In other news: Chestnuts! and what to do with them

Hurricane Joaquin brought us some chestnuts!

The weather here has been gray and miserable (as I suppose it is all along the east coast) and our house has been, well, a bit more needy than usual (as evidenced by its desperate attempts to lock us in bathrooms and other things we might tell you about someday).  So it was some consolation when we went out to check the garden last night and found the ground scattered with chestnuts, freshly burst from their spiny husks.

We took about fifteen minutes to pick up 4.5 lbs (we should  really find a small child somewhere to do these things for us, right?) and then about 45 minutes quadruple checking that we hadn't accidentally harvested something poisonous and finding recipes.

 

It turns out that we have a Chinese chestnut tree and that roasting chestnuts is hardly any work at all.

 The Recipe:

Take chestnut, make sure it came out of a spiky husk and that the tip is pointed and tasseled.

Cut a small X in the shell with a sharp knife

Put in a pan with some water sprinkled on it

Chuck in oven (400F, 30-40 minutes)

Poke chestnut with your finger until you can touch it without burning yourself

Finish peeling

Eat

We weighed a few of our chestnuts at various stages so that we'll know how many we need for recipes later on (there wasn't much weight difference between shelled and unshelled).
12 chestnuts = 100 g, or 200 kcal and 48% of your daily dietary requirement of vitamin C! (so saith Wikipedia)

100g of cooked chestnuts

We have some eggs piling up, despite the cold weather and a new bout of broodiness, so next up will probably be an attempt at chestnut pasta, where the ground chestnut is used to partially substitute for flour.  I didn't know that such a thing existed, but this (fresh chestnut pasta with Brussels sprouts)  looks delicious. It doesn't hurt that we have a freezer full of Brussels sprouts from our garden as well.

To be cont.?