on an open fire, bitchezz

it is fall now, i know - even though it is still so warm in the daytime and even though, now into november, the leaves have only just started to turn - because now in the grocery store are cardboard displays of nuts in their shells, and orange-frosted baked goods with white and brown sprinkles, and jugs of cider, and turkey-shaped balloons are supplanting the helium cats and bats and pumpkins. and there are chestnuts.

so, chestnuts.
they keep them in a large woven bushel basket with a scoop attached. they're pleasing things: not quite round, but rounded, and flat on one side; hard and cool and smooth to the touch. it's nice to roll one between the fingers: they are solid, but with little heft. hold one in the palm of your hand and gaze down into it: see the light catch and play on its curves, highlighting the surface's soft sheen, picking out the undulating striations of auburns and blacks within the deep, rich brown. i always want to slide my hand deep into the bin, and run my hands through them like rocks in a river's bottom, but i am not amelie, and such things are frowned upon. so i take the scoop and i take a bag, and pour the chestnuts into it, listening as they clink softly. and then i take them home and i put them on the kitchen table and forget all about them.

or i did until about an hour ago, anyway. it's finally a bit cooler out, and i was in a mood for a snack, and i'd already eaten all the leftover halloween candy. roasted chestnuts are unlike roasted nuts in the general sense, and not at all what you'd expect after, say, reading dickens. the shells become papery, and split, but seldom neatly. the meat of the nut is within, but not at all crunchy, even though roasted: it's soft and very, very hot and shot through with clefts and rather resembles a small and shrunken human brain, if you can remove the thing from the shell entire. often the nut tends to crumble and cleave to the shell. the texture is soft and mealy and a bit chewy - quite like a potato, though the flavour is sweet. i was bitterly disappointed the first time i had one, but i've since grown rather fond of them.

i prick them with a fork - feeling, as always, surprise at how easily the shells yield. range them on a baking sheet, put them in the oven. i take out the Joy of Cooking to check the proper temperature: 425 degrees. as always, i wonder at the line in the recipe about the childhood game of popping chestnuts: each player selecting their own entry and cheering it on to burst first. i never do understand this idea. it would seem to take an awful lot of peering to work out which nut won.

so i leave them alone for twenty minutes or so, until the fragrance tells me they're done. i reach into the oven, pull out the pan, and turn to set it on the stovetop, until suddenly i am UNDER A HAIL OF FUCKING GUNFIRE. dimly in some corner of my brain i realise i have come to know what a popping chestnut sounds like. i did not expect it to be quite so like a driveby.

when things settle, i return with a plate to discover that at least a third of my chestnuts have exploded - but where did they go? one would expect at least some scattered remains. the kitchen, from counter to floor, is coated in a fine layer of chestnut-dust, but only a few fragments of shells lay entire. they quite literally vaporise.

that's a hell of a thing, i think to myself, carrying my plated chestnuts to the relative calm of the livingroom. two more go off. this time i actually see it happen: they really do completely atomise, annihilated in a puff of chestnut-scented smoke. i have a new respect for the things.

i think i'll go make some more.