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Lucky me! I found some walnut trees today and have harvested a modest amount. Can someone please tell me what is best - shell and freeze or keep in shell and use as needed. Also, is there any other preperation that I need to do (cleaning, drying etc). Cracked on just to see and looked nice but tasted a bit bitter.

Any advice much appreciated.

Tara

I used to like pickled walnuts but can`t remember how I did it. Remember having to use a silver skewer to test them with. Crikey, is this what they call a senior moment?

At the moment they're not ripe - they're called "green" and are right for pickling. To ripen just leave them in a cool, dry, squirrel-proof place until - well, nearer Christmas. And just leave them in their shells, they'll be fine.

We're in a similar situation, we picked about 5/6 kilo's the other week from our last gite, too many for us at Xmas. Tried looking at all the usual recipes, wine etc, but they need to be green whereas ours are fully ripened.
Would like some imaginative ideas on what we could do with the bulk of them apart from eating them 'au naturel' as after a few we get a sore throat....

I have picked 558 from my tree. Yes I counted because it's a young tree and last year produced about 8 nuts, so I was interested to see how many I'd get!

You can use walnuts for sooooooo many things - put in cakes, bread, nut loaf/burgers, all sorts of veggie dishes, meat dishes - just Google walnuts + recipes and I'll bet you'll find thousands!

Thanks for the tip, MMM, yes, we have tried googling, I slipped the word 'imaginative' into my text, I wondered if anyone here had something different to the norm....
How old is your tree? 8 nuts to 558 in a year is outstanding.....

I guess the tree is about 12 years old as it produced its first couple of nuts in 2004 which is when we bought our house. I am amazed too and although I can't do the maths I just hope that I don't get the same percentage increase next year!

If I come across a particularly interesting recipe I'll post it here.

That would be an 6,975 per cent increase, if my maths is correct. If you have that kind of increase next year, you might have a slight storage problem...

Gollum wrote:That would be an 6,975 per cent increase

Blimey! Finally someone else who's as anal about doing these sort of calculations as I am.

Stick around, will ya.

No!!! That's my husband, where the bloody hell did he appear from. Go away! This is my place!