That's Just Nuts!

We have three pecan trees on our property that we pick from.  There's a couple more in the back that the squirrels claim.  We don't get a single pecan off of those.  Then our neighbors directly east of us have three pecan trees.  Those pecans are huge!  Ours are very small.  In fact, most people wouldn't bother shelling them.  The thing about our pecans is this: although they are small, they are oily and very rich.  This makes them delicious!  So in our brief winters here in South Louisiana, I spend nice relaxing times in front of the fireplace shelling pecans.  It is a satisfying pastime while listening to music or visiting with family.  The only downside is the mess I make.  I keep the vacuum cleaner close and try to clean up after myself when I'm done.

Pecans freeze very well.  So we pack them in gallon-sized zip loc bags and put them in the freezer once shelled.  Some years the trees produce lots and some years, they make absolutely nothing.  That's why it's a good idea to store some in the freezer during the "fat" years to be prepared for the "lean" years.  I think that's what ol' Joseph did back in the Book of Genesis.  Here are 9 gallons of pecans in our deep freeze in the house:

And here are four more on the door of the stand-up freezer out in the garage.

And six more gallons on the shelves in the same freezer.

If my math is right, that's 19 gallons of shelled pecans this year.  I think we gave some away, so it's more like 20 or 21 gallons.  For the bigger pecans from our neighbor's tree, we crack them ourselves with our "Reed's Rocket" pecan cracker.  For the smaller pecans?  Forget about it!  We bring onion sacks of whole pecans to our local feed store.

They have a pecan cracking machine.  They pour the pecans in the machine and it cracks them.  You can hear the noise in the warehouse with the machine going, "Crack, Crack, Crack."  They charge $0.33 per pound before the government takes their share of it in taxes.  The machine is ancient and I figure they've probably paid for it many times over.  I think it is worth it for our small pecans.  The paperwork below shows that we brought them 109 pounds of pecans and paid $39.77 for the cracking.

We like to eat them to snack on.  Tricia will oven roast them in butter and Worcestershire sauce.  That's pretty addictive.  My favorite way to eat pecans, though, is in pecan pies.  I love pecan pies.  We like this Recipe right here that uses Steen's Pure Cane Syrup.  What can be better than a slice of homemade pecan pie and a cup of coffee?

A Bumper Crop of Pecans!

We lit our first fire of the season in the fireplace this week.  We put off turning on the heat for as long as we can and enjoy sitting in front of the fireplace in the evenings, enjoying the warmth and the mesmerizing fire.  There are so many memories associated with fireplaces.  The andirons come from my mom's great aunt and uncle's fireplace.  The bellows hanging was my maternal grandmother's (Bumby) and the fireplace tools were from my paternal grandparents' home.

We've watched a TV show set in Canada called 'Heartland.'  The grandfather (Jack) in that program has a fireplace in his home and has special stones set in the fireplace that are named after people.  They are special and have a place in the hearts and minds of those who gather around the hearth to enjoy the fire.  I wish we would've done that.  In the home I grew up in, Mom & Dad have bricks in their fireplace that were from other buildings that were special to my parents.  They can point them out and there are stories to go along with them.  I think that's neat.

As 'fireplace season' progresses, this is a place at night where I spend a lot of time, sitting around, shelling pecans.  We have SO many pecans this year.  We'll take the small ones from our trees to the feed store we patronize.  They have a pecan shelling machine.  You can hear it pop as the pecans are fed into it.  The pecans are cracked (for a fee, of course, and you're charged by the pound).  I'll sit here and separate the shells from the nut.  It's mind-numbing, but pleasant work on a cold winter's evening.

Our neighbors let us know that they are so busy working on their house that they won't be picking up any pecans from their trees this year.  They didn't want to see them go to waste, so they told us to pick up all we wanted.  Wow!  How generous.  Their pecans are almost as big as golf balls.  On a beautiful afternoon last week, I set up my pecan cracking operation on the back patio while listening to an audiobook.  How relaxing!

My pecan cracking operation doesn't involve mechanized equipment.  I use elbow grease.  I use a Reed's Rocket, circa 1950 manufactured by the Arthur W. Reed Manufacturing Company out of Little Rock, Arkansas.  I'll show you how the process works.  It is wonderfully simple.  There is no rush to the process.  It doesn't require any deep thinking or ciphering.  You just settle in to a rhythmic, efficient repetitive motion.  The nuts go in a bowl and the shells go in a bucket to be either burned in the fireplace (they make cherry-red coals) or composted in the garden.

The Reed's Rocket is adjustable and thus allows you to crack any size pecan, walnut, etc. in it.  You can adjust the threads to accommodate a larger or smaller nut.  Once you get is set just right, you slip the pecan in and use leverage to pull the 'piston' down.

You hear a loud crack and little pieces of pecan shell fly across the patio, revealing the treasured pecan inside.

While the pecans from our trees are only about half this size, they are full of oil, rich and fat.  These pecans from the neighbor's trees are larger and just about perfect, from my vantage point.

About 1 in 10 are bad, and I just throw them away.  Let me correct that.  Nothing goes to waste.  As it turns out, Belle eats them, even those that have bad spots.  A pecan-eating dog, can you imagine?  In just a short time, I filled a blue plastic 'pea-shellin' bowl with shelled pecans.  The contents filled two 1 gallon sized zip loc bags.  We'll put them in the deep freeze for later use.

This just scratches the surface of the pecans we'll have on hand.  We'll be shelling pecans all winter long, both on the patio and in front of the fireplace.  It's a good thing that we love pecan pies!  If you drop by to visit, we'll send you home with some shelled pecans.  Maybe Tricia will share her oven roasted pecan recipe with you.  It's got Worcestershire Sauce in it.  They are so addictive that you might have to attend a 12 step program once you've indulged.  

The Pecan Crop - 2024

We have husband and wife pecan trees in our yard.  A husband and wife tree is an old custom from New England where a (you guessed it) husband and a wife would plant two identical trees side by side by the entrance of their home, and they would grow together as a testimony of their love and fidelity.  I don't know who planted our husband and wife trees, but they are quite large.  Their boughs have grown together such that their outline is as one large tree instead of two.  

The two trees make great pecans (puh CAHNS), but they are small.  They are, however, good and rich because they're full of oil.  They're just hard to crack, so we generally take them to the feed store in town where they have a pecan cracking machine that cracks them.  We then take them home and sit in front of the fireplace all winter shelling them for pecan pies!

Mom and Dad came over the other day and we laid out a blanket and walked around the trees, filling up a 5 gallon bucket.  From those trees, we've picked 4 1/2 five gallon buckets of pecans.  We also have a wagon filled with pecans as well that Ginger, our cat, has decided is a nice place to lounge throughout the day after hunting all night.

Our neighbors had made a coconut dessert Sunday afternoon and wanted to share a couple of slices with us.  They walked over and we visited.  They are real busy with a construction project.  So busy, in fact, that they don't have time to pick up pecans.  They offered that we could pick up all we could and were going to leave their "pecan-picker-upper" out by the tree.

That contraption is a back-saver.  As you get older, I've learned, you come to appreciate things like this so you don't have to constantly bend over.  This is like the slinky we used to play with as kids,  you roll it and the pecans go inside until its full.

It's so easy, it almost feels like you're cheating.

Tricia was using an older model of the same device.  This one, I think, was my great-grandmother's.  When it's full, you simply pull back the wires and allow the pecans to tumble out.  We began to quickly fill the wagon...

Our neighbor's pecan trees are LARGE pecans.  I'm telling you, we felt kind of funny picking these compared to ours.  Tricia said, "Man, our pecans are about 1/3 the size of theirs!"  It's true.  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's pecans, came to mind.

The neighbor's pecans on the left.  The largest of our pecans on the right.

We will let the pecans sit for a couple of weeks and after a cold front comes through, we'll begin shelling them.  I enjoy sitting and shelling pecans.  It is an enjoyable pastime in the fall.  Pecans freeze well, so we'll freeze them, but we'll turn many into pies and will roast and salt others.  The neighbors have a recipe with cinnamon and sugar pecans.  Looking forward to all of that!

2021 Pecan Harvest - By the Numbers

As we've discussed in previous posts, we have three pecan trees on the property that bear pecans.  Trouble is, they don't produce every year.  This is the first year in the past two or three years that they've produced.  In this PECAN BLOG POST from mid-December 2021 we talked about the harvest a little bit and then how we brought them to our local feed store for cracking.  In total, we brought 122 pounds of whole pecans for shelling.  As discussed, it costs $0.33 per pound to crack them.  In other words, we paid $40.26 for the feed store to crack the pecans.

Once cracked, we take them home, and shell them.  It is really easy and quick to do this!  You simply separate the shell from the "meat."  In the past, I'd save the $40 and crack and shell them myself, but I've found that the time cracking can be better used in other areas.

It is a very relaxing task to do while sitting in front of a fireplace, especially if the weather is cold and wet outside.  I'll take all the pecan shells and throw into the compost pile.

An added bonus in allowing the machine at the feed store to crack them is that you generally get mostly whole pecans - not a lot of brokens.  We'll generally get gallon-sized freezer bags, label them, fill them and then put them in the deep freeze.  Pecans freeze well and then you just don't know, we may not have another pecan crop for a couple of years.  We'd do well to stock up.

And, stock up, we did!  We filled a number of gallon-sized ziploc bags.  Before I loaded into the deep freeze, I decided to count and weigh the bags.

In all, we filled 13 gallon bags and 5 quart bags.  The total weight of pecan "meat" was 39 pounds!  The total weight of pecans cracked was 122 pounds.  So that means that 83 pounds of the total weight was NOT the edible pecan.  Seems like a lot of shrinkage for the shells, but as I think about it, roughly 1/8th of the pecans were bad (rotten, dry, inedible).  

So, not counting my time, we spent $40.26 in total for Parsley's Feed to crack the pecans.  That yielded 39 pounds of pecans and that equates to $1.03 per pound.  I just pulled up the price of a pound of pecan halves at Wal Mart.com and the Great Value Brand is $9.48 per pound.  Looking at the bottom line, we saved $8.45 per pound on pecans.  With all this talk of pecans, I'm getting hungry for a slice of pecan pie right about now!

Shelling Pecans after a Three Year Draught

For whatever reason, nutrition I'm guessing, our trees haven't made pecans in three years.  This year, however, they made up for lost time.  As discussed in previous posts, we picked up six five gallon buckets of pecans.  We could have picked up more, but realized we had enough.  We decided that we needed to get started cracking and shelling them.  Five years or so, I'd crack them all myself using an old timey cracker.  In recent years, we've taken them to a place in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana that cracks them or to our local feed store.

Don't you love going into old feed stores or hardware stores?  It's like walking back in time.  There's a screen door to enter.  The merchants are always friendly and talk to you about the weather and other happenings.  You can pick up feed, or medicine, halters, buckets, boots, seed, seed potatoes and Farmer's Almanacs.  They load the feed in the back of you truck for you.  Old feed stores are the best!

Our local feed store also has a pecan cracking machine.  It is an odd looking contraption.  When you walk in, you can hear the "pop, pop, pop" of pecans being cracked.  You pour your buckets of pecans in the hopper and they go through the machine.

The cracked pecan drops out of the chute below and back into the bucket that you brought them in.

Then, the shopkeeper puts them on a scale and weighs them.  This year's charge for cracking them is $0.33 per pound.  That might sound like a lot; however, it saves you a lot of time!

Once we get them home, I grab several handfuls of cracked pecans and put them in a box.  I shell them over the box so that all the shells and dust don't get all over the place.  I use a special tool to clean the shell out from the ridges in the pecan.  If you don't get that piece of shell out and you eat it, it will instantly make your mouth very dry.  It's not very appealing.  If you deal with home-grown pecans and are a pecan-eater, you know what I'm talking about.  Anyway, here's what they look like right out of the machine.  As you can tell, the machine has done most of the work for you.  All you need to do is remove the cracked shells and sort out any bad ones.  Most of them even come out whole and not broken.

In three shakes of a billy goat's tail, you have a pot-full of shelled pecans.  Nice ones, too!

So far, we've shelled two of the 6 five gallon buckets and have put FIVE one gallon zip lock bags of fresh pecans in the deep freeze.  By the time we've finished the other 4 buckets, we'll have quite an inventory of pecans.  Pecans freeze well, and it is a good thing.  You never know, we may have another 3 year spell where we don't get any.  It'll be good to have some squirreled away.

Before we go further, let me tell you about our pecans.  It is hard to get perspective from the photos.  Our pecans are a 'wild' variety, I think.  They are small and a little difficult to crack manually.  But what they sacrifice in size, they make up for it in taste.  They are rich.  Full of pecan oil.  If you cut them up, your fingers feel kind of oily.

For comparison, the photo below shows on the left, a pecan from a local Pecan Company that has orchards.  Our pecan is on the right.  Quite a difference, huh?

But that's okay.  We like our pecans and look forward to once again, having pecans grown in the yard to eat.

Pickin' Up Pecans

We were happy to find that we had pecans this year.  We pronounce them puh CAHNS.   Our trees haven't produced in a couple of years.  We were out!  We don't know if it was a fertilization issue or something else that caused them not to produce.  Tricia's theory is that the hard freeze did something.  Who knows?  

Normally, we pick up a whole lot and then shell them and freeze them in quart sized freezer bags.  We'll snack on them, use them in baked goods, making pesto and then we soak some and ferment them.  Pecans are delicious.  We have seven pecan trees on our property.  The ones up front make small pecans that are kind of hard to shell.  Although they are small, they are "fat."  By that, I mean they are full of oil.  The trees in the back either don't produce or the darned squirrels eat them all.  The tree by the garage makes larger pecans, but they aren't quite as good as the ones in front.

Last weekend was a beautiful weekend.  Tricia and I each grabbed a bucket and went into the front to pick.  There were pecans everywhere!

Tricia likes to just pick them up with her hands.  I have a contraption I use that collects the pecans in lazy fashion, where I don't have to bend over.  You just walk, press the device over the pecan and the wires separate and allow the pecan to enter.  Then the wire closes behind it, capturing the pecan.  Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

In no time at all, the pecan-picker-upper is full and ready to be poured into a bucket.

So far, we've filled a couple of big landscape buckets along with two five gallon buckets.  We have more to pick, too!  As you look in the bucket below, you'll see some pecans with the green 'hull' still on them.  Tricia made a grievous mistake and tried to peel off the green hull.  It stained her hands!  It won't wash off.  It has to wear off!

I do have a different mode 'pecan-picker-upper.'  I have a photo of it below.  It operates on the same principle as the one above, except this one is like a Slinky.  Instead of pressing down over the pecan, you roll this one over it.  I don't use this one any more.  It is from my childhood and was from my great-grandmother.

We still have some more pecan picking to do.  Once we've finished, we'll weigh them and shell them.  Then we'll weigh the shelled pecans, so we'll know gross and tare weights.

Bushy Tailed Bandits

The first cool front dropped temperatures into the 70's, but it warmed up with a vengeance after a few days of teasing.  It is back in the 90's again, but the weatherman said to expect another cool front, bringing temps back into the 70's.  I can't wait.  To celebrate this onslaught (hopefully) of cooler weather, Tricia and I have been thinking about driving to Beaumont and purchasing a new fire pit.  We've had our eyes on one outside Buccee's that is built in thick-gauge steel and built to last for a lifetime.  It has a grill on a pivot so that you can build wood fires on it and barbecue.  Our old fire pit has rusted out.  It did give us many years of service, so we can't complain.

Here's the other thing about the beginning of fall.  Leaves start falling.  That's a good thing, but something better falls out of the trees - PECANS!  Last year we harvested exactly ZERO pecans.  It was the first year that we didn't get any pecans.  Most years we pick up buckets and buckets of them.  We shell them and freeze them and use them throughout the year to snack on and to use in various recipes.

So craning my neck upward, I begin assessing this year's crop.  I can see some up there.  I began calculating how many future pecan pies will be baked when those pecans ripen and fall to the ground.

But we've always been told to not count our chickens before they hatch, right?  It was not until I looked down beneath the pecan tree that I saw the dire straits we're in.  Can you see what's littering the trampoline mat?

I'll zoom in a bit.  What you are looking at is chewed up pecans.  The stain on the trampoline is the rich pecan oil that has leaked out of the chewed up pecans.

Who is the culprit, the perpetrator, the vile, evil doer?  I submit to you Sciuridae.  That's the Latin family name for Squirrel.  The bushy-tailed bandit.  The rascally rodent.  It is nice to share, but if we aren't careful, the squirrels will eat every pecan and we will have no pie.  Troubling thoughts indeed.  I looked for a meaningful squirrel poem that would memorialize my thoughts, but alas, there are no poems about squirrels that capture my ruminations.  So I had to write one myself.

Our pecan trees are really loaded down

With thousands of pecans that will soon be hitting the ground.

But there's trouble in paradise and this is why,

The Bushy tailed bandits are eating my future pies.

They watch me each day as I drive off to my job

And they come out of their nests and commence to rob.

But I have a plan I'm cooking up in my head

It involves a shotgun loaded with high powered lead.

Then like autumn leaves on breezy nights,

The dead squirrels will fall from lofty heights.

I'll look into their beady eyes

And relish the thought of my rescued pies.

Processing the 2016 Pecan Crop

We have a few pecan trees in the yard and each year we pick what we can from underneath the trees crack and shell them.  Our pecans are really small, but they are rich - loaded with oil and very flavorful.

I like to sit in front of the fireplace while shelling pecans.  It is a relaxing, yet rewarding task. Depending on how many pecans we pick, it can be a long process to get them cracked, shelled and in the freezer.  We compost all the pecan shells into the garden.  This year we took our pecans to our local feed store to have the pecans cracked.  In the past, I'd crack them myself, but for a small investment, having them cracked mechanically, saves a lot of time.  There was a problem, though.  The mechanical cracker at our local feed store was broken and they weren't fixing it until next season.

We looked around and found that there is a place in nearby Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, called the Fruit Stand that has a pecan cracker that will crack our small pecans.  They charge by the weight and when they weighed the pecans that we brought to them, the total was 62 pounds.  They charge $0.35 per pound to crack them, so the total was $23.

Tricia dropped them off and drove to Lafayette and had lunch with me.  An hour later when she went to pick them up, they were ready.  She shopped around at the Fruit Stand and bought some good french bread while she was there.  She also looked at what they were selling shelled pecans for.  $10 a pound!  Wow.  She brought the big molasses tub full of 62 pounds of cracked pecans home and I got busy.  Since the pecans had sat on our back patio for a few months, we experienced some loss.  Some of the pecans were bad, but many were good.  In no time at all I had the big tub empty.  Out of 62 pounds of cracked pecans, we yielded five one gallon sized Zip Loc bags holding 18 pounds of shelled pecans.  I was hoping for better, but that's okay.  Now we have a baseline of 29% return on pecan "meat" to whole pecan, we'll shoot for better next year.

Four bags - with one already in the freezer

Although we snacked on some, we like to preserve them by soaking them and then freezing them. We use a recipe from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions cookbook. It is called Crispy Pecans. We love this recipe.  It is very easy.  It calls for:
4 cups pecans
2 teaspoons sea salt
filtered water

Mix the three ingredients and allow it to soak overnight.  In the morning, drain in a colander.

Then spread the soaked pecans on a tray and place in an oven, or in our case, a warmer, and let it get to 150 degrees for 12 to 24 hours, turning until they are dry and crispy.

When dry, we pour them back into a Zip Loc bag and snack on them or freeze them for snacking or using for baking recipes like pies and brownies pancakes.

A Delicious, Healthy, Simple Snack

Tricia ordered a case of organic pears from Azure Standard Co-op.  It is the craziest thing because she doesn't like apples.  I think pears and apples are similar.  We made quick work of the first case and then she ordered a second one.  Just the other day IN THIS POST we made some homemade cream cheese.  It was very simple to make.

We use cream cheese to make cheesecake, dips and lo and behold, Tricia found another recipe for a simple, yet healthy and delicious snack.  For starters, take a pear and cut out the seeds and stem.

Then in the blender, she combined mostly homemade cream cheese with a dash or three of goat kefir to make it a thick, liquid consistency.  Then she dunks the cut up pears into the cream cheese/goat kefir concoction to coat the pear.

In a separate container, she has run some of our 2015 pecan crop through a blender to chop the pecans into semi-fine crumbles.  She drags the cream cheese/kefir coated pears through the pecans and the pecans stick nicely to the pear.

And she does likewise for the remaining pieces of the pear, arranging them on a plate for viewing and then snacking.

This simple recipe came from Southern Living Magazine, but Tricia changed it up a little bit.

The sweetness of the pears contrasted against the tanginess of the kefir and smooth cream cheese and flavorful pecans.  Yeah, this recipe is a keeper!

Making Homemade Cream Cheese

We hadn't made cream cheese in quite a while.  Azure Standard, a co-op that we order from, just started carrying Cultures for Health and Tricia decided to order a starter kit to try out the cream cheese to see if it would work for making cheesecake. With Thanksgiving right around the corner, we normally buy a lot of cream cheese from the store to make cheesecake and radish dip and we normally put big dollups of our pepper jelly over a brick of cream cheese.  No sense in buying all that when you can make it yourself with Daisy and Rosie's rich milk/cream.

So here is the kit, complete with instructions and 4 culture packets.  Each packet is to be used with 1 gallon of milk.  Traditional cream cheese is made with 50% cream and 50% whole milk.  For richer cream cheese, use whole cream.  Tricia just used a gallon of whole milk from Daisy.  Her milk is the richest.  Let's do this!

Slowly heat a gallon of milk to 86 degrees.  Don't heat it fast.

Once at 86 degrees, remove from heat and pour in your starter packet.  Mix it in using an up and down motion versus stirring motion.

Cover it and let sit for 12 hours at room temperature.

After 12 hours, scoop all the curds in a colander in a bowl lined with a cotton rag and lift the rag, tying up the corners, allowing the whey to drip from the curds into a bowl placed below it.  Let drip for 12 hours.

Take it down, opening it up to reveal your cheese.

Knead some kosher salt into it.  Tricia found that in using 1 gallon of whole raw milk, it made:

• 1 3/4 pounds of cream cheese or 28 ounces, and 
• 3/4 gallon of whey

Tricia put 10 ounces of homemade cream cheese aside in a bowl as she was going to make a cream cheese icing for my birthday cake.

Here she is mixing cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar.  Once it is mixed, she stirs in chopped up pecans.

And the result is....  Perfection!

Yeah, we won't be buying cream cheese for Thanksgiving baking this year. Homemade cream cheese was, well... THE ICING ON THE CAKE!