Merry Christmas and How to Cook Fresh Water Chestnuts for the Holidays!

Season's Greetings from my small family. This will go down as an unprecedented year in many ways, and I'm grateful for having the VWK community to share in all the ups and downs of 2020.

Enroute to the grocery story the other day, we purposefully 'got lost' in our own town, taking turns down unfamiliar streets. Since Santa Cruz is at the ocean, it's no surprise that we ended up there, with a beautiful afternoon view.

We donned our masks and stepped out for a brief stroll. Other locals were there, and we all socially distanced. It was miraculously peaceful and wondrous in beauty. Nature has taught us a lot this year, but it may also save us in many ways.

I made this short video to share:

The trumpet serenade(!) and vista underscore how good moments may be had now, that better days are to come.

Fresh Water Chestnuts for the Holidays

Meantime, small victories count! And, not sticking to traditions is liberating!

My family usually roasts chestnuts for the holidays but this year, I chose water chestnuts instead. Compared to canned version water chestnuts, fresh water chestnuts are delightfully crisp crunchy, with refreshing flavor. However, they are a pain in the butt to peel and there's a lot of waste. That said, prepping water chestnuts are not as hard as shelling tree chestnuts.

All you have to do is trim the ends, then use a knife or better yet, a vegetable peeler to go around the water chestnut to remove the remaining skin. A cocktail helps move things along, too.

After trimming and slicing, I blanched the water chestnuts to rid them of their slightly muddy taste; water chestnuts, Eleocharis dulcis, a type of corm, grow in marshy conditions. My husband jokingly said, "This is Asian-style Christmas chestnuts!"

In Vietnamese, water chestnuts are called củ mã thầy ("koo mah thay"), borrowed from the Cantonese máh tài. (In Vietnamese, củ is formally used to describe a tuber or corm.)

I bought the water chestnuts at the Chinese market, and yes, they come from China. I can't recall ever seeing domestically-grown fresh water chestnuts but maybe some day? Regardless, buy a decent amount as they keep for a good week in the fridge, untrimmed. Once trimmed and submerged in water in the fridge, water chestnuts last about 3 days.

I prep water chestnuts as I need them, mostly for adding to stir-fries. The other night, water chestnuts added crunch to a mess of chow fun — which included chanterelle mushroom, chile garlic sauce in the seasoning sauce, and fresh herb garnish at the end. The red and green are my holiday flair.

Here's a beef chow fun recipe for you to work off of. I swapped the fermented bean sauce with 1 ½ teaspoons of chile garlic sauce. And, I threw in a handful of mushroom with the beef. When done, I scattered freshly chopped dill and flat-leaf parsley on top.

Celebrate and stay healthy.

Take extra good food care of yourselves!