A touch of nuttiness

For Britons nuts is an easy concept. There is, almost certainly, a scientific description but I think of nuts as having hard shells and an edible bit inside - peanuts, almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, pistachios, brazils, pecans and others I can't remember right now. Spaniards don't share that concept. They use the term frutos secos, dried fruits, and that includes nuts but it also covers what we think of as dried fruit - prunes, dried apricots, raisins, sultanas, currants and the like. It's not all that different really. Just one subdivision more. It is, nonetheless, surprisingly difficult to explain to Spaniards learning English.

I like nuts. This is quite a good thing because I don't much care for water, nor for the sawdust flavoured whole grain cereals. Fruit is OK but you get sticky eating it and it's such a faff - all that peeling and de-seeding and slicing. Vegetables and pulses are generally fine but when I say veg. I mean the standard stuff, nothing too slimy. I'm not too keen on sleeping either, after six hours in bed I'm bored. So, I'd have to say, the World Health Organisation and I don't see eye to eye about my lifestyle. Except for nuts. Nuts I like.

The first time I bought loose, in shell, nuts in Pinoso was this Monday. Until then I had blithely passed them by unaware of their existence. I didn't buy many and I only bought hazelnuts just to check. Sometimes, at Christmas time, I buy kilos of chestnuts to find that half of them are rotten. The hazelnuts were fine so, today, I bought more and a few walnuts as well. Before then the last time I remember buying whole walnuts was a couple of Christmases ago. They came in a string bag along with a little tool to pry the two halves of the shell apart. If it hadn't been a diagram on the label I wouldn't have realised why there was a bit of metal attached to my bag of walnuts. I was amazed how well it worked. I couldn't find that tool today so I just used my penknife to split the shell and reveal the brain shaped nut inside. I pondered. For the first 63 years of my life I shelled walnuts by squeezing them in pliers like nutcrackers. They were always a pain because the splintered shell would mix with the nutty bit. The Spanish way is definitely superior.