Chestnuts

 

Here's a chestnut for you:

There used to be four billion chestnut trees in my country. But then the chestnut blight, or ink disease, came along in the early 1900's and wiped most of them out. But don't worry, counting just mature chestnut trees there are still like a hundred chestnut trees now in the U.S.A.

That's a lot!

If I had a hundred readers of clerkmanifesto I'd be sitting pretty!

But I'll grant you that it's not quite four billion.

Tonight my darling wife and I had some roasted chestnuts. They were probably imported. So they're kind of a metaphorical nut for... every single thing about America in every way possible. 

These chestnuts were quite tasty, but I didn't like cutting X's into their tough shells to roast them. And there was some peeling that was challenging too, and had to be done to get rid of a kind of inner skin that was inedible. I saw a recipe that told me how to roast easy peel chestnuts. The recipe said it was a 30 minute recipe, but it involved soaking the chestnuts overnight. 

This sounded more like a 12 hour recipe to me.

I didn't have 12 hours. We needed to eat some chestnuts in a hurry!

In Rome (and probably loads of other places in Europe), people roast chestnuts on street corners in charcoal braziers, and they sell them in paper cones. They are very fun to buy and to eat and they make you think:

Maybe when all the Chestnut Trees died something in America died too.

Actually, I don't think those street chestnuts make very many people think that.

And that concludes everything I know about chestnuts.

I would, at this point, refer you several excellent chestnut blogs, but there aren't any!

Did you know that there used to be four billion blogs on the Internet?

Now there are barely one hundred!

I am one of them.

It's a lot of responsibility. 

I'm trying to get around to every possible subject, but it takes awhile. 

Thank you for your patience.