Maple Glazed Pecans

One of the nicest things about boiling our own maple syrup is that we have plenty for cool treats like these glazed pecans.     Lily made them, put them out, and they were gone.   Gone. 

Maple Glazed Pecans
www.rurification.com

2-3 cups pecans
2 Tablespoons butter
1/2 cup maple syrup
3/4 cup sugar

Roast the pecans on a baking sheet for 10 minutes at 350 degrees.   Let them cool while you're making the glaze. 

Put the butter and syrup in a medium pan and bring to boil.   Boil for 2 minutes.   Reduce heat to medium low and add the nuts.   Stir to coat the nuts.   Add the sugar.   Stir to coat.  Spread them out to finish cooling and dry a bit.

Pecan Butter

A few days ago I told you about our experiment with almond butter.   It was so good, so easy and so flexible in recipes that we decided to try it with pecans.

Because we love pecans as much as we love almonds.

Plus, the almondbutter cookies were so incredible, we started thinking about pecanbutter cookies.  

So we dug out the pecans and went to work.

1.  Toast the pecans.    5-10 minutes at 250 in the oven is great.   Don't turn your back on them!  Pecans are full of oil and burn quickly.

2.  Put the warm pecans in your food processor and turn it on high.

3.  Grind it down until the nuts release the oils.   This only takes a few minutes for pecans, unlike the almonds which take for freaking ever.

Store the way you store peanut butter. 

Now here's a little recipe for you to try:  


Pecanbutter Cookies

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 pecan butter
• 1 cup sugar  [white or brown]
• 1 egg
• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• pinch salt

Cream butters and sugar.  Add everything else and mix well.   Drop by teaspoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet and bake 5 minutes at 350.   Don't let them brown - just bake them until they firm up a bit.  Pull them out and let them sit on the hot pan until they finish firming up.   It's ok to let them cool on the pan.    They'll stay soft on the inside, but have a bit of crunch on the outside.

You can also refrigerate the dough and roll it out, then cut it into rounds or shapes or whatever.

Yum.

Pignuts?

We have several types of hickories on our place.   The tree that bore these is right on the path and it's obviously a hickory when you look at the leaves, but a good friend who really knows hickories told us that these aren't the 'real' hickory nuts.   So I gathered some up and did some research. 

Hickory is a large family of nut bearing trees in the genus Carya.  'Carya' is from an Ancient Greek word meaning nut.  

The hickory nuts that you like to eat are Carya lacinosa or Carya ovata.  
Pecans [Carya illinoinensis] are a type of hickory.
Pignuts [Carya glabra] are  hickories.
Bitternuts [Carya cordiformis] are hickories.  

Ours are either pignuts or bitternuts - not very tasty, they say.   Only the squirrels like them.