Alphecca

It has always mystified me as to why people think honey needs to be refrigerated, but then, not everyone has a dad who is a beekeeper.

Never refrigerate honey. It only accelerates the crystalization process. If it's "raw" honey it will crystalize even faster. The stuff sold in stores takes longer, but all honey will crystalize eventually.

Honey was used in centuries past as a preservative--meat was stored in honey to preserve the meat. I think it was the ancient Egyptians who did this. It will not "sour" or go bad under any normal conditions.

Crystalized, or "sugared" honey, is still good to eat. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it except that it's no longer completely liquid. You can use a butterknife to smear it on toast. Some people crystalize their honey on purpose because they like to use it that way. You can still use it to sweeten hot beverages. When it hits a hot liquid like coffee or warm milk, it will dissolve just like sugar, except that it will dissolve much faster.

Crystalized honey can be re-liquified by heating. Put the jar in a pot of hot water, lid open, water level lower than the top of the jar. However, re-liquified honey will tend to re-crystalize again faster than honey that has never crystalized.

Here's what I know about your questions:

1) Walnuts. Fast and simple, let the green felty part dry out until it turns black/dark brown. Sprinkle them on your driveway and run over them a few times with your car. Seriously. The "husk" can be toxic and make you sick (if you notice, very few plants like living next to black walnut trees), so you don't want to touch that part if you can avoid it. Wash them up afterwards before you crack them open.

2) Condiments. Relish, catsup and mustard are pretty acidic, so they keep for quite a long time.

3) AlanDP said it all, except that when archaeoligists have been excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, they've found honey...and it was still good. Honey has been used as an antibacterial agent, so yeah...it keeps for thousands of years...

Good comment on Honey AlanDP.

One thing to add, you can also re-liquify it in a microwave. Just be careful, cause it can get super heated (and very liquidy).

As to the other questions, I have no idea regarding walnuts, don't eat pickle relish and have never had mustard or ketchup last long enough to worry.

The mustard question is probably harder to actually answer since some mustards use a mayonaise base (which will go bad) and others are just ground up mustard seeds in water and then all sorts of combinations inbetween.

Sandi, it that right about the husks? My family's been picking up the walnuts for years, though normally the husks are at the point of pretty much falling off by themselves.

Jeff,

get yourself this cookbook and enjoy. Some of the best recipes for solo eating.

Just to back up what Sandi and Ken said, you have to get the husks off the walnuts, and it is best to let them dry. Otherwise, the juice in the husks will dye your skin, although it wears off pretty fast.

Little white kids who wanted to play "Indian" used to use the juice to dye themselves brown. I think the it was also used as a fabric dye by frontier seamstresses.

Once the husks are removed, make sure that the walnut shells are completely dry before storing them, and all should be well.

A true honey story: My roomie in grad school spent a year on foreign study in Sweden. The family he stayed with served honey at breakfast. It was crytallized in a platic container. When he pointed out that it was very different from what he was used to, the kids in the family did not believe his story about honey being a liquid back in Texas. Maybe the stories about giant Texas armadillos that ambush lone Star Beer trucks had degraded his believability.... Much experimentation followed, with microwaving of the honey, double boiling of the honey, refreezing of the honey outdoors in the snow and so on. A good time was had by all.

http://backtable.org/~blade/fnord/condiments.html

Lots of other good search results if you use the words condiments shelf life, but this is a classic that made the rounds a couple plus years ago. I'd forgotten it.

Relish, mustard, and ketchup will all last for quite a long time (lots of vinegar in them), at least several months. Honey will last pretty much forever (they've found it in ancient Egyptian tombs, still perfectly edible; it's so sweet, it kills pretty much all bacteria, refrigerated or otherwise).

Hi.

On walnuts, first determine if you have black or english walnuts. If, after you remove the hull, they look like the walnuts you see in the store, they are english walnuts, and should be ok to keep and eat. If they are small and black, the hulls, as noted above, can be used for dye. If the nuts themselves have any use, I don't know what it is. If the tree has heavy, dark, ridged bark out of the ground, and lighter, smoother bark higher up, it is an english walnut grafted onto a black walnut base, which is the usual way english walnuts are grown. Hope this helps. I'm sure you can find out more about the usefulness of black walnuts, if any, on the internet.

Dale

Honey's the best thing to ever come out of a bug. If yours has been around long enough to worry you, you aren't eating it fast enough.

I don't know about walnuts and the honey question was covered, but as far as condiments go, I have found that they look or smell gross by the time they are no good to eat. If they look fine, they are probably fine.

The driveway method works ok. Walnut husks are perfectly safe to handle, but as mentioned the juice can and will stain anything it touches, so on "dehulling day" wear something you don't much care about. Let the removed nuts dry before storing.

Black walnuts are much tougher to crack than english walnuts - regular handheld nutcrackers seldom suffice. Either use a hefty hammer and content yourself with picking out the smashed bits of nutmeat, or buy one of those super-beefy lever-action nutcracker contraptions to keep the meat relatively intact. YMMV if it's worth it, but I know several people who'd rather eat a few home-harvested black walnuts instead of a whole bag of "regular" store-bought ones any day.

To the condiment advice I agree with the others, except that depending on the relish's ingredients and fridge temp it may eventually mold over. Look at the top of it before you spoon it out just to be safe.

The human nose is a wonderful instrument. If a food doesn't smell right, it probably isn't. I always refrigerate wet condiments just to have 'em all in one convenient place.

I dislike walnuts, They taste very bitter to me. I suppose you could feed 'em to your neighbor's hogs if he has any, otherwise they make pretty good slingshot ammo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Walnut

Actually, it appears to be a Black Walnut tree (which is what we build the furniture out of. Don't have my camera with me but I'm guessing from the description of barks...

From the other commenters, sounds OK to leave everything out. I've heard that peanut butter should be refrigerated, but I never have and have had no problems: have also heard that coffee should not be refrigerated because of moisture (???) but I keep it in the freezer.

Jellies and jams, if to be open for more than two weeks or so, probably should be refrigerated lest mold form.

And as someone suggested on the previous thread, get some containers for sugar, flour, etc. Doesn't have to be Tupperware, there are cheapo containers at dollar stores or whatever. In fact, I keep sugar in an old plastic jar that originally held peanuts - keeps about four pounds, the other I keep handy in an old coffee plastic jar. OK fo months on end.

Peanut butter can be but does not need to be refrigerated if you are using it fast enough. The trick to PB is that is has this thing that grows in it invisibly and gradually gets worse. I suppose I ought to look it up instead of doing this from memory. Anyway, the spoilage, or not-peanut-allergy sensitivity one can get in reaction to PB, is caused by this stuff that grows in it. That is retarded by refrigeration and it keeps way longer.

I had to refrigerate it when I was single, as I didn't eat it fast enough. Though I would sometimes start out with it in the pantry and decide later I was eating it too slow. With Deb a PBholic, my appreciation of it, and it being a Sadie staple, our problem is one of running out too quickly rather than it getting all spore-crazy before it's gone.

I hated the stiffness from the fridge, but I loved not having to throw it out.

I don't refrigerate PB because it just gets to "unspreadable" or some word like that. Unless the temperature is really hot, PB seems to last for a couple months. You can usually smell if it's going bad -- really just the oils they mix in going rancid.

A jar of Skippy (sorry, only brand I accept in my house) doesn't last very long since I eat it right out of the jar with a spoon. Yes, one of the few advantages to being single!

My biggest problem with Peanut Butter is that they mix in soy oil which can trigger my gout but if I'm on a PB kick, I just limit other trigger foods. It's all about food management with gout.

Did you know that as long as the cover is on tight, you can leave out a jar of mayonnaise for a week or two? I remember reading that somewhere though why anyone would want to do that is beyond me. It's the other ingrediants in salads that go bad, not the mayo. Can't find the reference now but while searching, I did find this interesting link:
http://www.realsimple.com/realsimple/content/print/0,22304,676079,00.html

And, of course, everyone in New England leaves their butter out in a covered dish (safe for a couple days) so it's nice and soft.

See! I do know some things.

Hi Jeff. If sealed properly, honey can last forever. However, honey acts like a dessicant (pulls moisture out of the air), so if left long enough the surface will become a water/sugar mixture. This mixture can grow mold or even spontaneously ferment (unless you're lucky, spontaneously fermentated sugars won't taste good). If this happens, you'll know.
When I brewed mead, it was a seasonal thing. After the sugar becomes alcohol, the remaining flavors are delicate; although subtle, this flavor will start to fade long before the honey goes bad. Thus, if I bought honey off-season, it wouldn't be nearly as good (for brewing). If your honey tastes sweet but flavorless and empty, get new honey. It's not bad yet, but life is short.

I've gathered black walnuts from the parking lot of an office park near here, after the green hulls were gone. Never did solve the problem of cracking the hulls, which is a drag because I too prefer them to English walnuts for eating and baking. A search of my blog will turn up a recipe for black walnut baklave which won a state fair blue ribbon, but we used boughten ones.

"..for walnut stain cometh not so easily from a yellow beard."
Robin Hood

Wear rubber gloves when removing the outer hulls. Black walnuts have a ridged shell, unlike the english variety. I'm told they make excellent cookies.