May 14, 2001 06:12 PM
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I believe the following story took place in the fall of 1968 when I was a sophomore in high school.
Anyway, my folks and I got together with our longtime friends--Oliver/''Red'' & Edna McLaughlin and their teenaged daughter, Ruby--and spent the day in Brown County.
For those not familiar with Indiana, Brown County (located in the hilly southern part of our state) has long been a favorite place to go and enjoy the colors of autumn.
Since the place is so popular in the fall, the first thing we did was to remain in an unmoving line of traffic for about a million years until our bladders were screaming for relief to the point that we'd wished we were wearing diapers!
When we finally reached Nashville (Indiana, not Tennessee--though I bet we could have made it to Tennessee much faster, considering the lines), we looked for restrooms and found ourselves, once more, waiting in line.
My bladder has grown more impatient over the years, so I never would have ''lasted'' under the same circumstances today. However, back then, I managed to hold my water until I could deposit it in the proper receptacle, once it became available.
Originally, we were going to eat at The Nashville House, but the wait for that bordered on ridiculous, so we looked around their well-stocked country store for awhile and then drove on out to the park where we spent some time looking at the scenery before eating at The Abe Martin Lodge (located in the park) and starting towards home.
At that time The Abe Martin Lodge and The Nashville House were both owned and operated by the same family, so they served pretty much the same menu--which included, among other things, those wonderful fried biscuits and apple butter.
On the way home, we stopped at this open-air market that claimed to be selling the very same apple butter that was served at The Nashville House and The Abe Martin Lodge. We paid good money for that and, upon eating it at home, found out that it didn't even come close!
Not only that, but we also bought some chestnuts there--which turned out to be green.
I believe it was Edna who mentioned that, maybe, they just needed to be roasted.
Well, a few days later, I was sitting in the family room watching TV when the thought occurred to me that it might be fun to roast a few of those chestnuts.
So I preheated the oven to 350 degrees. While I was waiting for the over to heat up, I took an edged baking sheet and dumped a couple dozen chestnuts onto it.
While I was waiting for them to roast, I returned to the family room to watch TV.
Pretty soon, I heard a couple of poofing sounds but thought nothing about it. When I heard a couple of reports that sounded like a small cap gun being fired, I still thought nothing about it because the well-known Christmas song, SLEIGH RIDE, talked about watching the chestnuts pop.
Before I had the chance to think too long on whether or not this was normal, the volume of the explosions had reached firecracker-decibel-level, and I could see that the chestnuts were now jumping out of their shells at a rapid rate and hurling themselves against the window of the oven, making it look like the result of a bunch of giant grasshoppers coming in contact with the windshield of a moving car!
Obviously, there was something very wrong with this picture!
I opened the oven door, and one or two chestnuts went flying by me, just coming within inches of hitting me.
Using potholders, I quickly grabbed the baking sheet, took it to the sink, and ran water over it, causing a couple of the chestnuts to go ''poof! poof!'' and jump about three inches off the surface of the baking sheet.
Studying the oven, I found out that its walls, window, and ceiling had all been ''decorated'' with exploded chestnuts. What a mess!!!
When I later told that story to a friend, I was advised to make a slit in each chestnut shell before roasting the chestnuts.
Slit nothing! On those occasions when I want to roast chestnuts--and, mostly, I just love eating them raw--I take them completely out of their shotgun shells before doing so!
If you'd like another even more incredible story re: how not to treat your poor oven, go to the writing site called WrittenByMe and read I WAS A PRE-TEEN ARSONIST by Candice923 (who not only also writes for here but was also the one who referred me).
