Pearl in the Shell

When I was home for Thanksgiving, my grandmother gave me a bag of Kansas pecans to give to a certain lucky recipient on the East Coast. Kansas pecans are the best kind you can get (apologies to any Southerners who might be reading who think that their pecans are better). I decided to be nice and shell the pecans before sending them to my friend since shelling takes special skills ;-)

Here is McKenna posing with the bag of pecans:

I usually shell pecans at a table, but I was catching up on some TV shows, so I put the newspaper on the couch along with a bowl for the pecans, a pair of pliers, and a nail. These pecans that have been cracked, but you still have to use pliers on a few of them.







First, I poured the pecans onto the newspaper:





These are some nice looking pecans:






When Brother of Ken and I were kids, we spent almost every Sunday afternoon at my grandparents' farm. In the fall, after the pecans were harvested, my grandmother would pour pounds and pounds of them onto the table and "let" us pick them out of their shells. I might have done the same thing to my family last Thanksgiving...



Here are the pecans and the shells after I finished:




A closeup of the bowl of pecans:



These are really flavorful pecans.