Well, maybe not very interesting, but Wendy and I thought it was kinda cool.

Excuse the post if this happens to be a topic you already know top to bottom.

Anyway, take a look at this picture and try to guess what these things are:

Looks like some kind of bizarre tropical fruit, right? They reminded Wendy of peppers or large corn kernels. I thought they looked like something you'd see growing on another planet in Ray Bradbury's imagination.

Turns out, those things are cashews in the shell.

Yesterday Wendy just happened to say "I wonder why you never see cashews in their shells at the store?"

Hmmmm....

So we looked it up and learned the following:

Long ago the U.S. passed laws against importing the nuts in their shells (all cashews sold here are imported from China, India, or Brazil). (Fresh and unshelled,) they're toxic.

Cashew grove: Imagine a tree covered with small, yellow-red apples. From the bottom of each grows something that looks like an inflated lima bean. That's the nut. It has a thick outer shell and thin, membranous inner shell, between which is an oily liquid that is quite irritating and potentially toxic. When cashews are processed, the outer shell is removed, the liquid drained off, the nuts are dried, and the membrane shell is removed, and the detoxed nuts are packed in tins for export. The oily liquid is recycled into bug spray. Lurking in the branches of the cashew's family tree are a couple of nasty relatives: poison oak and poison ivy.

Eeech. (The emphasis above was mine.)

I think I'll keep letting the good folks at Emerald Nuts do the work for me.