The other day I bought a pound of almonds in the shell. They reminded me of Christmas when my mom used to buy a big bag of mixed nuts in the shell and over the holidays we'd eat them. It was so fun cracking the nuts and extracting a whole nut from the shell.  The exception of course were the Brazil nuts which stubbornly held onto the nut and we'd always have to pick it out of the cracked shell.

Anyway, almonds is one nut that is "safe" for us so I brought the bag home, hoping to share the nut cracking tradition with my kids.  One problem...no nut cracker.  So today I bought a nut cracker and I could not wait to finally crack those almond shells and eat the raw nut.  However, cracking nuts has been harder than I remember!  First I could not get the cracker to get a good grip on the nut.  Then when I finally cracked it, the cracker went right through and broke the almond meat inside into a million little pieces!  Noooo!  I tried again and the same thing happened.  I have not cracked 20 of them and have yet to get a whole almond out of the shell.  Just itty bitty little pieces that I have to pick out of the cracked shells.  Not fun!

Clearly my fond memories of how fun cracking nuts can be are false memories!  I just showed Cars and Dex how to do it and they were like "meh"  and asked me why I didn't just buy a can of already shelled almonds.  Goodness knows it would have been cheaper.  The almonds were $3.99 and the nut cracker was $4.99 and a can of dry roasted almonds is $3.69 (or less if on sale!).  *sigh*