English Peas, Spring Onions and Roasted Almonds

Just cooked English peas, sautéd spring onions and roasted, salted almonds are a delicious combination of tender sweet, sweet pungent, and crunchy just salty. You can set this side dish next to grilled fish or chicken or mashed potatoes and a roast. It's...

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Nuts & Seeds Category Archive

Walnuts

Choose your walnut.

The English walnut is sweet flavored and a favorite for snacking or garnishing both sweet and savory dishes, including vegetables, breads, and pastries. The English walnut is also known as the Persian walnut.

The black walnut is strong flavored often on the tannic or bitter side. Also known as the American black walnut, it is the key ingredient for the black-walnut cake and is tasty chopped to dress sautéed trout.

The white walnut is another American walnut with brownish-white rich, oily meat, it is most often used for baking and also called the butternut, a name that may tell you something about how rich tasting it is.

Walnuts have been around for a very long time. Etymologically, walnut comes from the Old English word meaning ‘foreign nut’. It was the staple nut in ancient Greece and Rome. In the fourth century, the Romans carried the walnut to Britain via Gaul, or modern-day France. It’s thought that before the walnut got to the Mediterranean region, it may have gotten its start in northern India.

The walnut is a bumpy kernelled nut. It’s flavored is enhanced by toasting for 15 to 20 minutes at about 350ºF. Blanching can be problematic given the walnuts uneven contour, but it can be done.

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Sunflowers

Sunflower seeds have a pleasant, nutty flavor and a crunchy texture that makes them a welcome and simple addition sprinkled on salads, sandwiches, vegetable dishes, and yogurt as well as mixed into stuffings and granola.

Ground sunflower seeds can be combined with flour to make cakes, cookies, muffins, pancakes, and bread.

Lightly toasted sunflower seeds are a tasty snack for eating out of hand. Unshelled seeds also can be roasted and salted then eaten from the shells as a snack.

One flower head of the sunflower can contain up to 2,000 seeds. The sunflower goes to seed in late summer and fall.

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Chestnut

Chestnuts can be roasted, boiled, grilled, braised, puréed, preserved, and candied.

You can add shelled and peeled chestnuts finely diced or chopped to soups, stuffings, and salads. The rich, sweet taste of chestnuts is a good match for savory dishes such as game and poultry.

The chestnut harvest for this year is drawing to a close; it runs from October through March.

There are several varieties of chestnut, but when it comes to cooking, there are two kinds: the cultivated chestnut and the wild chestnut.

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Walnuts

Fresh de-husked walnuts are in peak-season from mid-September through November.

The most popular walnut variety is the English walnut, which is also known as the Persian walnut. The Persian walnut originated in Iran or ancient Persia. (The Persian walnut migrated to China before 400 AD. It came to New England from England with the Pilgrims.)

The less popular black walnut has a stronger—slightly bitter—taste and is a native of North America. Its shell is harder to crack than the English walnut and its flesh has a high fat content that will shrivel and turn rancid quickly.

Choose: Walnuts out of the shell should be plump and meaty and crisp. Don’t accept shriveled nutmeats. Walnuts in the shell should not have any cracks or holes.

Serve: Use walnuts ground or chopped in cakes and pastries. Use in salads or in meat, poultry or fish dishes.

Almonds

The almond harvest has just come to a close. The harvest lasts from mid-August to mid-September, but you will find almonds at the farm market almost all year long.

Almonds originated in Asia and North Africa, and the almond tree—which resembles a peach tree—can grow as high as 20 to 30 feet (6-9 m) tall. Because the almond is very sensitive to cold, the tree thrives in the Mediterranean-climate regions of Europe, Australia, South America and California.

The fruit of the almond contains an oval, off-white seed that is covered with a brownish skin. The shell itself is covered with a tough, fibrous green husk which breaks open when the fruit is fully mature.

There are actually two types of almonds: one bitter and one sweet. The sweet almond is the one that you will find at the farm market and the one you will use in the kitchen. (The bitter almond is strong flavored and after being processed to remove a toxic acid is used to flavor extracts.)

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