Beginning in July 2020, I became a regular contributor to Wisconsin Outdoor News (WON) in "From The Little Cabin In The Woods" column.
This article was published in the WON December 29, 2023 issue.
“I picked up some black walnuts for you a couple of days ago,” shared my friend, Sue Zimmer. “However, I tried to peel the husks and they were infested with worms. They were so gross that I threw them away. Yuck!”
You met Sue last year when I wrote an article about taking her two Airedales, Chipper and Buckwheat, pheasant hunting. That article is up on my website, www.christinethomasoutdoors.com, if you missed it.
I did a lot of Googling, and insect larvae in walnut husks is “a thing.” Everyone seems to agree that this is a disgusting phenomenon, but mostly harmless to the nuts, themselves.
Shortly after the Zimmer communication, I got a Facebook Messenger note from Dan Small, informing me that his colleague from Outdoor Wisconsin, Nancy Frank, had a yard full of black walnuts and that I was welcome to pick some up. I worried about the possibility of maggots in the husks but made an appointment to get some anyway. The three-hour trip to her place became unnecessary.
A few days before that planned adventure, a US Postal Service box showed up on my front porch. There was black gold inside the box. My friends from Ducks Unlimited, Greg and Marsha Meissner, whom you met in an earlier article, had sent me this treasure. The Meissners own a landscape business in Sturgeon Bay and have the fortune/misfortune of black walnut trees in their yard. This necessitates picking up the walnuts before lawn mowing can occur. They decided to share the fruits of their labors with a friend whose entire walnut crop (15 nuts) was stolen by squirrels.
I had written about this earlier this fall. You may recall that I had thoughts of eating some of the offending squirrels as a way of getting some of my walnuts back. Now I had the actual ingredient on hand. I just had to get the husks off and the nuts out of the shells in time to make my nearly world-famous lucky cookies in time for deer season.
The walnuts were in really good shape. There were no signs of maggots. I spread them out on the bench in the garage, hoping they would begin to dry out. This was mid-October, and I was running out of time. After a week, I donned rubber gloves (the husks will stain your fingers black), got out one of those little plastic box cutters that you use on all those Amazon boxes, and went to work on them. That box cutter worked slick. I had the husks off in no time. I saved back three of the husk-on nuts for our son-in-law, Dan Honl to plant out on the south side of our property, where the neighbor’s irrigator would hit them. We left them in a dish on the table at the cabin but forgot to text Dan about them.
“I thought they were shriveled limes and threw them in the trash,” Dan would later say, “I was really surprised that Christine left food out at the little cabin.”
Stan and he commandeered three of my husked walnuts and planted them. We will be looking for those seedlings next spring.
Meanwhile, I needed to move the drying process along, with deer season looming. So, I put my walnuts on a rack that I placed in a sheet pan. I set the pan in my oven and turned the oven on long enough for the oven to heat up to less than 100 degrees F. I did this intermittently for a few days. Then I went off to Louisville, KY to the Wildlife Society meeting where I was invited to chair a panel on boards and commissions by my former student Kurt Thiede, who currently works for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.
Three days later, I returned and decided to bake bread. I turned the oven to 375 degrees F, to preheat. A wonderful smell began to waft from the oven. I opened the oven in a panic. I had forgotten the walnuts. Hoping no harm was done, I removed them and took them out to the garage. Presently smoke was rolling from the oven. I looked in and could not find the source. The smoke alarms all went off. I had the doors and windows open and exhaust fans running on high. Finally, I pulled out the lower rack, where I keep a cookie sheet to protect the oven from spills. There in the bottom of the oven, was one black walnut, glowing red and smoking. I was beginning to think that I was better off letting the squirrels win.
A few days before deer season, I decided it was time to crack open the walnuts. Armed again with gloves, I added a mallet and small screwdriver to my tools. I sat on a concrete step in the garage, placed a dish towel on the concrete and used the mallet to smash the shells. I used the screwdriver to pick out the meats, which I collected in a small deli container. After two hours of smashing and picking, I had just over a cup of the tiny gems of flavor. I did eat a few along the way.
I used about half of the nut meats to make my lucky cookies. Dan loves them. I wrap them individually in foil. We heat them up on the wood stoves in our blinds. I am pretty sure the smell of them wafting through the woods attracts deer. This year I took a dozen of them over to the Kranz farm and left them on the tailgate of Ken’s pickup. If you read my last article, you know that two of their youth took Butkus and one other very large buck. I bet they think my cookies are lucky too. This year, the cookies had the extra good karma of Wisconsin black walnuts.
I took a quarter cup of the nuts and modified a recipe I found on the internet. I did not have any squirrel on hand. However, I did have a couple of boneless rabbit loins. From the walnuts and the rabbit, and herbs from my kitchen garden, I created something I am calling Rabbit and Fettuccine in Black Walnut Cream Sauce. I guarantee you would lick your plate.
I still have a quarter cup of the black gold to experiment with. In the meantime, I will post both the recipe for the lucky cookies and the fettucine up on my website. The address is in the first paragraph. The pasta would be good with chicken, pheasant, wild turkey, and, of
course, SQUIRREL.
Special thanks to Greg and Marsha. I had a lot of fun (mostly) with an ingredient I had not used in more than 40 years. Happy New Year to all. May we all enjoy another year of outdoor adventure.
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