Comfort Foods

#2 Kuri

Chad and I went treasure hunting for one of Japan's popular fall foods, chestnuts.

What a beautiful find! Unfortunately, not many chestnuts were left so neatly for the taking. We spent some time searching around trees, shaking them and hoping for little chestnut gifts to fall down to us. When they did, we used our feet or gloved hands to pull away the prickly covering and retrieve the nuts.

Our hard work paid off! Check out our loot above and below.

However, the work wasn't over yet. Many students told me I should try making kurigohan, or chestnut rice, so I thought I'd give it a try. The first step would be softening the chestnuts and shelling them.

I boiled the nuts for about ten minutes before draining the water from the pot. The shells were still quite difficult to remove--after a few patient minutes, I became impatient and decided to attack the task with a spoon.


From there, I added the nuts to uncooked rice in a rice cooker with a little salt and let everything cook. Meanwhile I grilled some salmon, fixed up a couple small dinner salads, and threw together a Korean cucumber salad as well. Below is the little feast from our afternoon toils!


The chestnut rice turned out pretty nicely, although I think a little soy sauce and sake would have brought the flavors out a bit better. There are many ways to make the rice, but after taking an entire afternoon to make ours, we decided buying it from a department store (as pictured below) might be the best future option for us. The kurigohan below had sweet red beans inside and was cooked with sweet sake. Pretty yummy!