Into the Woods

Raw walnut pâté in pocket bread, cucumber slaw, homemade refrigerator pickle, garden tomato. Click here for high resolution version.

A good maxim for good health would be, eat more walnuts. Believe it or not, here in the Blue Ridge foothills, I can sometimes find local black walnuts for sale in late summer. You have to know whom to ask. Walnut trees are common. There are a few people in these parts who (like me) hate to see walnuts go to waste (though the squirrels rely on them) and who (unlike me) are willing to do the work of shelling them. They fetch a good price, too.

Otherwise, if you buy walnuts from California, you need to buy from a source that sells a lot of them, to be sure that they’re fresh. Whole Foods sells excellent walnuts in bulk. Trader Joe’s has them pre-packaged, and at affordable prices. Store them in the fridge, and keep them sealed against oxygen.

To make walnut pâté, first soak the walnuts for at last an hour to soften them. Purée them in a food processor. I add a dab of tahini to hold the purée together. After the walnuts are mushed up, pulse in some onion and celery and seasonings, but leave the onion and celery a tad coarse.

I love bread, but if I always had it, I would gain too much weight. When the craving for bread becomes irresistible, I sometimes make myself one flatbread. It’s easy. The people of India are the best at it. Just watch a YouTube video to see how it’s done. I use nothing but flour and water, and I bake the flatbread in a dry skillet. It doesn’t always “pop,” but I’m much better at that than I used to be.

Though the pâté in the photo was incredibly tasty, it was the tomato (one of the first ripe ones of the summer) that blew me away.