30 Minutes of My Life
Not strictly from my "garden", the three black walnut fruits that I gathered from the lawn had been drying since autumn. One of my baby (and wild) black walnut trees had conveniently dropped them over the fence, right next to my lawn chair. Today, I decided that "one of these days" was now. With a pair of pliers and a claw hammer, I pounded away the outer husk, then managed to actually crack the nut shells. A small fork assisted in prying out some of the smaller pieces.
You can't just sit down and eat a handful of black walnuts. They are too strong and astringent, and not the satiny, yummy Carpathian (English) walnuts sold in the supermarkets. But their intense flavor is perfect as a condiment. My typical use for black walnut is sprinkling a dust of finely chopped fragments on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Another way that black walnuts differ from Carpathian walnuts is their thick, nearly indestructible shells. You can't just "crack" a black walnut, and extract a half or a whole nut. I suppose a vise somewhere might succeed in breaking them open more gently. But a nut cracker is powerless against them. My 16 oz. claw hammer required multiple blows so severe that I worried for the kitchen counter surface on which I was engaging in this savagery--not that the hammer might miss the nut, but that the nut might crack the counter.
Of my three black walnuts, one was found to be moldy inside, and was discarded. What you see in the photo is the yield of the remaining two nuts. The pounding and the picking and the subsequent cleanup of all the widely scattered debris consumed about a half-hour. Gone forever.
Bob