I heard about roasting chestnuts on an open fire but had never experienced such inviting holiday activity. Neither had I ever played conkers but it sounds like a fun game. A horse chestnut seed is threaded with string and formed into a sort of ninja weapon used to smash the opponents conker chestnut weapon. How to win at conkers.
Nobody mentioned when you roast chestnuts, if they did I didn't notice, to drill a hole for steam to escape. If not, they explode in the oven and it sounds exactly like gunshot. They do not all go off at once, it takes time for steam to build up, each chestnut is individual and once they start banging you cannot open the oven door and put a fast stop to it. You must let it cool down by itself while they continue to bang. Horrible having irregular gunshot sounds emanating from one's apartment for a half hour period late at night. That is what happened.
It makes a complete mess of the oven. Tiny bits of chestnut shell and meat splattered all over, nothing recoverable except waste to sweep out and oven walls to wipe clean. I mentioned this to my housekeeper, she told her teenage son, and thereafter her son bugged the heck out of her to allow exploding chestnuts in their oven just once.
2 comments:
Conkers looks like fun, but you do not want to be roasting horse chestnuts. They are not good to eat (they are slightly poisonous).
With American chestnuts (great eating but hard to find) or European or Asian chestnuts (usually the ones you see in the stores for sale at the holidays), you can slice an x on them before roasting and that makes them easier to peel later on.
The neighbors just said, Chip's up to his hijinx again.
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