veganmofo #15: bestnuts.

my formative years were spent in south florida, so i feel like i got pretty screwed when it comes to awesome wintry traditions. i mean, it's green year-round there and "winter" consists of a two-week cold snap, when temperatures drop below 60, spurring the locals to bust out their down coats and crank up their thermostats. no matter that my dad was a born northerner. by the time i was an adolescent, he had long since decided that he wanted to live somewhere where he could walk outside at any time of year without thinking about grabbing a jacket. not a COAT, mind you...a JACKET. my mom wasn't down with the cold anymore, either, likely due to her dreary north of england childhood.

apparently it snowed once in (ancient) recent history, sometime in the '70s. mr. herndon, my 5th-grade teacher, told our class about the blizzard and how the snow settled on one of his students' afros and stuck there longer than it did on the ground.
it's practically a guarantee that christmas day is going to be sunny and warm every year.

so now that i'm an adult and living in the northeast, i find myself trying to make up for lost time by doing and eating all the cold-weathery stuff my family never did. tonight i roasted chestnuts. they're easy enough to prepare, but shelling can be kind of a hassle. i don't know, maybe i should have let them roast a little longer? does that make it easier to pry the meat loose?

they were pretty tasty on their own, kind of rutabaga-y in flavor. they definitely had a baked potato thing going on, so i opted to toss them in melted EB and a little salt. they were pretty good that way, but i think i preferred them plainly roasted.