Chestnuts Roastin' and Sweet Potatoes Bakin'

How appropriate.

Just tonight I was coming home and I saw a familiar seasonal makeshift stand by the road a block away from my place - the roasted chesnut and sweet potato stand. Its one of my seasonal favorites, something that I constantly look forward to when autumn and winter dips in.

For the uninitiated, the roasted chesnut is .. well, roasted. Its got this amazing rich, nutty flavor when you crack it open from the shell and pop it into your mouth. If I recall correctly, it used to be occasionally available at Manila chinatown, but I don't really know exactly when or where because I don't do the buying; my mom does. She'd bring back a bagful of these delightful morsels, and it'd be finished in.. oh well.. around 4 hours. It only takes that long by the way because the shells are hard to crack. But the meat is defnitely worth the time spent cracking. My mom would ocassionally add chesnuts in into our typical pork adobo, and I'm shameless to admit, I'd pick out the chesnuts instead of the pork. Chesnuts by themselves are great, just like others nuts (macadamia immediately comes to mind) but roasted chesnuts are even better. Its like the comparison between a freshly baked pandesal and pandesal that's been left for a few hours on the kitchen table. The warm, freshly roasted taste is indescribable.

As for the "roasted" sweet potato, I'm surprised we don't have a supply of it in the Philippines. Considering there's camote-Q, which is pretty popular by itself, sold usually outside schools in the Philippines along the sidelines together with street foods like banana-q, turon, isaw and fishball. The current camote-q version is fried together with brown sugar, usually sold skewered in sticks just like the more famous banana-q, but sometimes its also sold in the form of typical french fry "wedges". Roasted sweet potato would make a great addition to the street food ensemble. Of course, its not really "roasted" the same way as the roasted chesnut, but it is actually charcoal cooked (primitively baked, if you will). The smell of charcoal baked sweet potato is astounding in itself. Its even more amazing when you "break" the potato open and greeted by one of the sweetest fumes around (think of the persistent durian smell but of a more pleasant, sweeter aroma). The taste is even better.. if the sweet potato is picked correctly and ripe, its going to taste exactly like camote-q, as sweet, and yet more smooth and mellow, since the natural sugar is inherent within the sweet potato, unlike the camote-q, which has gobbles of crystallized brown sugar on the surface. If the taste isn't enough to assuage you to become a religious follower, at least you can rest assure that this version doesn't come in "fried" and with additional processed sugar. In effect, this decreases your chances of obesity, diabetes and a rotting sweet tooth when eaten in place of the traditional camote-q.

Of the two, I particularly like the baked sweet potato more, and it comes in two types: the typical yellow ones, and the more favorable (at least for Hong Kong people) purple yams. To me they both taste the same, but I think the purple ones are more coveted because they are more rare, and tastes slightly milder in terms of sweetness, and have more of the deep sweet potato-ey taste.

I've been tempted to grab a snack from the stand, but I figured, autumn just came in, and I'll be having few months' worth of chances to get them. Besides, they both taste better when the weather is extremely cold, and they are not exactly for the atkins follower freak, since both have loads of carbohydrates. I'm not really an off-carbohydrates person, but I can't seem to be able to munch down on too much rice at any one seating, and this is most probably the same. But an occasional snatch of them would be good...

I can't wait.

Autumn is starting to sound pretty good to me. :)