I remember when I was growing up that getting cocktail peanuts during the holidays was a special treat. It was always fun because they were salted and they tasted so good.
As we got older my brother and I would demolish a can of them! My mother actually had to restrict us and say you can only have a few at a time. My mother liked cashew nuts but because they were more expensive she didn't really get them very often. Sometimes she would receive them as a gift at Christmas. Sometimes she would buy a can and tell us that we could only have one or two cashew nuts because she had bought them for herself as a treat. She said they were her favorite. And we respected that and would go through the Spanish peanuts or the cocktail peanuts fast like we did.
But I never knew what the difference was between all of those different kinds of nuts.
As I've gotten older I've learned to enjoy Brazil nuts where I didn't really like them very much growing up. They were so dry! But they're actually quite good and make an enjoyable snack in the afternoon. I never liked pistachio nuts. I still don't like to have them in the shells but if I spend the money and get them already out of the shell they're actually really good.
But I didn't know that cashew nuts were so different from other nuts. I learned just before a trip to Guyana about how cashew nuts are actually part of an apple and that they stick outside of the bottom of this small apple.
And I was amazed after learning that at the age of 60 to meet someone on a trip less than a month after learning about how cashew nuts are actually grown who had a tree that he grew cashew nuts and apples on. We talked about how different that was with the nut poking out of the bottom of the apple.
It's amazing all the fun things you can learn through reading and scanning through different things on the internet.
I enjoyed learning about cashew nuts.
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