Chestnut Apple Stuffing

Hey, I'm Louisa Shafia, at eHow.com. Today, I'm making a chestnut and apple stuffing. I'm starting out with a traditional stuffing base of some diced onions and celery. I've got a little bit of minced garlic in here and I'm going to add some fresh sage. Sage is a wonderful and classic stuffing ingredient. So, I'm just going to coarsely chop this, throw it in with my onions which are already smelling good and I just want to cook these onions and celery until they're soft. They don't need to be browned. Um, smells good already. Meanwhile, I'm going to dice my chestnuts. So this is what fresh chestnuts look like. These are those wonderful chestnuts roasting on an open fire that you hear about at the holidays. You can find them in glass jars like this or in bags and they come with the shell already removed. This is a really easy way to cook with them and they're ready to go. So all I'm going to do is coarsely chop them and if you've never tasted chestnuts they have a really sweet taste. They almost taste like sweet potatoes but with a drier more dense texture. They're really good, very savory. They're wonderful with mushrooms and just a great kind of warming ingredient in the cold weather. So I'm combining them with some organic apples that I diced up and that taste of the apples and chestnuts is going to come together with the savoriness of the onions and give me a really well rounded stuffing. So the onions look nice and soft. I'm going to add in my apples and chestnuts. Now you can also buy chestnuts in the shell and make roasted chestnuts from scratch and that's a really great technique and something that's kind of fun to do with kids. All you do is you take the chestnuts, cut an X in them and then roast them in the oven at 450 until the shells start to come off. Then you have to pull them out of the oven and remove the shells while they're still warm but they are so delicious and you know, hey, maybe you'll do it once during the Winter and that's enough. Meanwhile over here, I have some bread cubes that I already cooked in the oven. These are whole grain bread cubes. They're toasted with just a little bit of olive oil and salt and I'm going to mix all of this together to make my stuffing. I really just needed to heat my apples and chestnuts all the way through. They don't need to be cooked anymore. So I'm going to turn off the heat and stir these into my bread cubes. Okay now I'm going to mix everything around until it's well incorporated and at this stage you can add a little bit of stock. You can add vegetable stock or chicken stock but you don't have to add stock. You can also just use plain old tap water. That's just fine. But you do want to add a little bit of liquid just to help everything cook and mix the flavors. Okay so this is ready to bake and I'm going to put this in the oven at 400 and let it cook for about 30 minutes and what I'm looking for is a golden brown texture on top and I want all that liquid to dry out and when it comes out of the oven this is what it looks like, really beautiful, golden brown on top. You can see the bits of chestnut are in here, the apples, and I didn't even have to peel these apples because they're organic so you've got that red color in there and you can see the chunks of red are really big. These are perfect for soaking up gravy or pudding with mashed potatoes. I hope you'll give chestnuts a try. I'm Louisa Shafia. I'll see you next time here at eHow.com.