Hazelnuts = Happiness

Hazelnuts are a very healthy food; they can be used in many ways and recipes are easy to find. We tend to eat them just on their own or mixed with Walnuts and raisins as a healthy snack. We made delicious Hazelnut Chocolate Spread one year, which proved very popular indeed with my daughter.

I heard a BBC R4 report recently, stating that Hazelnuts are in short supply this year because the harvest has failed... in Turkey... However, if you are in the UK August/September, these super-food nuts are ripening on a bush near you gratis and they look particularly abundant this year. 

The signs are easy to spot, if you know what you are looking for… The Squirrels will always come early to the table and the first signs will be nibbled green shells scattering the pavements.

You can pick and eat hazelnuts when they are still green, but we prefer to wait until they are brown and falling of their own accord.

Often there will be lots on the ground after a windy or rainy day but if they are wet, you will need to dry them out, if you do not plan to eat them straight away, otherwise they will go moldy.

Magnificent Muesli

I realised that we still had a large stash (several Kgs) of last year’s hazelnuts squirreled away in a cupboard and brought a basket load down to see if we could utilise them in some way. It didn’t take long for the kids to notice them and they were soon happily cracking away and munching handfuls of healthy nuts and making a merry mess of the carpet.

My partner then decided to make her favourite homemade muesli. I was subsequently tasked with cracking enough nuts to create a massive biscuit tin full of delicious, crunchy oat-based cereal. I’m sorry to tell you that the exact recipe for this blend of wholesome ingredients is, apparently, top secret.

I can’t remember how exactly how many nuts she used that night but I lost track of the plot of the film I had intended to watch; you need to concentrate or you can get tooth-challenging shell fragments in your muesli; not a good thing at bleary breakfast time.

While I was on the job, I thought I would make a box of tasty trail mix to take to work; I added our last walnuts, some raisins and any other titbits that could be foraged from the cupboard – The resulting combination made a pleasant contrast to my daily cheese sandwiches.