How to process chestnuts for storage and flour? And how to cook them?

I think chestnuts would make a nice perennial staple food here if I could figure out how to easily process them for storage. So far, we’ve enjoyed roasting or boiling them, peeling them, and then eating them as-is.

There is a kind of chestnut cracker available in organic shops here which I think is made from roughly half chestnut flour and half rice flour, they are really tasty and I’d be interested to learn how to make my own chestnut flour to make something similar. What would be the best way to go about doing this?

Elisabeth Luard’s peasant cooking book says that in parts of Europe chestnuts are available shelled and dried for sale along with dried beans and other staples. How would this have been done on a homestead scale without special equipment?

Also what are your favourite recipes for chestnuts?

At one time in the U.S. it was said that a squirrel could hop onto a chestnut tree on the east coast and go all the way to the Mississippi River halfway across the U.S. without ever having to touch the ground, just by jumping from one chestnut tree to another.  Alas, the chestnut blight killed the trees.  Today chestnuts are rarely seen except for farms that grow them and those are usually the  Chinese hybrids.   If I’m fortunate enough to obtain some, I freeze them a couple of days first, before roasting and shelling.  Notch the shell before roasting at 275 degrees for an hour, so they don’t explode in the oven, creating a mess.   I just put on the floor on top of a board, and press a knife down the center halfway thru.  That makes it easier to peel later too.  So good just out of hand after roasting.  Once I overcooked some and could not eat them that way.  Threw into a pot of rice and they were scrumptious.  I like them in cornbread stuffing too, with cranberries, for Thanksgiving.  

What I did a couple of years ago was to parboil them, peel and mash, and then spread the meal out in thin layers on the food dehydrator (baking sheets and a slow oven would work for this, too). When the meal was dry, I gave it a whiz with the stick blender and put it into a sealed container. There's still some there and it has kept brilliantly.

Now, I'm just waiting for the young chestnut trees to equal the productivity of the big older one that died suddenly two years ago :-(  We got enough this autumn to make two good pots of soup.