Chestnuts?

Well, this weekend took a turn I was not expecting. First, my hubby, who starts twitching when there are too many people around, suggested we head up to the apple orchards, on a weekend, in October. Second, when we arrived, all ready to pick apples, we were informed that due to the wonderful weather we had all summer, all the apples came in early and there were simply none left to pick.

I was a little disappointed until the lady then told us that the same weather had caused the chestnuts to arrive early as well and many of them were ripe for the picking. You will have to forgive my excitement over such a little thing, but as I have never even seen a chestnut tree, you can imagine my excitement when I was informed we could pick chestnuts for ourselves.

As it turns out, chesnuts hide themselves inside a very prickly, hard outer shell. So the first step was to knock down the chestnut pods without touching them. For once, K's obsession with her umbrella came in handy.  You can see Em in mid-swing.

Step two is to step on and crush the pods by twisting them a little under your foot.  This causes the three chestnuts inside to pop out.  K was totally intimidated by the pokey spikeys at first that she was barely going to try.  Don't worry, her confidence grew and she soon totally into it.

The last step is to pick up the newly freed chestnuts and put them in your bag.

I love the color of the shell!

So, for those who have also not seen a chestnut tree before, this is what they look like.  Each spike ball has chestnuts in it.

If they dry all the way, you can see they crack on their own and drop the chestnuts.

Eventually Em just wanted to collect the chestnuts, so K would crush them and Em grab them.

I'm sorry, this was fascinating!  Usually for us, the joy of taking the girls places is to watch them see it for the first time.  We get to relive that excitement through them.  I was thrilled to also be doing something for the first time, together, with them.

Holding the spikey pod so carefullly.

This is the latest pose.  It will disappear very quickly, trust me, but as we need to document all things, here it is.  :-)

So, with enough prickers in our shoes, off we went to press our own cider.

First we collected apples...from the boxes they were bringing in from the farm...yes, there are still apples, just not in the "u-pick" part.

Then we washed them.

Then we ground them up like ground beef.

This turned into the girls putting apples in while Daddy turned the crank.  :-)

Then we crushed the ground up pieces to get the juice out.

Finally, we poured the juice into our very own bottle of fresh apple cider.

We had a blast!  It didn't take long though, as more and more people began to show up, for Dad to start twitching, so we headed home. I love fall!

And yes, we roasted chesnuts on a not-so-open fire.  I googled it and we shelled a pan full.  They were honestly a little bland - they are a substitute for potatoes in Europe.  So we all agreed, chestnuts, although fun to collect, need to be decorations, unless someone else is going to do the labor of shucking.

God Bless!!