First
breakfast is going to center around apple cinnamon oatmeal. You make it in a
crockpot with steel-cut oats, so it’s the kind of thing I can plug in at night
and it will be ready for us when we all wake up. Ahhhh.
To go with
it, I thought it’d be nice to have some spices nuts. I used to make some every
Christmas and give them away – cinnamon walnuts and ginger almonds. They were
great because they lasted forever, so they were a sweet treat that I could give
out, and if the recipient didn’t eat them right away they wouldn’t go stale and
be wasted like cookies or other baked stuff.
But
somewhere in the course of moving computers over the years, the recipe was
misplaced. Also, they were cooked up in a microwave, and ours broke and hasn’t
been replaced. So I looked for a new recipe on my favorite recipe site.
As
usual, I looked at the recipes by rank, and the highest-rated one was something
I had all the ingredients and equipment for. It was originally for pecans, but
it seemed worth the risk, so I tried it.
But apparently,
it’s not as good with walnuts, period. And it’s definitely not as good as my
old recipe. They’re not bad, but walnuts have a much stronger taste than pecans,
and this recipe has almost all sweet notes, and no buttery or salty, which I
miss. But they’re still good enough that I’m going to try it on pecans later
and see what I think.
A
reasonable person might wonder at this point why I don’t make this with pecans now. It has to do with the attempted
aesthetic for this shindig.
When
contemplating the foods I was going to serve, I considered a number of factors.
The first, and most important, is that Tolkien himself wrote about food that
was inspired by the rural, late-19th-century diet that he remembered
fondly from his youth in the English countryside. It’s
also worth taking into account the medieval feel of the stories as well as the
18th-century feel of the movies’ version of the Shire.
To this
end, I’ve tried to cut out American and other non-British crops unless they are
specifically mentioned in the books. Potatoes are in (“boil ‘em up, mash ‘em,
stick ‘em in a stew”), but the dilly beans I bought really shouldn’t be
included, and Tolkien himself ruled out tomatoes during an edit of the Hobbit.
(Apparently Gandalf originally asked Bilbo to bring out the “tomatoes and cold
chicken,” instead of pickles. There is some debate as to why he made the change, though.)
I’ve
already got a fairly thorough knowledge of American crops, but in terms of some
other areas – cheeses, nuts, and wines – I’ve had to do some research.
Hazelnuts are in, because they’ve been cultivated and prized in the now-BritishIsles since prehistory. I’m going to put them out right in their shells
in a salute to this little fact.
Black
walnuts are indigenous to the Americas, and so are pecans (a type of hickory
nut, apparently), but while regular walnuts aren’t native to Britain, they’ve
been eaten there for long enough that they’re now called, “English walnuts.”
Good enough for me!
It’s
just too bad I didn’t have my old recipe…
Sweet Coated Walnuts
1 egg white
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons water
1 pound walnut halves
Preheat oven to 250 degrees F (120 degrees C). Lightly butter a baking sheet.
In a bowl, beat the egg white until foamy. Mix in cinnamon, sugar, salt, and water. Mix well. Stir in walnuts, stirring until well coated. Spread on baking sheet.
Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes.
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