An autumnal salad
Serves: 4
Takes: 25-45 minutes (depending on whether you cook the spelt with a pressure cooker)
Ingredients
beetroot
3-4 medium red beetroot
1/2 c cider vinegar
1 t dark muscovado sugar
1/2 cayenne pepper
1-2 dried chillies
*
salad
300 g whole spelt
1-2 oranges
1 pomegranate
1 c hazelnuts
2 yellow capsicums
400 g mâche (or other greens of choice)
*
dressing
1 T pomegranate molasses, juice of 1 orange, 1 t sumac, 3 T olive oil.
Method
Wash beetroot, remove tops and tails, and cut each one into eight segments. Place in a saucepan with 1/4 c water, 1/2 c cider vinegar, salt and pepper, 1 t muscovado sugar and 2 dried chillies. Bring to the boil and then cook on medium heat until soft, around 10-15 minutes depending on the size of your beets.
Rinse spelt in a pressure cooker (20 minutes) or saucepan (40 minutes) and cover generously with water. (You can substitute spelt for any other grains, like couscous, quinoa, wild rice, etc.) Once cooked, but still chewy, allow to cool slightly, drain any excess water.
Pierce the skins of a yellow capsicums with a sharp knife and place on an oven tray under the grill, along with the hazelnuts. Roast for around 10 minutes until well browned, checking the hazelnuts regularly to ensure they do not burn.
Once cooked, peel off the skins from the capsicum, remove seeds and cut into slices.
Rub the hazelnuts furiously with a tea towel to remove skins and allow to cool before chopping into rough halves.
Peel oranges and slice into thin rounds.
Rinse and dry mâche.
Remove pomegranate seeds from their shell by cutting in half, holding the pomegranate in your hand, and whacking the back of it with a wooden spoon (check out this video from 47 seconds in for a demonstration).
Make dressing, vigorously mixing together 1 T pomegranate molasses, 1 t balsamic vinegar, juice of 1 orange, 1 t sumac and 3 T good olive oil. Spoon in 1-2 T of the liquid the beetroot cooked in, to taste, until you have a well balanced, glossy dark reddy-brown dressing, that should be sweet and sour.
Once all the components are ready, layer the pieces of the salad, reserving most of the orange and pomegranate pieces for the top, along with a handful of the hazelnuts.
Serve as a meal by itself, or alongside a tray of roasted Autumn root veggies, or with some flatbreads slathered with a green tahini sauce.
The story behind the recipe…
Well, I’m back after a short hiatus, in which I have been cooking plenty (one has to eat, busy or not), but struggling to find the time to write. A warning up front. You’re in the wrong place if you’re here to learn how to cook chestnuts. But if you’d like to know how not to cook chestnuts, read on, read on.
What a month it has been. T’was chestnut season and I was full of ambition. This year, for the first time, I was going to forage for my own chestnuts. I imagined I might roast them and mill my own chestnut flour, or simply make delectable chestnut jam, or maybe they would feature as centrepoint of a salad, a chestnut and orange salad, I thought. Or a chestnut cake?
A chestnut cake had once revived me, a few years back, while walking the GR20 track. We’d decided to do the 180km walk on something of a whim, in 10 days (which required doubling some of the legs). I walked it in new hiking boots that I soon realised were too small. I quickly developed epic, bloody blisters on both heels, which I would gingerly repatch with giant compeeds each morning before setting out. One morning, we set out in head torches before the sun was up, setting off across a narrow, rocky ridge to watch a huge red ball crest above the ocean, the sky glowing with pinks and oranges. We walked down valleys, across streams, through an enchanted green forest, along a stoney, track through never-ending tall trees, and then up, up, up, zig-zagging back and forth along the side of a mountain, until finally, fourteen or fifteen hours later, we stumbled like zombies into the next camp, well past-dark. Unlike most of the camps on the trail, this one doubled as an over-nighter for day hikers and there was a lodge of sort that served hot meals. We were too late for dinner, but they managed to patch together a few bits for us, and then we filled up on giant pieces of Corsican chestnut cake, ordering extra pieces to walk with the next day. How to describe this cake. It was moist, lightly spiced with earthy, nutty undertones. It was understated, shot few with a few soft chunks of chestnuts. It was not fancy, as far removed as one could get from a Parisian patisserie. It was perfect.
For a week or so, I had been watching the giant chestnut tree out the back of my work, trying to dodge its glossy brown nuts as I would park my bike. One evening, I collected a giant shopping bag of them. The next day, in a meeting, I mentioned that I planned to try my hand cooking with the chestnuts I’d collected from out back, lamenting that they were otherwise just going to waste. An older colleague gave me a funny look. Those aren’t edible chestnuts you know, he said, they’re horse chestnuts. They’re poisonous to eat. I started, cleared my throat, embarrassed, thanked him. It had not crossed my mind that there were varieties of chestnuts you couldn’t eat. That had been a close call. Chestnuts: 1; Amelia: nil.
But I was not to be defeated. I turned to the internet to learn how to distinguish between an edible and an inedible chestnut. The easiest way to tell them apart seemed to be the skins. I was looking for the prickly green spikes (pictured above), not the knobbly, smoother conkers that had nearly done me in.
Then a piece of luck. On a walk with a friend one day we noticed two women stooped over under a tree, filling up baskets (tree pictured below, centre). On closer inspection, it was a chestnut tree with the tell-tale green spikey cases littering the ground. I too, filled up a bag. Chestnuts, bring it on.
I took them home, consulted the internet, pre-soaked them, then scored all of the skins before roasting them in the oven. After five minutes of scoring I was beginning to wonder if the chestnuts were worth the effort. My paring knife wasn’t very sharp and my wrists were beginning to tire. But visions of roasting hot chestnuts spurred me on. I was careful when scoring them not to cut too deeply, after all, I wanted a tray of Insta-perfect nuts. I placed them in a hot oven, feeling smug.
Fifteen minutes later, I heard a muffled pop. Then another one, louder, more of a bang. I went back into the kitchen, mystified, and opened the oven door slightly. Just at that moment, one of the chestnuts burst right out of the oven, narrowly missing my eye and hitting me in the forehead. I slammed the door shut. The explosions increased, chestnut flesh ricocheting around the oven, the repeated pop-pop as if I were making popcorn for giants. I turned the oven off and waited for it to cool down before opening it again.
Catastrophe. My chestnuts were a flop. I had needed to score them much more deeply, etching the lines into the nuts. Most of the shells had not opened at all and those that had had now coated the roof and walls of my oven in a crumbly white powder. I tried to prise one open with a knife, and it was soft, furry, crumbly, its insides undercooked and barely edible. My second chestnut attempt ended up in the compost bin along with the horse chestnuts. Chestnuts, I thought, you win.
I had already bought the ingredients for what was to be my stunning chestnut and orange salad. That’s the recipe you have this week, sans chestnuts. I’m sure someone more patient than me could recreate it with the real thing. For the mere humans (and risk-averse) among us, substituting with shop-bought hazelnuts worked a treat.
Thanks for reading, as always.
Amelia.
Rather refreshing to hear when something didn’t work out the first, or second time 😂. Still persevere 😊😊All good in the end.
Amelia , this is a very funny story ….. next year we’ll roast chestnuts from the many kilos chestnuts falling yearly of our trees 😂 we have so many that in the end I put some by the mailbox for passers by to take along. Cheers to the chestnuts 🌰 👍