Food can be both a pleasure and your ticket to lifelong health, but only if you choose wisely. The temptation is great to pick elements from various popular diets, but intuition and common wisdom can be misleading.
[More about that later…]
Month: January 2016
Chestnut Soup
This simple, hearty soup makes a good fall or winter starter. Chestnuts used to be standard fare in the French countryside, most of the time cooked in milk for supper. The soup is extremely easy to prepare with peeled, pre-cooked chestnuts. It is quite an ordeal to make it with whole raw chestnuts, though!
Serves 6
- 1 onion
- 3 oz bacon
- 1 tablespoon oil
- 1 tablespoon Brandy
- 1 lb peeled, pre-cooked chestnuts
- 1 qt broth
- Crème fraîche or sour cream
Chestnut Season is too short!
Chestnuts belong to the “nuts and seeds” family, but contrary to most edible nuts, they contain almost no fat. (This, by the way, is not a virtue: our body needs fats.) The simple, hearty soup presented here is everybody’s favorite and makes a good fall or winter starter.
Fall is good! If only because this is the time when Trader Joe’s carries pre-cooked, vacuum packed chestnuts. Look for them in the vegetable section of the store and make sure to load up when you find them, because they will disappear too soon.
Pre-cooked chestnuts keep for a long time, and can be frozen with no loss of flavor or texture.
(!$#@!) Unfortunately, because it took me so long to get started with this blog, chestnuts are no longer available at Trader Joe’s. Draeger’s carries them year long, at a premium of course. I’ve been told that Costco has them too. Asian supermarkets sell roasted-peeled chestnut, but I haven’t tested them yet.
Chestnuts belong to the “nut and seed” family, but contrary to most edible nuts, they contain almost no fat. This, by the way, is not a virtue: our body needs fats of all kinds in order to be healthy.
For a given weight, they are no starchier than other nuts but you tend to eat more of them. They are gluten free. But beware if you treat them as a vegetable: their starch content is similar to that of starchy foods like potato, sweet potato or plantain.
Their nutritional profile is not great but they make a nice treat on a cold winter day, especially if you’re planning on going out to chop wood.