Sophisticated Soup

“Roasting Chestnuts. Chestnuts, roasting. Maybe roasted instead of roasting...”

I was pondering words, and the order thereof, to enter into the search engine of my trusty computer so I could learn how to... you guessed it... roast chestnuts.

R-O-A-S-... Before I’d even gotten through the first word, my desired choice had popped up among the many that populated the selection box.

“Heavens!” I said to myself, “If they make the search process any easier, we’d just have to think the search word and it would appear on the screen!”

I had a new recipe, you see, snipped fresh from last Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine. The Magazine is very cosmopolitan and trendy, and I like the feeling (however temporary) of sophistication that a spanking new gourmet recipe brings to my humble kitchen.

‘Creamy Chestnut Soup’ was the name of my project. The commentary that was prelude to the recipe recommended using canned roasted chestnuts, as the roasting and shelling of the nuts was somehow difficult, though the detail and degree of difficulty was not delved into. It was assumed, I suppose, that all readers had roasted chestnuts at one time or another in their lives, and knew what the process entailed...

But I hadn’t, and I couldn’t find canned chestnuts anywhere in town. I only found the regular kind, ready for roasting. But I wasn’t. Ready, that is. Because I didn’t know how. Thus the search.

I chose the ‘oven’ method over the ‘open fire’ method, seeing as I don’t have a fireplace. Roasting and shelling and chopping was the work of a couple hours, but finally I had the 2 & 1/2 cups of roasted nuts that the recipe called for.

The rest was easy. I had procured the other unusual ingredients (leeks and a pear), that the recipe called for, and an hour of chopping, sauteing, simmering and pureeing later the creamy soup was ready to eat.

Mm. Rich, sweet and complex.

Almost worth all the trouble.
.