In recent years I have tried very hard to expand not only my own eating horizons but those of my family.
Slowly, with much patience I have been introducing world cuisine into our lives. Be it in the form of spices, meats, or veggies, I am working things in when I can. I am proud of the progress I have made. Going from meat, potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes to a veritable cornucopia of possibilities is not easy.
I persistently push the food envelope. And yet, I seem to have missed a treat right under my very nose. Something so familiar and so banal – or so I thought – that it missed my culinary curiosity entirely!
Chestnuts!
It is not that I have not known about them. Every fall my favorite blogs suddenly come alive with chestnut recipes. A few of my favorite blogs talk about them all year, using chestnut paste and preserved chestnuts any old time.
They are even a part of popular culture. “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” anyone? They are the part of Americana that is deeply tied into the whole Normal-Rockwell-Holiday-America experience. The one where cherubic faced children race down decoration bedecked and delicately snow-powdered streets.
Yet surrounded by all that I had never tried them!
It was a post in Live Journal’s Cooking community that finally got me off my duff!
As fortune would have it, I was still thinking about the post when I stopped by my local Japanese market which prominently featured a HUGE mound of the nuts right by the front door.
However now that I had them, I had no idea what to do with them. I knew they had to be roasted. So I tried to wing it by sticking them in a 350 degree oven. It would have probably been OK if I had read the bit about cutting a little X in the shell to allow steam to escape.
Unfortunately I became all too aware of the problem when the first one blew up right in the oven, bathing the insides of it with a fine mist of superheated chestnut innards. And hurrying to remedy the issue just did not help my case. Thinking fast (but not quite fast enough) I grabbed each nut in a towel and proceeded to gently poke a small hole in the shell.
Congratulating myself in the quick thinking I forgot a basic principal of physics…and as I gently poked one of the nuts with the tip of my paring knife the built up steam found its long waited escape route…coating me from head to toe in a fine dusting of chestnut. It was in my hair, it was hanging from my lashes, and it was creating an interesting constellation effect all over the front of my black t-shirt.
Needless to say, I carefully put down the rest of the nuts. Choosing caution over cavalier, I simply covered them with a nice thick towel. Luckily for me, buy this time they were all cooked!
Once cooled extracting them was fairly simple though because of my earlier goof, getting one whole was nearly impossible. My mother managed one but event hat soon got crumbled to use in the recipe. Of course I couldn’t resist a taste as I sat there scraping out the flesh with my tiny knife.
And with each taste, I wondered why I had not discovered them earlier. The chestnut meat had an odd texture reminiscent of poorly cooked potato but that was soon forgotten for the enticingly sweet nutty flavor. It was wonderful! Mild and thoroughly addictive! I was tempted to just serve the meats as they were rather than put them in a recipe and risk loosing the chestnuts unique flavor.
The recipe that inspired this was a take on an Italian fall dish including apples, onions, pancetta, and brussel sprouts. I didn’t have most of the ingredients on hand but I liked the idea of using fall harvest ingredients together, so I improvised!
Rice and chestnuts paired beautifully together; the rice a toothsome white stage for the heavenly little chestnut morsels. The apples provided contrast keeping the dish for becoming too heavy with just the tiniest bit of sour. And the smoked turkey sausage brought it all together, binding the fall flavors with just a hint of fall smoke.
I served it with planked salmon but everyone agreed that given a little more sausage the rice was a meal onto itself. It was an instant hit, disappearing faster than the salmon itself which is saying something as planked salmon is very popular around our dinner table!
A definite keeper recipe!
Autumn Harvest Rice
1 smoked turkey sausage diced fine [1]
1 firm cooking apple, peeled and finely diced [2]
¾ cup finely diced chestnut meat, packed
1 ½ cups cooked rice
2 teaspoons olive oil [3]
1/8 teaspoons cinnamon
Salt and pepper to taste
Drizzle olive oil in the bottom of a large skillet. Sauté over medium-high heat until the oil shimmers. Add the sausage and cook until well browned on all sides.
Lower the heat to medium. Add the apple, simmering together with the sausage until the apple is tender. Once the apple is translucent add the chestnuts and rice. Season with salt, pepper, and cinnamon. There should be just enough cinnamon for a hint of flavor but not enough to really stand out.
Cook until the rice and chestnuts are piping hot.
Serve as a main dish with a salad or as a side dish.
[1] If you are planning to server this as a main dish, increase the amount of sausage to 2 or 3. You can also use another kind of smoked meat or substitute with left over chicken.
[2] I use a Granny Smith but a Pippin or Braeburn would work very well. The apple should be tart and crisp. Sweet or mushy apples would not work in this dish. The apple should be peeled cored and slices thinly then diced finely to roughly the same sized pieces as the chestnuts.
[3] If you are using a fatty meat like bacon reduce or eliminate the need for oil. Adjust accordingly.
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