Trader Joe's Tuesday Treats: Raw Sliced Almonds
Wednesday Edition
A beloved former colleague of mine was Latvian, first generation.
She taught me a lot about fine dining, back when I was but a spry barback and busboy in the mid 2000s. Mara once recounted a visit to Minnesota from her Latvian relatives, who upon entering a Minneapolis grocery store named Byerly’s broke down in tears.
Nothing like Byerly’s existed in the old Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. Not even close. Byerly’s had innovated the luxurious grocery shopping experience, complete with plush carpeting and chandeliers, a fine collectibles gift shop, and a full-service sit down restaurant. This level of full-on capitalist American decadence was simply too much for Mara’s humble, economically repressed relatives to bear.
Byerly’s has long since retired its restaurant, but its best-selling Minnesota Wild Rice Soup endures. Growing up in land of ten thousand frozen lakes, it’s hard not to develop a fondness for creamy, rich wild rice soup. The long cold winters call for warm, hearty foods and few satisfy like a cup of well-crafted chicken wild rice.
Byerly’s’ version stood out among the rest thanks to the subtle but decadent inclusion of sliced almonds. Texture, flavor, nutritional value—everything is better with sliced almonds.
Inspired by the brilliant chef team behind this Byerly’s staple, over the last year I’ve begun adding sliced almonds to different dishes in an attempt to level up my home cooking game. First I added Trader Joe’s Raw Sliced Almonds to my steel cut oatmeal, along TJ’s own Very Berry Granola and Maple Syrup. A very nice touch.
Then I tossed a few into a spinach salad with blue cheese, red onions and dried cranberries. Another culinary advancement. Last night I whipped some into a tuna salad—you already know I love a tuna melt and I love a good almond; why not see how well they go together? (They went together beautifully.)
The next time I make pancakes or waffles from scratch, I think I’ll see how these delightfully crunchy bursts of flavor hold up. How do you like to incorporate sliced almonds into your home cooking? Soups, salads, cereals, sandwiches? Weigh in with a comment:
Fair warning: nut gut. As previously mentioned, consuming too many nuts too rapidly without the proper caloric counterbalance can disturb your precious digestive system. The human body has not yet evolved to rapidly process more than a handful of nuts, a superfood our hunter-gatherer ancestors only ate on rare occasion and in very small amounts.
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Your story about your Latvian colleague Mara stirred a memory from 1989 when the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre did a cultural exchange with the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow. Similarly, young members of the troupe burst into traumatized tears, overwhelmed by the opulence of the overflowing shelves at Byerly’s, a painful contrast that couldn’t have been anticipated. Oh, and I add sliced almonds to green beans.