We lost our minds collecting the seeds. Before long we had collected approximately two 10-kilo sacks worth of cashews. Whew…what a workout. Bending down to pick up handfuls of cashew seeds and moving on to more soon had us all perspiring up a storm. We used bottled water to wash our hands of the cashew fruit’s juice and were soon on our way. Throughout all this, it still hadn’t occurred to me to ask how or what we were going to do with all these seeds. My wife knew, but she wasn’t talking. When I finally did ask she would only say, “You’ll see”.

We arrived in Atalaya about an hour before nightfall. After getting the seeds into the backyard my wife asked our daughter Jenifer to go next door to her grandmother’s house and ask to borrow ‘la paila’. Jenifer soon returned with ‘la paila’. It turns out ‘la paila’ was an old beat up and blackened Ford hubcap. I asked what we were going to do with a hubcap. As an answer, Tina asked me to go to the orange tree and cut two long 1-inch thick branches off of it. Then she thrust the machete in my hands and sent me on my way all the while telling me to quit asking so many questions as we had work to do and were losing the light of day.

While I was massacring the orange tree, Tina started a fire with wood from the backyard. She had set up an area away from all the outbuildings with rocks to form an outdoor hearth and put some discarded rebar over the fire to form a grate. Then she placed the hubcap on the rebar over the fire. Once the hubcap started to smoke she filled it halfway with some of the cashew seeds we had collected.

Pretty soon with the intensity of the fire the cashew shells were smoking and sputtering oil. Tina gave me one of the branches I had chopped and cleaned up and told me to mix the cashews around in the hubcap. While I’m mixing, the cashews are spitting and sputtering in the hot oil. I asked Tina how she knows when the cashews are cooked and ready. Again, she tells me to be patient and that I’ll see. When the cashews are nice and hot, Tina puts her branch end in the fire and ignites it. Then she touches the flame on the branch to the cashews. The oil on the outer shells ignites and now one heck of blaze is going. I’m looking around for a fire extinguisher, which we don’t have handy. Tina tells me to calm down and continue swirling the nuts in the hubcap. When the outer shells are thoroughly blackened Tina takes her branch, reaches underneath the hubcap and flings it up and away from us as the nuts go sailing through the air.

Fire goes everywhere. Quick! She commands me to douse the nuts with dirt/water and turn the fire out.  Then we go about collecting all the still hot cashew shells and put them into a bowl where we let them cool off. I look at Tina and ask her if we have any nutcrackers in the house. She says, “Maybe, but there are plenty outside”.  She smiles and points at some medium sized rocks. I tell her she’s crazy and go look for the nutcracker.

By the time I get back she has already started lightly pounding the cashew shells with a rock against a cinder block. She is shelling three nuts to my one. I gave up on the nutcracker and grabbed a rock. Hey, don’t laugh! It actually was quicker and I was able to pull the nut out whole.

When we were done, we cleaned up and went out on the veranda and lay in the two-person hammock while we munched on still warm, freshly roasted cashews. As we were enjoying the pepitas secas, I asked about the rest of our horde of cashews. Tina smiled, and says, “We are going to roast them later and make a ‘dulce’ (Panamanian fruitcake) like my grandmother used to make. We talked about the how to’s of this fruitcake as we continued to eat the pepitas but that story is for another time.

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