I know it’s not Christmas yet but this crossed my mind last night when I reached for the raw pecans I have on the counter. You know the ones. The kind you buy at Christmas that come inside their shells. They’re usually mixed together in a great big bin that your mom keeps telling you to stop playing in.

Where I lived, mom brought home a mix of them every year. Walnuts. Pecans. Almonds. Squirrel nuts…just a sec, I don’t think that’s what they’re called…oh, Chestnuts. And those horrid tasting um…yeah, no….those weren’t referred to in politically correct terms. Hold on… Brazil nuts. Everyone avoided those so I have no idea why the stores kept including them in the bins!

Anyway, now that I’ve educated you on nut names…

Whenever mom brought these home, she’d put ’em in a big bowl and throw the nut cracker and picks into the bowl with the nuts so that we could actually get the shells off and eat them. As far as I knew, that was the only way to get to the good parts of the nuts.

Well I just got re-edu-macated last year by a short little Mexican lady that my  sweetheart calls mom.

We were in Houston for a few days and she loves raw pecans in the shell. Now you gotta understand. This is a woman who raised 8 kids on her own with no job and a little help from the kids’ grandpa. They didn’t have a lot of money and I’ve seen her do wonders with next to nothing.

So, while we were sitting at the kitchen table chatting, she got out a bowl of pecans in their shells and set them down where I could reach them. I said thank you as I looked around for the nut cracker. There wasn’t one. Being that it’s rude to go thru someone’s kitchen drawers, I politely waited for her to get one and bring it to the table.

She didn’t. What she DID do was this…

She picked up two pecans and put them in her hand next to each other. Then she closed her hand, wrapped her other hand around the hand holding the nuts, and pushed. Next thing I know, she opened the hand holding the nuts and one of them looked like they’d been stuck in a nutcracker!

Yes. I know it sounds stupid simple. But not once in my childhood or adult life to the age of 40-something have I EVER thought you could crack those stupid nuts open with just your hands and another nut!!

Go ahead and admit it. I can’t be the only one out there who never thought about cracking nuts open like that… or maybe just my son and I are that slow-minded? Hmmmm…. scary, but possible. 🙂

And just so you know. Cracking pecans open that way is actually easier than using the nut cracker because the smooth shiny shells don’t slide out of your hands the way they pop out of the nut cracker!

But at this point I can’t help but wonder how many other things in my life that I’m making more complicated or difficult than they have to be!  Hmmmmm, definitely something to ponder.

Later…