Last fall I gathered a bunch of Hickory Nuts when I went to visit my inlaws in Arkansas. I had good intentions of cracking and eating them so I kept them around for about a month and forgot about them. When I was cleaning the back room up I thought , " I need to crack these things and eat them." so I set about w a hammer and cracked a bunch of them and set them by my chair in the living room, again, with every intention of eating them. Well, they are hard to get the meat out of!! and not worth my trouble so I decided to give the squirrels and opossums a treat and threw them out in the back driveway. One day later I was switching channels on the TV and came across some Oklahoma Native Americans showing how they use hickory nuts.... the easy way! so I will share this with you and hope that I remember next year to check my own blog before casting them asside ( of course, they were totally gone from the driveway) So here's how our native ancestors used the nuts:
Wash the shells/nuts
They put a hand ful of them in a carved out hole in a rock and ground them shells and all with a big stick that looked like a baseball bat
Throw everything into a pot and boil
strain the milk into a container
add water to the original pot of nuts and boil and strain again
It is the milk that you will use, not the actual nuts. The woman on the show cooked her rice in the milk as a staple meal.
