Autumn is here, with chilly nights and fresh, crisp, sunny days. (With the occasional rain shower of course, it is Belgium after all.) We don't get the same vibrant colors on our trees here as they do in Minnesota, but it's still beautiful.
It's also a great big mess. The other day I was at school, waiting to pick up the children. I arrived early, so I had a few minutes of silence in the car to collect my thoughts. It was a blustery day, and as the treetops waved back and forth, leaves and sticks dropped down all around. Then, there was a big (and by that I mean giant) gust of wind that rattled the trees. And this time, my car was attacked by chunks of tree branches and...clonkers.
Have you ever seen a real chestnut? Before I moved to Europe, chestnuts were only something you sang about "roasting on an open fire" every year at Christmastime. I'd never actually seen one, and if I had, it wasn't in the full shell as it just came off the tree, it was in the grocery store in some sort of prepackaged something or other.
In the shell right off the tree, these nuts look like an organic instrument of torture -- something Mother Nature must have invented on a day when she was feeling particularly moody. They are round, and can be anywhere between the size of a golfball and a tennis ball. They are green, and shooting out from every which way are spikes, the size of sewing needles. They are also heavy.
That day, several had split open upon hitting the cobblestone street and/or my car. I don't even want to know if they put dents on the roof - probably they did, it sure sounded like it. (In the midwest I know it's common to make an insurance claim for hail damage, but I doubt I could call my insurance agent here and ask about chestnut damage.) All around me on the ground were perfect brown nuts, two to a shell.
Over the years we have lived here, I've learned that there are two different types of chestnuts, the ones you can eat and the ones you can't. I decided to do some research to figure out which was which. If these things were falling out of the sky clonking me on the head, it would be nice to know if I could at least roast it on an open fire and see what that excitement was all about.
Google is amazing. Within five minutes, I learned that, first of all, they are aptly nicknamed Clonkers. The ones you can't eat are called horse chestnuts. I don't know why, I can't imagine horses actually eat them. The way to tell which is which is easy: The horse chestnuts have short spikes that are spaced wide apart. The ones that you can eat are covered with long needle spikes, and it made a joke about figuring out how to get them open. Both versions have two nuts inside. The ones that attacked my car were horse chestnuts. Bummer.
Later in the week I went for a run. I was almost back to the house, when there in the road before me, was a round green spikey ball, with needles the size of a sewing needle. A real chestnut! I tried to pick it up. It poked me, drawing blood. Forget about opening them, how the heck do you even collect them? I, very carefully this time, picked it up by the stick part that was still attached and walked it home. I signed into google again, and confirmed by pictures and descriptions (of the shell, needles, leaves and everything) that this in fact, was a non-poisonus chestnut. That I could roast on an open fire.
The next day, Belle and I walked down the road with a basket. Very carefully, we filled it with chestnuts and took those spikey little balls home. The basket sat on the counter for a week, while I worked out a strategy for what to actually do with them next. The excitement in the house grew. "We get to roast chestnuts," everyone said. That week I saw chestnuts in a big pile in the produce section at the grocery store. With a smug grin I thought to myself, "I don't have to buy those, I collected my own off of my street for free."
Last Saturday morning I was feeling particularly ambitious. With the BBQ tongs in one hand, and the sharpest knife in my drawer that most closely resembled a saw in the other, I set about opening them. I discovered these tiny, little wrinkled nuts. But this far into my task, I wasn't about to give up. An hour later, I had a tiny bowl full of wrinkled nuts to show for my effort. The ones at the grocery store looked better. And much bigger. I think the sign next to them had said that they were from Italy.
Do you think my family would notice if I buy the ones at the grocery store and we roast those instead? Apparently Italy grows better clonkers than we do here in Belgium. I would hate to see how long the needle spikes are on those things. But that's the beauty of a grocery store, isn't it? I'll never have to know.
