Garden clean-up

I finally got around to cleaning up the main part of the garden this week. The peas finally gave up after nights in the teens and a whole week of snow flurries, so I pulled them up and removed the trellises. I hacked the weeds out of the two remaining garden squares that hadn't been cleaned up, threw some fertilizer and pea vines over them and covered everything with hay:

Walnuts, again

So, the black walnuts have been sitting around drying for almost 2 months, and I decided it was time to start the final stage of processing.

Step 1: smash the shell with a small sledgehammer. No, normal nutcrackers can't break the ultra-thick, super hard, spiky black walnut shells.


Step 2: sort into empty shell pieces, nut pieces, and chunks of shell with nut pieces still in them.




Step 3: try to get the remaining nut pieces out of the shell with more smashing or by pulling them out with a dental pick.

I got about 1.5-2 cups from maybe 100 walnuts? I'm still not sure I really like black walnuts! They taste sort of cheesy-fruity, bitter, and smoky all at once.

Thanksgiving pie

The jack o'lantern from Halloween turned into a pumpkin pie:

I used the standard pumpkin pie recipe, and added the walnut topping from this recipe.
It successfully tasted like pumpkin pie, and the walnut-brown sugar chunks tasted good, although some of them sank into the pie instead of staying on top.

Four cups of frozen pumpkin puree turned into 2 cups of pumpkin paste after defrosting and letting the excess water drip out through a towel for an hour or two. It's definitely necessary to extract that extra water- I think the pie would have been a soup otherwise.