Tamunuts

So I'm minding my own business thinking about the holidays. It's been a poopy time at the factory and I'm beat. Mrguy has been seriously sick with the flu for ten days. Christmas approaches at the end of the week and I've barely prepared. I'm depressed. But I still want to do something fun. So I decided to make Chex Party Mix for the first time.

Of course I wanted to go back to the beginning and try to make the original recipe. But now I hear maybe I have a gluten issue, so I'll make it gluten free. I searched Newspapers.com for a recipe, sorted by date (oldest first) and came up with some recipes. Then one recipe called for Tamunuts. Wow. Am I going to have to order some? What's a Tamunut?

Had I thought about it for a minute, I would have figured out that it was a food product produced by Texas A&M University, but I let the intertubes do the thinking for me. Here is a really great article about the history of the Tamunut. It's an edible cottonseed that is high in protein and tasty, and making it into a food product solves the problem of ginning the cotton and being left with cottonseed waste as a byproduct. I never thought about cottonseeds much until our recent trip to Texas, when our cousin mentioned, offhand, that he'd played on cottonseed golf courses in his youth. I couldn't quite picture it. Wouldn't it just blow away? Here is a story of how cottonseed surfaces entered the world of mini golf.

Back to the Tamunut. Man has long known that cottonseed contains valuable oils, but the oil that was produced was an ugly color. In order to beautify the nut they created a hybrid cotton that developed without a gland that produces gossypol. Nearly every article about Tamunuts spoke of the glandless and gossypol-free oil and nut. I love biology as much as the next guy, but Tamunuts needed a better press agent who didn't use those words as often. 

These days, in the world of the internet, a person might find out that studies show gossypol is a contraceptive. The mind reels with the fantasy of housewives of the 1960s making her chex mix and swapping in gossypolische cottonseeds as a natural form of population control.

Mine, however, will contain almonds. 

A final word here is that everybody I gave it to was super into it. Think I'll be doing this for years to come.