Pecans, Pecans

It has always been a bit of a Thanksgiving tradition to receive a nice, shelled bag of pecans from my Grandma. And I have always taken those precious nuts for granted. This year, my grandma is recovering from a broken hip and mysterious back and stomach pains, so the pecans didn't quite come in their usual convenient form. Since we love our grandma and we love her pecans, we've volunteered to help her pick up pecans from her yard several times already this fall. And on this last trip, we got a big bag of our own whole pecans. We decided to be ambitious and shell them together with the help of your average nut crackers and Jon's mom and dad (who came down to visit us for Thanksgiving day). That was a pretty seriously ridiciulous ambition...those things just break the nuts into smitherines! We worked for hours and got practically nowhere with hardly a "whole" nut to be found. It was quite depressing! Jon's parents eventually had to leave, and we sent them home with a few of the "easier to shell" variety of pecans from my grandma's tree in the chicken yard, and we kept the rest of them (an entire plastic WalMart bag-full) for ourselves to work on...in hopes that my Grandparents would lend us the secret to easier shelling.


Thankfully, my grandpa had a spare pecan cracker contraption that he lent us. I was secretly hoping he had a machine at his house that would allow us to dump large quantities of pecans into it and return them cracked, thus leaving us only the painstaking work of shelling them, but we had no such luck. We had to crack the entire bag of pecans with this contraption one at a time...but thankfully the cracking was much easier, faster, and more efficient for turning out "whole" pecan halves.


I'm so relieved to report that the entire bag is finished! Woo hoo! :) (For anyone curious, we ended up with about a gallon and a quart-worth of shelled pecans...) Jon and I ceremoniously threw the last pecan shells onto the fire tonight...never again to take for granted the beautiful pecans my grandma must have slaved over to give us in the years gone by...or to take for granted how wonderful and amazing it is that you can buy so many pecan halves in tact in the stores. They are worth every penny!


Enjoy some pics from our last day of shelling...