Holidays and Celebrations
Chestnuts are one of my favorite foods. Every year when they reappear I greet them with almost unseemly gladness, so not surprisingly they have made a number of appearances here.
Fresh Chestnuts, Roasting Them, Peeling Them, Putting them In The Stuffing has tips, tools, and techniques.
Recipe posts include
Leafy Brussels Sprouts and Chestnuts,
a modern take on an old favorite, and
Stir Fried Red Cabbage with Dried Chestnuts
another new twist on an old standard and in that same post a very easy because you use dried chestnuts White Chocolate Chestnut Candy.
Speaking of which (candy, not easiness) there’s also a post with full instructions for
Home Made Marrons Glacés
So although I love and adore them I figured we’d pretty much come to the end of what I had to say. But then I mail-ordered some ‘Marroni’ directly from the grower
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Winter Squash Brioche with Coconut Crust, where all this started out.
Backstory: Two years ago at around this time, I used the picture above as the coda to a long list of good things to make out of leftover mashed winter squash (an item that many of us will soon have in copious amounts).
What I did not do was post the relevant recipe – even after I was very politely asked. Why? Because the recipe didn’t exist.
That’s the great thing about bread. Unlike cake, you can just make it up as you go along, starting with pureed squash, for instance, faking your way toward brioche and then playing around with the dough.
The result was certainly good enough to revisit, but what with this and what with that I never did, so I never took the notes that add up to a recipe. Until now.
Here they are
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Sorta – These velvety sweet chestnuts in a crunchy sugar shell aren’t quite as light-textured as the real deal, but they’re good enough to be a variation instead of simply an earnest attempt, and now that the candied chestnuts of my childhood have hit about $5.00 each they’re a variant well worth making. (Assuming, of course, that marrons glacés are on your list of “wish I could afford more.”)
Left: Marrons glaces en chemise. Right: Glazed candied chestnuts
Although fresh chestnuts can be used, it’s far easier to start out with IQF peeled chestnuts (see below). The processing that delivers them whole, absolutely skinless and in a neither-cooked-nor-raw state is probably something we don’t want to know too much about;* but whatever it is has the happy side-effect of making them much more receptive to candying and much less likely to break.
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Also an Eek of the Week: Fake Bakers, about the – many, according to story – people who bring purchased pastry to bake sales and cookie swaps and pass it off as home made. To enhance verisimilitude, they doctor the store-bought by roughing it up so it doesn’t look too perfect. Directions are provided. I am still trying to digest this.
And in the meantime of course baking cookies, including vanilla almond Moth Cookies and The Spritz Bill Really Likes. Links to more never-fail all-timers after the jump, but first:
Our favorite Pepparkakkor, crisp, spicy, better-than-gingerbread. The quintessential Christmas Cookie and if the Christmas part gives you trouble just use a bird cutter and call ‘em doves of peace.
The recipe makes approximately a zillion. The dough is easy to mix, easy to handle and perfectly happy to stay in the icebox for weeks while you slice off chunks of it to roll and cut and decorate. Or not; a lot of people like them best plain.
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Just a little reminder it’s not going to be winter forever.
First, though, present time. Here’s my perennial shopping list ( with source links) of good gifts for gardeners.
Membership in The Garden Conservancy is on that list without further explanation and at this point none may be needed. But just for the record: after starting small and being exceedingly Northeast-centric, the Conservancy is now saving significant gardens all over the US and offering benefits almost everywhere. Just the ticket for garden-loving friends, regardless of skill level or actual possession of garden.
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Even though we’ve had three days of feasting: two dinners and two lunches at our house, one dinner in town with another branch of the family.
Local Thanksgiving bouquet – the very last chrysanthemums
Twelve people ate here between Thursday night and Saturday morning– several of us more than once – so even though the Poughkeepsie branch ( Saturday night) had leftovers of its own we ought, by rights, to be out of turkey.
We are not, even though the bird only weighed 12 pounds after I got done boning it. There was so much other food the turkey was as in my opinion it should be, almost incidental.
If you don’t remember to remove the string that helped restore approximate turkey shape, the starring bird will have a bikini line.
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It would be beyond bogus to pretend we’re anything like self-sufficient. We’re not even notably local; I’m too fond of things like olives, lemons and pomegranate molasses.
But at Thanksgiving we always try – ok; I try; I’m the one who makes up the menu – to celebrate our own harvest, both from the wild and from the gardens.
Some years this includes the meat; we have venison. Bill has even on one occasion shot a deer so close to the back garden we were probably eating our hostas and roses along with the rest of the produce.
This year it’s turkey, just so I can keep my hand in. Local but not heritage. And the corn for the pudding ! you absolutely have to have corn pudding! will be a mixture of our own Black Mexican and some kind of tender hybrid from Beth’s farmstand up in Maine.
Corn from the days when we grew more kinds. Top to bottom: Ruby Queen, unknown hybrid (seed purchased and name forgotten by Bill), the Black Mexican we still grow, at the cornbread stage
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Easy make-ahead piecrust recipes coming your way shortly… Meanwhile, here’s the (probably unneeded) reminder that house cleaning comes first. Nobody minds hanging out while you cook.
It’s also a reminder – should Black Friday find you in appliance shopping mode – that shiny black surfaces in the kitchen are a very bad idea. This is not a room where it’s wise to have water spots look like dirt.
Poor fellow can barely see himself; and I'd just washed it that morning!
Fresh chestnuts, roasted and peeled
Ok, It’s finally time for chestnuts, an autumn/early winter thrill that’s one of the last truly seasonal crops still standing. If you’re anything like me, you’re just about jumping up and down with glee right there in the produce section. But if you’re like I used to be, your joy is tempered by the knowledge that they’re a royal pain to prepare.
They needn’t be, as it turns out. I now eat more than is probably wise, having discovered a couple of tricks that lessen the pain considerably. I still haven’t found an easy way to go from raw in the shell to skinless roasted, but with these methods it’s easy enough to make me glad they’re low-fat.
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Roughly 15 years ago I wrote a piece for Yankee magazine titled something like “ The Only Roast Turkey Recipe You Will Ever Need.” Still substantially true, should you be the type who keeps clippings forever, but there have been a few refinements in the intervening years – mostly because there have been refinements in the turkeys themselves. Roast Turkey 101.2, The Upgrade, with Wild Mushroom Stuffing, was therefore rolled out last year.
Wild turkey booking it through the lower garden; she knows what's coming
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