Pass the Planters

I made roasted peanuts this morning, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. A couple weeks ago I was gifted the peanuts fresh from the chakra or field of some teachers, probably a kilo or a big plastic bag full of ‘em. Finally yesterday I decided it was time to do something with them, so a 5 year old neighbor and I set about shelling the peanuts, which is nowhere near as easy or fun as it sounds. When you go to a baseball game in the States and crack open the peanuts to eat ‘em, it’s easy and fun, two peanuts to a shell, no worries. But some of these peanuts had shells of steel and I have a callous on my thumb from cracking them, and you could never predict if there’d be two or four little peanuts in a shell. Once we had shelled them all, we still had to take off the little red covering thing. For a while I picked up a handful and rubbed em together in my hands, hoping the friction would remove some of the skins, which it did but not all. So for a few minutes I went ahead and by hand de-skinned the peanuts, but that got old quickly so just left on the harder-to-remove peanut skins. After all this, I ended up with only about two cups of peanuts!! This morning I roasted them in the oven, and now they’re ready to be eaten plain, or with a little salt, or mixed with raisins, or honey roasted (this is my favorite! You just stick em in a frying pan with oil and honey), or they could be smashed up and put into a thai-style peanut sauce, or I could smash ‘em and then mix ‘em with honey to make a sort of peanut butter that’s simply delicious. I have a feeling that after all this work I’ll be very careful about when and how to use up these peanuts!

February 18, 2007