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Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. When I feel like a nut I go roast some nice fat pecans in a bit of butter and eat myself sick. You might think I have run plumb out of things to write about and have ‘nuttin’ to say, but I couldn’t resist this one. So here I go with a nutty topic and lets get right to the ‘meat’ of the subject: NUTS.

The other day we were in Fredericksburg and as I was walking into a building there, I noticed something huge on the ground under a tree. I bent to pick it up and it was the biggest acorn I have ever seen. Inside the building, I asked the woman at the desk what was the name of this huge acorn. She told me that it was the fruit of the Burr Oak tree outside her office.

I don’t know one oak tree from another by its fruit for sure and I had never seen this acorn, or one this big. I read up on Burr or Bur Oaks, both are acceptable spelling and found that they are indeed indigenous to Texas. How would you like to be hit on the head by a couple of these egg sized acorns in a wind storm?

I wondered if squirrels eat these nuts and I also felt like the size of the nut would make it not portable for squirrels as the whole acorn/nut is about the size of a squirrels head or bigger. I would think that a squirrel could eat all winter on a couple of these nuts but they surely could not carry them in their mouth and they’d have to dig quite a large hole to bury one. They are huge!

My research told me that Burr Oaks have the largest acorns of any oak trees and some say these nuts from the White Oak species are the best to eat, if you must. However that said, don’t go cracking or peeling and eating these acorns without preparing them properly and like chicken paw preparation, this one is long and drawn out too.

They are quite bitter as most acorns are and there is a long process to get rid of the tannins in the meat before ingesting them. There are even recipes using these very nuts in muffins and bread, and of course we know that back in Indian times the Indians used acorns in many ways. The Indians called these acorns ‘grain from the tree’ because they dried them and chopped them and added it to breads and as a thickener.

Medicinally Burr Oak acorns are known to control blood sugar levels when used in food but don’t go whipping up a batch, as I mentioned before, we can still go to the drug store and buy a legitimate product to lower our blood sugar level or just lay off the cake and ice cream. The larger the acorns the healthier they are, I read.

To me making soups from the gelatin in chicken paws/claws or the meal from acorns does not make much sense as both of these things, gelatin or broth and different kinds of grains or meals can be bought in any grocery store. I am not a purist you see.

My dogs love to eat the acorns we have here on our place and they shell them to get to the meat just like we shell pecans to get to that meat. Our dog Candy used to eat so many acorns that she’d put on a few pounds every fall. I wonder how dogs know to do that; shell the acorns? Oh, I bet it’s because the shell is bitter and the meat inside is not!

So the seed inside the acorn is the edible part and if you shake a Burr Oak acorn and it rattles it has shrunk and will be no good to plant or to eat. Only the seeds inside that are still full and not damaged will grow a tree, MAYBE!

The name burr describes the outer cup, cap or "hat" as the Hacker twins call them. They always wanted Nanny Mary or me to shell acorns thinking they’d be as good as pecans.

To describe the bottom of the burr it looks like fringe on a hula skirt. The size of the acorn is about 1 ½" broad and the acorn outside of the cap is about 3" long or as long as my little finger and with the cap attached it is 4" long. These acorns can be bought, dried and shipped for use as decorative items for floral arrangements online.

My further research about nuts led me to the web site for the meaning of phrases concerning nuts and I ran across these and I list: "Nuts to you", "You must be nuts", "Lets get to the nuts and bolts of this" and so on. As you know the word nut has several ways to be used and these include as a noun, as in ‘This is a nut’, as an adjective; "She is a nut", as an interjection as in "Are you nuts?" It is used both as a noun and an adjective.

It could also be used to describe ones contempt for another or someone you feel doesn’t have both oars in the water and so on. There are lots of other ways to use the word nuts but I will leave you guessing and you may explore this subject further if you are nutty enough to do so and if not, I say, "Nuts to you".