Chubs

No, not those logs of ground meat you see in the grocery store or fish. Chubs are also raw peanuts, which is something I’d forgotten until I went looking for some.

My son, The Eating Machine, mentioned a few weeks ago that he was really in the mood for boiled peanuts, so I . . .

People boil peanuts? Ewwwwwwwwwww!

That’s right, not everybody lives in the South! It’s okay. Relax. I reacted the same way when I first got down here, but it didn’t take long for me to acquire the taste. The ones that are sold in cans are okay, but when they’re fresh!

. . . so I went to the little produce stand that normally has them and paid way too much, $3 for a sandwich-sized plastic bag of them. And they were only okay.

It’s not that they weren’t wonderfully salty and juicy (a roll of paper towels is required when eating boiled peanuts, and a bowl or some other container for the discarded shells), but there weren’t many good-sized peanuts in the bag. Most were downright small and some were so young, they hadn’t even had a chance to form any peanuts inside.

So this week, I decided to try boiling my own. Yankee-born, I don’t know how but how hard could it be?

Except as it turned out, it’s far more difficult than I had envisioned because first, I had to have raw peanuts to boil. There aren’t any which is why the bag I bought at the stand a few weeks ago was so expensive and the peanuts were . . . only okay.

If you’ve never picked peanuts (I have at a friend’s father’s house) you may not know that peanuts are actually attached to the roots of the plant. You dig up the plants, roots and all, then pull the peanuts off the roots. And with all of the tropical storms and hurricanes, the peanut crop rotted in the ground. In other words, there are no raw peanuts.

Oh, you can find them here and there: $65 a bushel if you buy 5 bushels or more or if you only want a small quantity, $5 a quart.

Suddenly, $3 doesn’t sound quite so expensive.