Go nuts!

Our tiny, backyard pecan grove of three trees has become a symbol of Mick Jagger's famous song, "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Oh, the nuts are there, but before we can snag any, every squirrel in the neighborhood, maybe St. Louis County, has nabbed them. And they're greedy little devils, scurrying off with entire branches of the clusters, not just a mouthful at a time.

My husband has tried squirrel baffles to inhibit them, which they used as exercise equipment to springboard from, then bird feeders to distract them, which only acted as an appetizer, and the penultimate tactic of trapping them, one at a time, to move them out of the area. Neither of us has the killer instinct, so the answer seemed to be to transport them across the river. They could start a new life, we could start harvesting pecans. But as soon as we created a vacancy, more moved in.

Ideas died on the vine. Pecan recipes withered in my cookbooks from lack of use.

Until we took the ultimate action.

We had to. Honestly, there was just no other choice.

We bought them. Bags and bags of right-off-the-tree and freshly cracked pecans.

We found Utopia on Thanksgiving weekend, right outside of Nevada, Mo., my hometown.

Pecan growers with vans and trucks were manning sites along U.S. 71 Highway, loaded to the gills with machine-cracked nuts. Every plastic bag was a see-through thrill of perfection, and free taste tests were abundant. We became as greedy as our suburban St. Louis squirrels, heedless of the knowledge that we'd need to get them out of their shells quickly, they were so fresh. We were so hungry for the nuggets we didn't care that we'd just bought hours and hours of work. Combining the sacks of pecans my dad gave us from his own back yard and the ones we'd just bought, we had about 40 pounds of nuts to shell.

Then we got home, pooped from the six-hour drive and the long, filling holiday.

Here's the long-standing deal with nuts: my husband collects and shells the things so I can create great culinary masterpieces with them. I figure that's even, right? Flops count. We had a discussion about that one, because there are usually plenty of duds in my cooking endeavors, but in the end, he agreed the effort counted for something, even if the new concoction didn't.

The kitchen table became the pecan work station. He'd carefully shell them with the help of a high intensity lamp so he could see every fleck of shell, then pass them to me for a final inspection before I prepared them for the freezer. We did that for two days, during which time we did not go barefoot in the kitchen. Ever stepped unsuspecting on a wayward pecan shell with bare feet? You don't want to do it twice.

Now the freezer's full of pecans. There's a little food up there, but it's mostly pecans and blueberries, which is another story. We're happy.

Our squirrels are happy, too. My husband's feeding the birds the bits and pieces from our labors. It's a big bag, and he puts out a few handfuls every day. Some birds get them, but it's usually the greedy little gray guys that gobble up every last tidbit. We know because we watch them from the kitchen window.

"Why are you feeding them?" I asked. "Aren't you just training them to like pecans? To return for more? To never go away, for Pete's sake?"

"Maybe they'll be too full to bother our trees now," he said.

Or maybe they'll send out a squirrel e-mail to all their relatives and buddies saying they've got a live one -- this guy's shelling them for us! I know one thing for sure. From now on, harvesting Missouri pecans, for us, is in the bag.