Tuesday 21st November 2017
Almonds driving me nuts
I was making a gooseberry tray bake today which required ground almonds in the base and flaked almonds in the filling. As we grow our own almonds and harvested well over a thousand this year, I decided I should really try to use our own ones.
Almonds are one of the toughest to crack.
As an experiment, I shelled 150 nuts, which weighed 100g before shelling and yieded 35g of actual almond kernel! The recipe called for 150g of ground almonds and 50g of flaked. Alas, it made sense to purchase the ground almonds, though I begrudged paying £1.87.
I shelled another 100 almonds and did the flaked almonds myself. This is a job for doing in front of the TV with an efficient nutcracker.
The tray bake was lovely. It's always good to find a new way to use gooseberries. Pie, sponge and fool can get a bit tiresome but gooseberries are such a wonderful fruit.
