Going nuts

The Chinese New Year celebrations snuck up on me since Saturday. I spent the entire day cracking ginkgo nuts. For the clueless, a ginkgo nut looks like a hard pistachio nut. Dad bought a huge bag like last year and all the years before.

Dad's a traditional man who enjoys his ginkgo nut dessert on New Year's day, so being the good daughter, I spent my weekend boiling the nuts and then cracking the hundreds (or was it thousands) of the little nuts using a small pair of pliers. Mind you, it's a monotonous task that requires deft fingers. You apply too much pressure and the tender nut inside gets all smashed up, too little pressure and you can never pry the hard shell open. Well, you can always buy the ready peeled or canned ones but they don't taste the same.

It's such a lonely task. The boys popped by occassionally, peeled two nuts, then proclaimed "This is so boring!" and disappeared. Thinking they're as yummy as his favourite groundnuts, Rusty sat below the table with his mouth wide open, waiting for some to roll off the table. He finally bit into one and promptly spat it out.

After cracking all the nuts, I dumped the basket of peeled nuts into a pot of boiling water to loosen the layer of brown membrane and spent another few hours removing the skin until my fingers were all wrinkled like prunes.

The job didn't end there. The final process was just as tedious. Inside every shiny yellow nut is a tiny shoot which is extremely bitter (like a pill). Using a toothpick, I pricked a hole and removed the shoot from each nut.

By the time I finished the tedious task, it was 10pm and I was already going nuts!