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THE PINION PINE NUT

Yummy! It's so good.

By Beth Hoffman

Found in: | Inside | Wellness |

Recipe

Once collected the nuts can be eaten raw, or roasted in the oven at 350 for about 45 minutes, then quickly steamed with salt. Although time consuming and difficult, the shell can be opened by gently hitting it with a hammer. The nuts can then be collected and used in dishes like the one listed below.

Wild Rice Stuffing with Pine Nuts and Figs
Makes enough to stuff one small turkey or one large squash

3/4 cup wild/brown rice mixture
1/4 cup diced dry figs
1/4 cup diced portabello mushroom
1 clove garlic
1tablespoon shallot
1/3 cup shelled pine nuts
salt and pepper to taste
One small turkey or large squash
Powdered parmesan cheese (optional)

Cook the rice for a little over half the time instructed on the package in a pot of water. Drain the rice when firm but partially cooked.
In a saute pan, add figs, mushroom, garlic, shallots, and pine nuts and sauté in a small bit of oil until fragrant. Mix together with rice and stuff turkey or squash. Place turkey/squash in pan with vegetable broth or water in the bottom of the pan. Cover with foil and place in preheated oven on 375 for one hour if making squash (follow directions for cooking turkey per pound).

Lucille Hunt gathers up her tools to go out pinion picking - a blue Chinese Noodle can to put the nuts in, two plastic milk jugs with the sides cut out in which to transport the nuts back home, and a pair of sweatpants and old sneakers she won't mind getting sticky with pine goo. The pinion pine tree, a shorter, bushier conifer than your average Christmas tree, bears a small nut "every so often," say the Navajos of southern Utah, when the wind or snows in the spring are just right. This year the wet conditions have created a plentiful pinion season in the foothills of the Abajo Mountains, a season that will last throughout the fall until the snows come and the ground is no longer visible.
Like most Navajos of the area, pinion picking is something that Hunt has done her entire life. She recalls how, as a kid growing up near the continental divide in New Mexico, her family would venture out pinion picking for weeks at a time, butchering a sheep before going to feed the group while out at the pinion camp. "My family used to hunt for the nuts in animal nests. My grandmother would first talk to them and pray for them to let them know we wouldn't take all of their nuts, that we didn't want to do them any harm. Then we would put the nuts in our bags and fix the nest back up, so that it looked like we were never there."
Another traditional way to harvest pinion nuts is to collect the unopened cones and lay them out in the sun until they open. But today Hunt and most others search for piniones by simply kneeling on the forest floor and picking the ripened nuts that have fallen to the ground on their own. "The nut [with the shell on] looks like a little brown bead," describes Hunt, "but if you look closely they have little specks of gold on one side. After you crack it open it looks like a tooth, the color of cream white and the shape and size of a corn kernel. Then you just pop it in your mouth and eat them raw or sometimes, if the nuts have been sitting on the sunny side of the tree, they will have roasted in their shells. Yummy! It's so good."
Archeologists believe that the pinion pine was "to the people of the Great Basin what the buffalo was to the plains people" and has been one of the key staples of native groups for over 6,000 years (pinenut.com/history.htm). In fact, the pine nut is extremely nutritious - all 20 amino acids are present in the nuts, and it is extremely high in both phosphorus and iron.
But the pinion pine has had a rough time in the American West. In an attempt to create a cattle-friendly environment out of the pinion and juniper forests of the region, over 3 million acres of woodland in the Southwest were "chained" between 1950 and 1964, a practice in which thick chains were connected to two tractors and dragged through the landscape to uproot all vegetation. Although many believe that today a well managed pine nut industry would be far more profitable and environmentally sound than raising cows, there only few pinion pine nuts from this region ever sold commercially. Those pine nuts found in American grocery stores come mainly from China, Spain or Portugal and are almost always sold shelled. As a result, today most pinion nuts picked by Navajo and Chicano families in the Southwest are sold only in local trading posts and gas stations or are collected for personal use.
Although most Navajos of southern Utah and Northern Arizona no longer need to collect pinion nuts in order to survive, Hunt says that going out pinion picking serves to connect her to the land and remind her of her childhood. "It gives me a feeling of security that nature still provides. When you are hungry you can always depend on nature; you can always find something to eat. I also like it because pinion picking also it brings me out in nature. You see all kinds of birds and plants, you can touch them and smell them and that gives me a sense of security also. And it just brings me back to really good memories of my grandma and my family growing up."

Beth Hoffman is a radio documentarian living in Salt Lake City. She has recently completed a radio series about cooking with immigrant women in their homes that will air Saturdays on Weekend America.