How to poison your family in under 30 days

Hi Everyone. This is actually Katherine posting under Aaron's name. We couldn't figure out how to allow me to post under my own name.  Those of you who know me will be shocked to hear that I had tech trouble (ha ha).  Aaron insisted I write this post, since I am the one to blame for almost poisoning our family. Me. The doctor in the house. Should have known better...

What happened was this: I took Daphne and Leo to the playground the other day. As we've already mentioned, the playgrounds here leave a lot to be desired, so the equipment didn't hold their attention for long. What seemed most interesting was all the nuts on the ground. There had been a gigantic wind storm through the day, and a ton of nuts had been knocked down. They were chestnuts. I remembered them from the prickly shell.

Daphne came up with a great plan: "Let's collect them, and roast them, and sell them!" Leo got right into the action, dashing around picking up every nut he could find. "We'll sell so many, we'll get rich!" he was shouting. "We'll be millionaires!"  I couldn't squash their enthusiasm, could I? I helped them smash the pods that weren't broken open yet, so they could get even more nuts. I figured we probably wouldn't really sell them, but at least I could roast them and we could enjoy them. There was a refrain playing over and over in my head by now...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-cxnPRwbNg  (Aaron loves this guy!)

We collected a lot of nuts. The next day, Leo and I went back to the park and got another bagful of them. When Aaron saw them, he said, "are you sure you can eat those"? I said, "well, they wrote a song about roasting them, and we've had roasted chestnuts before at Christmas parties, and the trees were in a children't playground, so I can't imagine any chemicals were used on them." There was another couple there collecting nuts with their kids. They must be fine.  But, did I look it up online? No.

You can tell this is not going to turn out well, right?


We had 3 big bowls of them by now.

When we got home, Leo kept asking over and over when we could start our scheme to become rich millionaires by selling the roasted nuts, so I looked up a recipe online and got to work. Scoring the shells was not easy, so I just decided to start with about a dozen, to see how they would taste. After simmering in salt water for a few minutes, they roasted in the oven and made the place smell great!!

We let them cool a bit, then cracked one open. Oh no! Very bitter!! Had to spit it back out. We cracked another one open. It smelled really bitter too. Neither Leo nor I even wanted to try it. But, I didn't have time to think about it much more because we had to get dinner ready, and we had a couple of new friends from our language school coming over for drinks. "I'll look up another recipe tomorrow, OK Leo?"

Fast forward to after dinner and our guests have arrived. Christoph is a ski instructor from Austria and Maximilian is an economics student from Germany. We met them in our French class. They came over for drinks. Christoph noticed the 3 big bowls of chestnuts right away and said, you aren't going to eat those, are you? They're poisonous! We call them "Horse chestnuts".

Well, a quick search online told me that we had gathered 3 large bowls of toxic chestnuts. Egad! Symptoms of toxic ingestion include vomiting, lethargy, etc, etc. Oh no! Leo said at dinner he didn't want to eat any more. Is he getting ill? He only had a tiny bite! And spit it back out. I hope tonight won't be our first trip to the local ER! We don't even have health insurance officially yet (that post will be coming soon).  I checked on him. Seemed fine.  Commence the nice evening with our guests.

Left: edible sweet chestnuts. Right: toxic, poisonous horse chestnuts frequently found on French playgrounds for children

This morning I broke the news to Daphne and Leo that the chestnuts are poisonous. My plan is this: let's take them to the river and have a contest to see who can throw them the farthest into the river. Leo was disappointed about not becoming a millionaire, but remembered that it was actually Daphne's idea in the first place. But, he was up for a trip down to the river. It took a while to throw all those chestnuts in. The swans came by to see if we had anything they'd like. Even they turned up their noses.

Adieu, toxic horse chestnuts. In my next post I'll write about my plan to learn how to cook while I'm here. Because, to be honest, when I think about the future, it just wouldn't sound plausible to tell anyone that I lived in France for any length of time, but never learned to cook.  

Paul Bocuse beckons me to learn to cook while in Lyon.