"pecans" news and stories

Nuts have been my "go-to" snack lately. I'm trying to stop eating stuff like chocolate and cookies and cake while still satisfying my snack food cravings, and nuts can actually be very good with you (within reason - watch the amount you eat). Now, if I could just stop eating the chocolate-covered cashews...

Today is National Nut Day. Grab a bag or can of your favorites, whether its cashews, pistachios, walnuts, or peanuts (which, as you may know, aren't a nut at all but a legume, in the bean family). Here's an easy recipe for Roasted Almonds, and here's one for Recipe Goldmine has a ton of nut recipes, including Cajun Cocktail Nuts, Glazed Pecans, Chili Walnuts, and Citrus Nuts.

In the course of writing here, I end up taking a lot of pictures of the food I cook and eat. Oftentimes I get lucky and end up with a good picture, but typically that's after taking about 17 shots from different angles. Even after all that, the results are typically mixed and the good pictures are essentially the product of dumb luck. I'm always looking for new tips to make my pictures just a little bit better.

One of my favorite food blogs out there is Still Life With... as it is a site devoted to food styling and photography. In each post, Lara walks her readers through each step she takes to capture a particular shot, including all the not-so-pretty stops along the way. I'm loving her recent post on the way she got an appealing photo of a slice of pecan pie. Pie, while delicious, is not particularly lovely on it's own and so required substantial help to get gussied up for the close-up. The final shot is gorgeous and makes me long for pie.

Oh, and if some of Lara's pictures seem familiar, it's because she's also the blogger behind the site Cook and Eat.

Among the many things I love about fruit crisps, one of my favorite features of this versatile dessert is that once you learn the basic technique of making one, you really never have to measure again. Saturday afternoon, I put together a blueberry-nectarine crisp to take to a potluck later in the evening. Back in August, I froze half the blueberries I picked, along with a quart of sliced nectarines. I plucked both bags out of the freezer, and after an hour of defrosting, tumbled their contents into a large bowl. I sprinkled them with some sugar (I didn't measure, but if I was forced to guess, I'd say it was a little more than half a cup), some cinnamon (a good shake), fresh nutmeg (a third of a meg) and a teaspoon of cornstarch (the only thing I measured, because you always want to err on the scant side with cornstarch). I tossed the fruit around with my fingers until coated and them spread them out in a large baking pan (it was a lot of fruit).

The fruit went into the oven at 350 degrees plain for the first fifteen minutes, as it was still a little frozen and I didn't want the topping to burn while the fruit was undercooked. While it baked, I whirred up topping in the food processor. In went about 2 cups of oats, 1 stick of butter (unsalted please), cane sugar (about a third of a cup), some cinnamon and a bit more nutmeg. This is my favorite way of making a crisp topping, because some of the oats get worked down into flour, while other bits remain intact. It comes together into a sort of dough that has a terrific texture and makes you think that what you're eating has some relationship to healthy eating. I toss in a couple of handfuls of chopped pecans just before spreading it out over the fruit. It baked for another 45 minutes, until the top was lightly browned and the fruit was bubbly and soft. Eaten with vanilla ice cream, it was one of the better treats I tasted in recent memory.

I've had this particular type of fudge many times since I was a kid, but I had no idea it was called "Penuche Fudge."

According to Wikipedia, it's a New England fudge (and parts of the south) made with butter, milk, brown sugar, and vanilla, and tastes a lot like caramel. It's lighter than regular fudge.

Here's a recipe from recipezaar.com made with walnuts, and here's one from AllRecipes made with pecans.

To be completely honest, I am not usually impressed too much by nuts, even those coated in sugar and spices. I can easily make my own. So with this in mind, it was a complete surprise to me that I liked the Nutorious Nuts I sampled at the Fancy Foods Show so much.

Nutorious Gourmet Nuts started out as an old family recipe. Deliciously flavored nuts were passed out as holiday gifts to family and friends until their popularity finally pushed the nut-makers into the business world. Using only nuts and a few ingredients, like butter, sugar and spices, every batch of nuts is handmade in one of several delicious flavors that are crazily addictive:

• Oooo La La Original - classic buttery sweet combination
• Cha Cha Chipotle - savory and a little spicy, an updated bar snack
• Door County Cherry Vanilla Crunch (my favorite!)- a sweet nut mix with the addition of some dried cherries coated in the same sugar crust
• Cranberry Orange Crunch - nuts mixed with cranberries and tossed in an orangey sugar coating
• Chocolate Coconutty (updated!) - amazingly addictive, with chocolate and toasty coconut.

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