Following in the footsteps of countless internet bloggers, I too will document my journey to try something new. Albeit with my own take on things.
Walnuts!
To be honest there isn’t much exciting about walnuts. They are fairly bland compared to other nuts like almonds. They also aren’t much to look at either. However, I’ve never cracked walnuts myself or ate them straight from the shell before. So I figure why not give it a go. Let’s get cracking.
Tools
What is a man without his tools. Well apparently not much. My first attempt to crack open the hard shell of the walnut was by banging it against random objects. This was entirely unsuccessful.
My second attempt involved the use of a small leatherman multi-tool that I have. You know the one’s that look like a swiss army knife but also have pliers. Well I thought this would be the secret to getting some walnut goodness. Little did I know that the walnut was too big to fit in the pliers.
Now things were getting serious. Ten minutes had passed and I still hadn’t tasted any walnut. Time to bring out the heavy guns, or in this case a pair of vice-grips from my tool box. I loaded the walnut into the vice-grips, adjusted the spacing and then – BAM! A crack was heard and the walnutty goodness spilled out. Feeling successful I quickly devoured what little was inside. I was actually hoping there would be more inside than there was though.
After several minutes of using the vice-grips, I decided to give the multi-tool another go. This time around I stabbed the walnut with the knife. Then I used the corkscrew and dug that into the little hole I had created. As I turned corkscrew I heard cracks emanating from all through the walnut. I was onto something. Using this method I cracked and ate a few more walnuts and then called it a day.
Thoughts
It was actually harder than I thought to crack the walnuts. I think if I went outside and crushed the walnut between two rocks or bricks then it would be a lot easier. I suspect the industrial process for cracking walnuts would involved the use of a fixed clearance rolling mill. Maybe someday I will look into this.
Let’s see what tomorrow holds.
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Clearly pistachios are supreme. So user friendly.
Pistachios do rock. I’ve also been eating lots of almonds lately. They have heaps of vitamin E (good for your skin!).
Indeed. Have you tried almond milk before? Maybe you should do a post on the definition of ‘milk’ and various types and benefits-almond, soy, coconut…
I have tried almond milk with oats. Didn’t notice any noticeable difference in how I felt though. Down the line I imagine I will write something on nutrition as I have been monitoring and tinkering with my eating lately. There seems to be a lot of misconceptions around different types of fats that I might address. Diet is incredibly complex though, so the researcher in me would want to spend a lot of time reading primary research before I ever write something on it myself.