Chestnuts roasting over an open fire..

…well in a toaster oven anyways. The bride has taken on upon herself to show me all of the best of the local area around San Jose. The other day we went on a cruise along Skyline Drive. It’s a road that goes along the ridgeline of the Santa Cruz Mountains in a twisty and heavily wooded path, beautiful and definitely scenic drive. So we’re driving along through these huge trees intermittent with fog and sunlight. Stopping at all of the overlooks and taking pictures when we see a hand painted sign saying “Chestnuts 100 yards”, being in no hurry, I pull over and drive up this dirt path a couple of hundred feet away from the road to a motor home with a dozen cars in the parked in a parking lot.

There’s a guy there with a stack of 5 gallon buckets and leather gloves and I ask how this is done, he points down a dirt path and says “The chestnut trees are down that way about a hundred and fifty yards and you pick them up off of the ground.” My wife and I don’t even know where chestnuts come from at this point. We soon find out they come out of pods that look like they came straight of the Doctor Seuss book The Lorax.

We picked up a pound of chestnuts for 5 bucks and after another beautiful drive back down to San Jose we cut X’s in the side and put them in the toaster oven for 8 minutes. Heather and I ate a quarter of what we picked but the person they were a real hit with was Gatsby (the dog). He’s been fixated on them all day, we think we’ve found his favorite food and it’s not a meat product, weird.