...a dear friend gifted us this BIG box of walnuts from her tree...
...we used to get walnuts from my Nanny's trees when I was little...remember my
Mom's Black Walnut Pound Cake...you can bet I'll be making one of those...just in time for Thanksgiving...
...and I definitely remember how messy the hulls are...
...If I needed to dye anything dark brown...I'd definitely have the dye-stuff for it...
...oh...that just reminded me of Dr. Thurmann one of my Classics profs...making ink from walnut hulls too...he had an antique fountain pen and he used his homemade ink in it...
...anywhoo...it was a warm-ish fall afternoon...and I set up a 'walnut cleaning station' in the backyard...
...and you can see that the
folding deck chairs that I got for $1 are still holding up well...
...and the box of hulled walnuts gradually went down...and the buckets of hulls and walnuts gradually filled up...
...until they were finally all done...and just in time too...it's turned off really chilly now...and this is a job that I wouldn't want to do inside...
...I spread the hulled walnuts out on some cardboard to dry for a couple of weeks...then I'll crack them open on a brick like my Mama did...and then we'll have Black Walnut Pound Cake for Thanksgiving...
~Have a lovely day!
That's a lot of work. My gran pickled walnuts by getting them early before the shells form. I was the one who had to poke them with a thin knitting needle! My fingers were brown for days afterwards.
ReplyDeletelooks like a lot of work! hope the "meat" of the walnut is big enough to use - last ones i had were not worth cracking open!
ReplyDeleteloved the coffee-grinder experiment. cool that it works that well! love, k
I like those deck chairs. How wonderful to get free walnuts. Though I see you have to do a lot of work to get at them I'm sure you will enjoy the end result. xx
ReplyDeleteHow cool!
ReplyDeleteI can remember sitting around my grandma's kitchen table hulling walnuts as a little girl. I loved helping her.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid my grandparents used to take their black walnuts and pour them into the ruts in their two-track style driveway. Grandma would go out every day and pick up the ones that had come free after being driven over and any that she missed the squirrels got for very little labor :)
ReplyDelete