Nuts

I'm making granola today, and we are now all out of sunflower seeds and pecans. This was predictable: we overstocked our nuts at one point, and I stopped restocking because I was afraid they would go rancid before we used them up. Right now we still have:

• almonds -- enough to last until fall (or beyond)
• cashews -- 1 1/2 quarts
• walnuts -- 1 1/2 cups
• pumpkin seeds -- 1 pint
• sesame seeds -- 1 1/2 cups
• pine nuts -- 1/4 cup
• peanut butter -- 6 jars

We buy 1 quart of peanuts and 1/2 gallon of trail mix each time we bulk shop, and mix in about 3 cups of the peanuts and save the rest for cooking. The more trail mix we buy, the faster it disappears, so we limit our consumption (or, more accurately, Sophia's consumption) by not stocking up. We didn't do a bulk shop in February, so the trail mix has been gone for awhile, and the rest of the peanuts vanished late last week. Which is a bummer: I'm planning to make a Vietnamese Chicken (okay, Turkey) Salad sometime in the next couple days, and I'm going to miss the chopped peanuts. (This is another recipe from Extending the Table.) Our current plan is to substitute cashews, of which we still have plenty.

Every fall I organize a bulk buy of raw unpasteurized Carmel almonds from Bremner Farms in California, just after the harvest comes in. Last year we used about 12 pounds. This year we bought 18 pounds, because Sophia has started drinking my homemade almond milk instead of the commercial stuff. So our almond situation is similar to our maple syrup situation, except that we're 5 months into the year instead of 11 months in.

Peanut butter is one of Greg's discount bulk purchases. He prefers the store brand of the local store where his company is located, so he buys peanut butter in quantity when he goes on business trips.

Cashews are still plentiful partly because we don't eat them as much as I had expected when I bought them, and partly because I prefer them whole and Greg prefers them in pieces, so he bought another quart after I'd already stocked up (oops.) I expect we'll go through them now that we're running out of the other stuff, tho.