Horned Water Chestnuts

Tuesday, 16 September 2008

These black hard shells looked like bulls' heads. Maybe there is a legend behind the resemblance. They were about 2 inches wide and hard! According to a vendor in the Miri market, they were imported from China and only available once a year, around the Mooncake festival season (lunar month of August). I was told to boil it for about an hour. Opening them was not easy! Technically they are called water caltrop. They are called Ling Nuts as well.

Cracking Pecans

Saturday, 7 June 2008

I don't know how long it took us to crack all the pecans! We didn't have any kind of nut cracker so we used the only cracker we have - crab cracker. Mike cracked the shells while I struggled to take out the nuts!

The pecans were given by Aunt Onlee during our travel to Uncle Jim's funeral last month, collected from her own pecan tree in her backyard. We said we are going to retrieve all the nuts and freeze them but never got around doing it until this afternoon.




We ended up with majority of the nuts broken. But that don't matter at all because they are still edible.

Out of curiosity about pecans, I learnt from the Internet the following nutritional benefits of this particular nut:

(1) Pecans have more antioxidant capacity than walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, peanuts and cashews.

(2) Lowering total cholesterol by 11.3 percent and LDL cholesterol by 16.5 percent.

(3) Pecans may aid in weight loss and maintenance.
(4) The unsaturated fat in pecans is heart-healthy fat.
(5) Pecans contain more than 19 vitamins and minerals