Why Walnuts are a Cracking Good Idea

  I'm sitting here in the kitchen with a pot of chicken soup for lunch simmering on the stove. It's nippy outside, drizzling, and most of the delicate annual plants have withered and flopped because of the frost we had the night before last. Pleasant to be here in the warm, and think about walnuts.
   Walnuts--or noix as they're known here--hang in a bag in the storeroom, and fill the bottom layer of the hanging vegetable rack in the kitchen. Some were a present from friends lucky enough to have a walnut tree in their garden. Others, the ones still in their black, fleshy skin, I've picked up from the street that runs along by the presbytery.
    I crack a jarful at a time, and keep them in a drawer beside the matching Bonne Maman jars of raisins and currants.
    Dismantling yet another batch this morning, made me think about what useful little things they are.
    They go into salads of spinach, clementine segments and avocado chunks.
    And salads of beetroot and goat cheese.
     I add them, in fairly small morceaux, to tinned tuna tarted up with celery and preserved lemon, both finely chopped, and loosened with mayonnaise. Spread it thickly in a split baguette or scoop it over lettuce leaves. Lunch.
     Walnuts boost the nut content in the granola that goes over the morning yogurt and fruit.
     They love to get together with raw endives especially with goat cheese crumbled over.
     And I haven't even got to the sweet stuff....yet.