It's all going nuts!

I've been looking at ways of preserving our walnut harvest which seems to be getting a bit out of hand. Yesterday I thought we had a good haul, but after the heavy winds of last night, the crop had easily quadrupled! There's no real way of knowing how many nuts are on a tree as most are concealed by the leaves. I really wasn't expecting to have this many though. I've ordered a vacuum pack machine and had decided to shell and pack the nuts and store them in the freezer as this avoids any risk of bacteria. It seems that if you look up preserving food of any kind, the US posts the most informative methods, including all the dangers and scientific proof to validate their concerns. We could die from botulism at any given day! However, it's good to err on the side of caution, so my solution is to do my homework and take all the information on board!

A basketful of nuts, once shelled, gave us a small bowl of flesh. It didn't matter as it was enough to experiment with. The shelled nuts were put on a roasting tray and baked for 10 minutes. Half of the tray were left to cool for lunch tomorrow, in a salad and the other half were made into a sort of granola/flapjack thing.
I heated a half cup of sugar until it became liquid. Stirred in a slice of butter and then stirred in the walnuts and a half teaspoon of cinnamon and a half cup of oats.

It all quickly cooled and set into little clumps of toffe nuts and oats. It was so hard not to eat the lot straight away, so I quickly put it all into a pot for tomorrow mornings breakfast or snacks.  The nuts have to be processed in some way as they wont keep for longer than three weeks, roughly, without going mouldy. The nuts we buy in shops have all been processed to given them a long shelf life, whereas these nuts are full of moisture and not at all like the ones we expect to eat at Christmas!

This was the moment when Manchee got out of the house and ran to help Moomin with the nut collecting. He's been cooped up a lot this week, recovering from his latest health problem. It was an unfortunate event arising from two households merging. Some animals just aren't meant to get along together and in this case, Manchee was the loser! Again!!!

Finn showed that he's more than able to deal with silly ponies running around. As soon as they see me, they all expect to be fed! They simply can't understand that I would want to collect nuts instead of getting their dinner! What craziness is this? they ask???

Finn and Cotton love playing on the wall in front of the house. I first saw this wall on the Estate Agents website. How was I to know then that my very own precious cats would find it such a lovely place to play. They've settled in perfectly and it makes my heart glad :D