Mama Says Monday: Oh For The Love Of Pecans

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This past week has been very busy. I worked, helped a friend get ready for an event this weekend, visited my mother-in-law, spent one day with my aunt, and spent all day Saturday making Crack, my special candy. So as I said, I stayed rather busy. But the first of the week I realized that this was my last week before the time changed. So, I spent a couple of afternoons picking up pecans. Now that the time has changed, I can’t just run back and pick up any, because it will be dark early.

Now why would I want to pick up pecans? Because my top choice of favorite nut (other than a few relatives) are pecans, with walnuts coming in a distant second. I use a lot of pecans in a year in my cooking. Nothing beats a pecan as an add-in in cookies, cakes, pies, chicken salad, as a coating for chicken, …well you get the picture. I use pecans for everything. 

Recently I made a trip to Georgia, and I thought I would buy a few pecans to stock up. Wrong!!! Going up we saw a lot of signs advertising pecans for $5.95 a pound. Not too bad if you don’t have to shell them yourself. When we stopped, at two different places, the price was actually $12.99 per pound. Obviously, the signs’ prices were out of date. Needless to say, no pecans came home with me. I decided that I would check out the trees around home first, before I shelled out (pun intended) that kind of money.

I am no stranger to a pecan tree. I have picked up a few in my lifetime. As a child, we helped pick up pecans and the money that was made by selling them helped to purchase our Christmas presents. Since there were 4 children in my family, and our first instinct was to run willy-nilly under the trees, trying to find a spot with plentiful nuts, my parents assigned us a strip under the tree where we would crawl and glean all the nuts. Sometimes our area would be marked off by fenceposts in the fence nearby. We were to leave no pecans on the ground. We had no choice, it was a family project. But we were aware that the pecans bought our Christmas. Kids don’t work like that these days. 

 
These days, my knees don’t allow me to crawl to gather the nuts. I use a roller pick up the pecans. But this year, there seems to be more debris on the ground and fewer nuts. This past week I have had a rake in one hand, and a roller in the other. I rake away some of the debris, then roll the pecans that was under it. Ok, so I am cheap and thought I could save money by picking them up myself. After going to bed with aching arms and hands that I can’t close, I may be reconsidering those 12 dollar pecans. Or maybe I should reconsider some of my recipes, but how do you make a pecan pie for Thanksgiving without pecans? And Crack won’t be Crack without pecans!! Or maybe I should put an ISO in a local buy, sell, trade sites for pecans. Because what would this world be like without Crack??