Ok, this is not a recipe as such, and it is not spectacular in any way, but it is the only edible thing I will likely make for the holidays, so I’m posting it.
For Thanksgiving we visited my Aunt and Uncle who live in a private campground in the high desert of far-western New Mexico. My sister and I stayed in a nearby Airbnb owned by a friend of theirs. It was surrounded by piñon pine trees, and the ground was absolutely covered with pine nuts. Every morning before anyone else was awake, my sister and I ventured out into the cold mountain dawn to harvest pine nuts together. This is not a family tradition, unless you count being stubborn, thrifty, make-do women as a family tradition, which it is. But not the pine nuts bit. Anyway.
Both of us brought a gallon bag of fresh piñon pine nuts home in our luggage. We have been told that New Mexico pine nuts are some of the most sought after, and you can’t really harvest or process them in any labor-efficient way. If you get there at just the right time you can, like mulberries, put a sheet under the tree and whack it, then gather up the sheet, but that’s really the only labor-saving trick. We were NOT there at such a time. Please do picture us, crouched in the freezing air, pink noses, our calves screaming at us all unused to the altitude, picking up nut after single nut, laughing the entire time at what a picture we must be to the ravens who called overhead.
So here we are. I’ve roasted all of mine. I think my sis is going to make liqueur with the shells, and do something with raw nuts too. But I will probably just eat them on salads. Lots and lots of salads.
Now to go crack each one of these nuts individually…
You know, even though I know pine nuts are indeed nuts, I never considered the cracking each nut aspect (probably because I’ve only ever seen pine nuts in their post-cracked state). What a lot of work, but it sounds like it will be tasty and worth it!
Thank you for sharing the entire process story behind these nuts. What a great start to the Holiday Bakeoff challenge!
It’s my understanding that different varieties of pine trees produce nuts of varying ease or difficulty in opening. A lot of America pine nuts are from a single-leaf pinyon pine, and apparently they have quite soft shells, so can be shelled much more easily. These New Mexico piñon nuts have HARD shells. They also apparently have fairly narrow environmental requirements for bearing well, including growing in high elevations, specific moisture levels and freeze thaw cycles. I imagine the labor and highly variable harvest sizes are why New Mexico pine nuts can be so costly, but also they apparently have the best flavor as well.
This story is great (and exactly the sort of thing my husband and I would do, we spent several hours on an outing with our kids squirreling away unexpected hazelnuts in our pockets, you sound like my kind of people). I only really put 2 and 2 together that pine nuts come from pine trees when I went to a program with my kids at the nature center a few years back. They are delicious, but so labor intensive. Thanks for sharing your story and your process.
. Way to persevere!