Pine Nuts

Way back about a gazillion years ago when I was young and cute I lived in Northern New Mexico.  I remember one fall driving north to pick pinon nuts.  I don't remember where we went, but I know it was quite a drive and it was north.

I remember parking the car along a road and going out to the trees.  And under the trees I picked up buckets of pine nuts that had fallen.  Then when I got home, I recall going through the nuts to pull out the "non-nut" items such as rabbit or deer fawn poop.  (Now don't laugh... they're all similar in size, shape and color!)  Then I roasted them and had a wonderful time cracking the hard shells with my teeth and eating those wonderful pinon nuts.  MMMmmmm... brings back some good memories.

Considering the fact that we have 35 acres of pinon trees, I thought of how wonderful it would be to gather the pine nuts and roast them again.  So the girls and I went up to the property on Saturday.  I grabbed my walking stick and started scouting around for some trees that could render their fruit to me.  After browsing around I quickly found some pinon nuts strewn under the tree as well as some pine cones that had fallen, but that hadn't opened yet.  So I grabbed a plastic cup in which to hold my harvest and went about looking for more.


After about an hour of stooping and scrounging I had to laugh at my lack of accomplishment.  My fingers were covered in pitch.  My back hurt from bending and crouching.  The girls were impatient as they thought we were going for a hike but I never even left the top of the property.  And all I had to show for my efforts barely covered the bottom of the cup.

It's a good thing that Safeway carries pine nuts.

Oh, and another thing, remember those "non-nut" items?  Poetic justice probably had a hand in the fact that a person who didn't treat me very nicely got one of those little nuggets in his bowl of pine nuts.  Completely unintentional -- but I still grin when I think of him spitting and sputtering.