the flowers, nuts start to form covered with their dark green husk. Into the summer months the trees feed the nuts while the white moist kernel grows filling the then soft shell. The nuts grow larger, with the kernel filling and expanding the shell, until they are fully grown and the tree does not feed them any longer. The nuts then start to dry out to become a crunchy nut with a hard shell; the husk also dries out and peels back from the shell to help it dry in the heat and summer wind. Harvest time comes after the dried nuts start to fall, some fall a bit before the leaves, although on some trees nuts and leaves fall at much the same time.

In about February, when the nuts no longer needed feeding because they had finished growing even though they are still on the trees drying out, the trees start their second growth period. Again new branches and leaves grow to help support and feed the following years crop. Then by late autumn after the second growth has finished all the leaves turn yellow and brown as the trees take food back form their leaves to store in their roots ready to feed their spring growth and the start of next years crop. After harvest the trees are ready for winter with their only jobs being to rest and encourage the slow, almost imperceptible, catkin growth so they will be again ready to produce pollen by the spring.

So you see there is a lot happening in a walnut grove. All sorts of creatures appreciate the trees and while I know foxes, possums and a range of birds like to eat nuts, doubtless werewolves would love them also but they would have to work much harder to be scary if they lived on nuts that have just fallen to the ground for them. One does not have to be very scary to pick up nice sweet nuts for food. Other trees also have wonderful and busy lives; maybe they will also be creating places for werewolves, perhaps even dragons, to hide until they jump out and frighten us all.

Werewolf Walnuts

If we ever decided on getting a mascot or little sacred animal logo for our nuts and oil, I vote we go for the Werewolf. "Werewolf Walnuts" sounds great don't you think? I think it would be a good sales gimick aka marketing strategy. We could imbue the walnut, walnut oil and our products with the strong, powerful and mysterious qualities of the Werewolf (plus it's cool and funny) thus dragging the nut out of 18th century France (think: Silvio Riviere narrating Global Village on SBS weekdays @ 1800h *yawn*). And let's face it, Wellwood is just a little bit haunted.

I'm deadly serious. But as a joke Liv suggested "We're-wolf Walnuts" whereupon i thought later on down the track when it takes on in households across the globe looking to add some extra feng shui to their cooking, Werewolf Walnuts could even be translated into a satisfying pop culture slogan such as We're Wolfin' Walnuts!!!

I'm a big fan of Google Image search. There's some great images of potential Wellwood werewolves online. Which is your favourite? There's even one which looks like Fang's been Got!

Brainwave, (yes, another one.)

While I was working on a proposal to present a paper at this conference I suddenly had the brainwave -- WALNUT MARZIPAN. (Image on left is Einstein's brain).

The possibilities are endless, as are the calories. Think: instead of almond croissant - WALNUT croissants with walnut marzipan.

I found this recipe online:

Walnut Marzipan
Walnut marzipan makes a nice change it is more nutty and less sweet than almond marzipan. If I were making this with almonds I would blanch off the skins but never have with walnuts. I use the following recipe which was originally from the Good Housekeeping Institute.

You need a food processor. I grind the nuts in a Bamix stick blender processing bowl in 2 batches and then do the rest by hand but it is probably easier if you ahev a proper full size processor.

4 oz broken walnut meats
2 oz castor sugar
2 oz icing sugar plus extra for dusting
1 egg yolk

Put the broken walnuts into the food processor bowl and blitz until they are finely ground. Add the sugars and the egg yolk and blend unitl the mixture starts to bind together. Take out and knead until smooth.

This will make a "sausage" about 11" long to lay down the middle of the stollen dough.

(From The Fresh Loaf)

Chocolate Walnuts