Killer Cashews

Some of you know all about how Jack and I moved to the country of Panama with two giant service dogs tethered to our wrists at all times. If not, here’s your chance–click here right this moment, buy Clueless Gringos in Paradise, and laugh yourself silly. One of the joys of living in a country where you did not grow up and where nearly everything is exotic and exciting is in sampling fruits and vegetable that you’ve never seen before in your life, or in experiencing them in a totally different way.
Cashews are a good example.
We had four cashew trees in our yard. When I first saw them, I actually said to a Panamanian friend, “Oh look at that fruit! That little thingie on the end looks just like a cashew!”
Well, I was speaking in childish Spanish so it’s possible I said nothing of the sort, but that’s what I meant to say. I once waved a handful of seedpods and flowers at two lovely old ladies I met while walking in the jungle and told them I was looking for my ass, when what I meant to say was that I was looking for treasure. Tesoro-treasure. Trasero-ass.
So, back to those cashew trees.
I was fascinated with them. I picked the fruit–which begins to rot about two minutes after it’s picked–and put it in my morning smoothie. Waited impatiently for the nut to be ready to harvest. The internet explained the roasting process. Roast the nut over an outdoor grill until no more oil came from the between the shell and the meat. Simple, right?
We had a giant outdoor grill. When I told my roasting plans to our gardener, Jose, he shook his head violently and went off with a burst of Spanish of which I understood only that I was not to roast them myself, he would do it. Well, since he didn’t even like me to pick my own fruit, I figured job security was his objection.
On his day off, I picked a hundred or so nuts, built up the fire and began my new experience. How fun! Roasting cashews from my own trees. Wouldn’t the folks back in foggy Humboldt County be jealous?
Gosh. There was really a lot of oil dripping onto the fire from those nuts. Made for a lot of smoke and for bad flare-ups. No problem. I put a large roasting pan under the nuts to catch the drips. Hmm. The pan filled fast and had to be wrestled from the coals and dumped every hour or so. This was a bit more work than I anticipated. Still, at the end of the day I had a lovely big pile of blackened cashews. I decided I’d let Jose do the cracking.
That night, Jack became amorous. Yes, that piece of information is important to the story.
The next morning I woke to darkness. Both eyes swollen shut, hands and arms covered with a rashy-burn so bad the skin peeled off in waxy layers. Jose arrived and went off on another machine gun burst and threw away all my roasted cashews.
Jack had a rash spreading from every single place I’d touched him the night after the cashew roasting. Think about that for just a moment. The redness and itching was like some creeping fungus. He developed a low-grade fever. His throat ached. We drove into Panama City and found a doctor. Stayed in the city for a week while he got steroid shots twice a day. He took steroid pills for two weeks. When the prescribed doses stopped, the rash came back. With a vengeance. Another week in the city. Followed by six weeks on sterioids.
Here’s a little fact I did not know about cashew nuts and that I did not find on the internet until after I’d almost killed my husband.
The oil between the shell of a cashew and the nut’s meat has the same molecular makeup as poison oak. Except it’s about a hundred times more potent.
Here’s a little lesson for any of you who travel or live in lands exotic and unfamiliar to you. When a local tells you something, listen.