inveniam viam

Riffing off the previous post, Preparing the feast, here's the first of today's prep, the chestnut stuffing.

The most difficult thing about making chestnut stuffing is preparing the chestnuts, which isn't particularly difficult.

I started with a pound/450 grams of chestnuts:


Cut the nuts in half. This was a bit of a workout if you are a woman of a certain age with less than stellar upper body strength:


Set a pot of water to boil, and at full boil, add the chestnut halves. Set the timer for 7-8 min, depending on the size of the nuts. Mine were a bit small, so I boiled for 7 min.


Drain the nuts into a colander. Many of the nuts will have slipped out of the shell. There is also a papery inner sleeve called the pellicle. This pellicle has to be removed; it's very bitter.
-- Image from the blog Vegan for the holidays.

All of my nuts slipped right out of the shell, well there were a few that I had to coax out with a fork, and most of them slipped out free of the pellicle. But there were a few where I had to scrape off the pellicle. There was just one half-nut where the pellicle just wouldn't come off, and I pitched it. You have to peel the chestnuts when they're hot, and work quickly. If they cool too much, they'll be hard to peel.


After peeling, I put them in fresh water and boiled them for another 15 min.


Then I drained and mashed them. After mashing, they're the consistency of ... hmm, they're not creamy. Kinda pasty.
The one pound of nuts yielded about 3 cups of mashed chestnut.

I mixed together about 5 cups of breadcrumbs (I used a 12 oz package of bread cubes, Pepperidge Farm), 1 1/2 cups mashed chestnuts, about a cup of diced onion, a cup of diced celery, 1/4 cup butter, 4 cloves of garlic, 2 tsp dried sage, 1 teaspoon thyme, 1 teaspoon pepper, 2 tsp of salt and about 2 cups of broth.

I sauteed the onion, celery, garlic, spices and salt in the butter, put the breadcrumbs in a big bowl and added the mashed chestnuts. When the onion and celery were starting to get soft, I scraped them into the bowl, added the broth and mixed it up. This all went into a 9X13 cake pan that had been greased with a bit more butter. I covered it with foil and tomorrow I'll bake it covered in a 350°F. for 30 minutes.