Hoary old chestnuts. Those are well-worn aphorisms and anecdotes, close kin to the cliché. Curious as to the origin of this phrase, I searched online and found a long-winded reference tracing it back to an English play of the mid-19th century. I had thought it would refer to the fact that chestnuts, encased in their hard shells, last a rather long time. Did you know the chestnut is also called chinkapin or chinquapin? By any other name, it's still the nut of a tree that belongs to the same family as the beech and the oak. I'd never prepared chestnuts, nor particularly enjoyed eating them on the rare occasion they appeared on my plate. They're always so dry and chalky. People do seem to love them, though—Americans in their Thanksgiving stuffing, the French obsessed with their marrons glacés. Vendors with carts full of roasting chestnuts—a romantic throwback to sweeter times—are still a common sight in many cities (London, New York, Rome), but I have to confess that acrid and sooty smell has never been my favorite. So it's no wonder that the jar I convinced myself to buy last year sat forlornly at the back of my cupboard these long months, getting hoary. Then I came across a recipe for chestnut and parsnip bisque. A vegan recipe, no less.
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Oh yes, more mushrooms! And it's raining like the devil in these parts, so probably more yet to come. I'm still not complaining. G found a brilliant orange chicken mushroom growing on the split trunk of the oak tree that crashed through our back fence during Irene and it went right into a pot of soup. I have so much maitake (aka hen-of-the-woods or grifola frondosa) in my freezer—and dried, too—that I'm set for hot pots for the rest of the winter. All this bounty has led me to invent a delicious soup: wild mushroom made with wild mushroom stock. The only other wild thing I had on hand (other than my imagination, of course) was some wild rice, so I threw that in, too. It turned out wildly earthy, nutty, chewy—more of a stew, really. Perfect for these days of incipient fall, and for October 1st which is World Vegetarian Day. In fact, I think I read somewhere that October is Vegetarian Awareness month. Meaning that we're supposed to notice they exist? Whatever, it seems like a good excuse to whip up lots of vegetable-centric dishes. Hey, flavor them with bacon, I don't care. But let's explore a few we may not cook on a regular basis: kohlrabi, parsnips, mung bean sprouts, jerusalem artichokes, turnips, puntarelle. It's a wild world but somebody's got to eat it.
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