Road Trip Snacks Part 1: Roasted Peanuts

If there's one form of vacation we Fixettwells take over and over, it's the “visit as much of the 2/3rds of the eastern USA as possible in one week-long road trip" variety.  So for Christmas 2013, we bought a cheap used cargo van and set off on an adVANture!

Being budget-conscious, Bea spent the week before we left town planning our menu around eating up all the perishables in our fridge.  When we weren't quite able to finish everything, she decided to spend the night before we left in the kitchen, whipping up roadworthy snacks!  These all turned out to be delicious, but we definitely recommend starting this snack-making project before 10pm and finishing before 4:30am of the day you're supposed to leave!

This post is in 3 parts:
     Roasted Peanuts (keep reading)
     Kale Chips
     Banana Chips

Roasted Peanuts!

We grew peanuts in one bed of our garden this year -- we had pretty poor germination rates and so our resulting peanut harvest was pretty pathetically small.  Peanuts are legumes and so they help add nitrogen to your soil, but they have a pretty long growing season (100-130 frost-free days, depending on the variety) so you have to be willing to devote them the growing space for basically the entire season.  In Washington, DC where we grew ours, you plant them a few weeks after the last frost (we put ours in around Memorial Day) and then you dig them up when the plants turn yellow in the fall -- before the first frost.

Each plant produces a cluster of peanuts but unless you devote a whole lot of space to peanut production, this is going to be a novelty crop for home or community gardeners.  For instance, it takes over 500 peanuts to produce a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter!  So to us, roasting them whole makes more sense.

Unfortunately, we dug up our peanuts right before making our Month-Long Move so stowed them in a bag in the fridge “to deal with later".  This is definitely not recommended as Best Practices for Roasted Peanuts!  Turns out it's better to hang the entire plant to dry for about a month.  However, even with our limited harvest & rocky harvesting procedure, the resulting snack is pretty tasty, and next year we vow to do even better!

We found some basic instructions on roasting peanuts on WikiHow -- and modified slightly since we had garden-fresh raw peanuts.

Step 1: Clean the peanuts

Our peanuts still had mud and dirt on them, plus the runner stems and unfortunately also a little mold.  Wash everything in cold water and compost anything that's severely discolored, mushy, or moldy.



We made 3 piles: compost, shellable, and unshelled.  The shellable were ones with minor discoloration that still felt firm and edible but wouldn't be pretty as-is -- but just remove the shells and voila, they look much more presentable!  For our unshelled peanuts we chose just those that had survived their being ignored for too long & still looked good after a thorough washing.

Step 2: Dry the peanuts

Spread them out and pat them dry with a towel.

Step 3: Preheat the oven

Set it for 350ºF

Step 4: Put peanuts on a baking sheet

Make sure they fit on only one layer -- they don't shrink as they roast so use multiple baking sheets if needed.  Also if you're doing some shelled and some unshelled, use multiple sheets since the cooking time differs.  If you're worried about discoloring your cookie sheets, use parchment paper or tin foil under the peanuts.

Step 5: Place in the center of the oven

Step 6: Check and turn the nuts occasionally

We used a spatula to move the peanuts around to make sure they got roasted on all sides.  This step seemed more important for the shelled peanuts.  To check the unshelled nuts for done-ness, we opened and ate one at a time every 5 minutes or so.  The cooking time indicated on our recipe was 15-20 minutes for unshelled and 20-25 minutes for shelled peanuts -- however, we found that it actually took more than half an hour until our peanuts were roasty and tasty, but your mileage may vary.  When our kitchen started smelling like roasted peanuts, that was when they actually tasted done to us so you could use this as an indicator.

Step 7: Remove from the oven & cool

We made sure to cool the peanuts completely before pouring them into jars so that we didn't have to deal with moisture buildup or potential mold.  Double check to make sure that they're completely cool before putting the lids on the jars!

Step 8: Salt if desired

Our peanuts tasted pretty good unsalted so we left them plain, but you could add salt if you want.  Some recipes call for soaking the unshelled peanuts for multiple hours before roasting, but we didn't have time for all that since we did this so late at night.  They turned out yummy anyway!

Enjoy!