Cooking Cashews

Often after coming home from an afternoon working with women or youth and walking in the hot sun, I come home exhausted to my house. More often than not I am greeted at the door by a band of kids from my neighborhood wanted to play with a ball I have or color or watch a movie. Sometimes all I want to do is just sit down alone in my house and make dinner, but soon I realize that these kids are awesome and always brighten my day. I always have so much fun with them no matter what mood I am in.

For a couple weeks now my neighbor kids have been collecting “cahwill” seeds. For a while a did not know, but cahwill means cashew. As the collection of cashew seeds grew to fill a large box that these children had, they kept asking me if they could come over to my house and cook the cashews. I was relunctant because I don’t have an outdoor stove, I don’t know how to cook the cashews, etc…. I kept telling them I didn’t know how to do any of this, but these kids ages 5-12 assured me that they could do it all. I was not to worry. Eventually, I had an afternoon free and I invited them to come over and cook the cashews in my yard. Around 3 they can over to my house and began searching my yard for the three most perfect large rocks to make the “camp fire” with. They found a large piece of metal and put it on top of these stones and then snuck under my barbed wire fence to go find sticks to burn for the fire.

They did everything, just as my neighbor kids knew so much more about building a fence than I did, these pre-teens did all of the work to start a fire and roast amazing cashews. Once the fire was burning well, these kids stuck the cashews on the metal plate and heated them until they were black, warning me and leading me away from the fire saying that if the cashew juices spattered as they were heating up it could burn me. These kids were taking care of me so much better than I could ever have of them. Once the first batch of cashews was ready they showed me how to carefully pick them out of the fire with a stick, take a rock and open the cashew shells to eat the cooked insides. The cashews were amazing. Never have I had such fresh nuts. As the cashews cooked and we all took care to stay a good distance from the fire, we started building our small piles of discarded cashew shells, blackening our heads and clothes with the soot from the shells as we devoured cashew after cashew. I probably at at least 25 cashews and they were delicious, until I decided if I eat any more I would likely get sick. Being the wonderful children that they were my neighbors made sure to save some cashews to bring back to their mothers and once all of the box of cashews were cooked and either eaten or saved, the sun was finally setting over the mountains and we called it a day. Without even being asked, my kids swept up my yard, cleaned up the fire and shells, and made sure the place was even cleaner than when they arrived. I feel so fortunate to not only have all of these new and amazing experiences, such as harvesting and roasting my own cashews, but also to share them with such amazing, kind, and giving kids.