Thyme and maple nuts

An easy, tasty snack recipe to make if you have some spare thyme and time this festive season! Especially easy if the oven is already on to cook dinner and you can just pop the nuts in to cook while you eat.

I made these last year as a Christmas gift and they were very well received although they are a bit of an accident. I am dyslexic and as any other dyslexic knows, it’s not just about being bad at spelling. One of the main frustrations I have is transposing words – for instance I have had arguments saying the opposite of what I mean not understanding why people won’t agree with me! Last year my mum found this great recipe for rosemary and maple nuts which she sent to me as a gift idea (we often do homemade food items for family gifts). I thought it sounded great, ordered the ingredients, and made the nuts. Afterwards, I said to my mum how funny that it took so much ‘time’ to strip leaves off sprigs of ‘thyme’ – my mum paused and asked why I’d used thyme in a rosemary and maple recipe… I’d swapped rosemary for thyme and not noticed even when following the recipe! Although they were an accident, they taste amazing and I couldn’t stop eating them – I made them again this year! I have to say I took more care making them last year, melting the butter, and measuring everything out exactly – I still doubled the sauce to nut ratio (see notes below ingredients) from the original recipe but I did 1.5kg of nuts last year! This year I was much rougher about it and they still tasted great, throwing it all together whilst cooking dinner on Christmas eve as I realised I had some spare thyme and the oven was on – what better excuse to make some thyme and maple nuts!

Ingredients
250g Mixed unsalted nuts (I used cashews, hazelnuts, and walnuts)
1 tbsp of fake butter
2 tsp sea salt flakes
2 tsp maple syrup
4-8 small sprigs of thyme (depends on your sprigs! Mine were only about an inch and a half high so I used 8)

Two notes about the butter

• I used Naturli’ vegan spreadable as I feel you can taste the butter more in this than baking so I chose the spread we use on toast rather than Pure (sunflower oil) which I normally use in cooking
• If you are using real butter then you will need to melt it, I didn’t need to as fake butter is already quite soft and mixed well with the nuts at room temperature but the original recipe calls for melted butter to make it easier to combine

Making the nuts

1. Line the baking tray with baking paper
2. Mix all the nuts in a big bowl, breaking the bigger nuts by hand like the walnuts. You can chop the nuts if you’d prefer, depending on how you like your nuts!!
3. Add the butter, salt, maple syrup and leave on the side while you prepare the thyme
4. Preheat the oven to 180˚ (fan oven)
5. Strip the leaves off the thyme and chop roughly – this is quite fiddly and takes time (pun intended!)
6. Add the thyme to the bowl and stir everything together, the butter should have melted a bit and as you stir it will melt a bit more – mix well
7. Spread the nuts on the tray, making sure they are spread out. Use multiple trays if you need to – I used one large tray for 250g
8. Cook for 15-20 minutes until golden all over
9. Allow the nuts to cool fully (whilst stopping your other half from eating them all) and then store in an airtight container – they will keep for about two weeks if they last that long…!