Why does hazelnut creamer taste sooooo good in my coffee, but hazelnuts taste worse than rancid calf fries?
At that moment when I pull back the foil freshness barrier on my new can of mixed nuts, a world of opportunity explodes. Like Guy Fieri says (excessively), “Everyone is in the pool.” And it’s all good; we’re all friends here. Except you, hazelnuts. Nobody invited you. We don’t want you living in our neighborhood, much less swimming in our pool. Go home. Go back to your fibrous husk and don’t come back.
Hazelnuts are otherwise known as filberts (which seems better suited as a name for a male born in the 1930s), but did you know they are also called cobnuts? Verily, I say this unto you. Can you feel your mouth salivating?
It is rather joyous to say “Kentish Cobnuts” aloud, however. Go ahead. Kentish Cobnuts. Kentish Cobnuts. Why isn’t there a band called The Cobnuts? It makes much more sense than The Lovin’ Spoonful. Moving on…
It is a universal truth that the filbert is the base of the nut totem pole, the bottom in the hierarchy, the least desirable. It’s the Mike Nesmith of The Monkees, the Whoopi Goldberg of The View. And why is it that I can pony up extra money to weed the commoner’s peanuts out of the can entirely, but those dang hazelnuts are still clear and present?
What gives? This is the land of the free! Do the rest of you really enjoy hazelnuts? Are you busy spreading Nutella all over your nine grain toast each morning? You know cashews are superior. And pecans. And almonds. And Brazil nuts. Heck, even peanuts are superior to those wretched hazelnuts. I would pay good money for someone to invent something akin to a metal detector, but much smaller and possessing the power to pull filberts to the top of the can, so I can grab them and fling them out into the back yard for my aging dogs to digest. I’m pretty sure any animal that eats lizard tails as an appetizer preceding a meal of its own poop wouldn’t mind a filbert. Then again–it’s a FILBERT. Ick.
The only thing worse is biting into a nut of higher caliber, and then realizing it’s rotten. Planters be damned!! And you never get the head’s up on that; it’s always a crapshoot. By the time you notice, you’ve already chewed it to a paste, and you can’t really spit it out, so you just swallow it down, hoping to quickly toss a fresh nut down your gullet to cover the taste of the foul one.
I admit I do eat them, but only because I’m all kinds of cheap and can’t fathom paying for something that may get wasted. But sometimes I leave several in the can before tossing it out. It makes a nice rattling sound as it hits the side of the garbage bin.
