by Jim Whitehouse
Peanuts. They are delicious. I like peanuts.
A couple of weeks ago, I invited some friends over for a spur-of-the moment bonfire gathering around our firepit.
I put a great deal of effort into the party. My beloved wife Marsha was out of state visiting family, so all the preparations were up to me.
It took me five minutes to invite everyone. It took five minutes to haul some folding chairs out of the garage to the firepit.
It took five minutes to build the fire, five minutes to take it apart and build it right, and five minutes to go to the basement to get a cooler, bring it upstairs and fill it with ice.
Now for the hardest part. Shopping.
A 10 minute trip to the store followed by checking out with a case of bottled water and two big bags of salted peanuts in the shell.
The party was a success. It was a most convivial gathering. The weather was perfect and since there was no wind, the smoke went straight up.
Peanuts in the shell are messy things to eat inside a house but perfect for a firepit. Crack ‘em open, eat the nuts and toss the shells on the fire. Any peanuts shell fragments and skins that fall on the ground? So what. They’ll blow away sometime.
The only two problems are that we didn’t eat them all. In fact, only ½ of the first bag disappeared that night, leaving me to eat the rest. So far, I’ve only consumed ¼ of the first bag. And the second problem is that after the party, we have been stuck in a heat wave.
I don’t do heat waves. I hate hot weather.
“So what?” you’re thinking. “What does that have to do with peanuts?”
Simple. I’ve been trying to eat them inside the house, even though Marsha is home now and catches me at it.
Peanut fragments abound.
I try going out on the porch to eat them, but it is too hot out there.
I still know what you are thinking.
“Just wait until it cools down. You don’t have to eat all those peanuts right now, do you?”
I can’t help it. I love peanuts, even if in the South they are called goober peas, a term I find less than appealing.
My mother was an excellent and avid gardener, once serving as an officer in the Michigan Garden Club. She wrote a newspaper column for decades titled “The Gardener’s Grapevine.
One year she decided to experiment and in addition to her usual flower and vegetable gardens, she planted peanuts and cotton. In Michigan.
She actually ended up with seven cotton bolls from which she plucked many seeds, lacking a cotton gin. She also ended up with 28 tiny little dirt-covered raw peanuts. She carefully cleaned the soil from the legumes and then roasted them in her oven. She let me eat a handful of the teensy things—outdoors. They were delicious but could have used some salt.
Growing peanuts and cotton in Michigan was not a solid commercial enterprise. It would have taken a field full of Mom’s itty bitty peanuts to fill a small bowl.
Not knowing that I am right now sitting here writing about peanuts in the shell, Marsha just asked me if she could stash the unopened bag of peanuts in the pantry, just leaving the small remaining original bag out on the counter.
“Of course,” I say. “I’ll know where to find them.”
“I wish you knew where to find the vacuum cleaner,” she thinks to herself.
