Bang, bang, I swing the hammer
down, scattering acorns all over my kitchen counter and my floor. Apparently you don’t need to hit the
acorns quite so hard. Tap, tap,
and I crack them open. I can now
pull the shells apart to reveal the nutty meat. I try popping the meat out with no luck. I try using a knife, and then my
fingernails. The nut’s meat
crumbles a little, but stays in place.
My husband, watching me while working on his computer, suggests using
our grapefruit spoon. As I gain a
little technique, the serrated spoon seems to work the best, and in just three
long hours I have a small pie tin full of acorn meats. I had to toss nearly half of the nuts
due to worms or rot. I tasted an
acorn and nearly spit it out right onto my kitchen floor due to its bitter
taste.
Yesterday while collecting the
acorns I was full of enthusiasm.
It was a pretty day in the woods and acorns were easy to find. I had an aura of self-sufficiency; I knew
that no matter what might happen some day I could feed my family. I had never thought about acorns as a
food supply before. I fantasized
about collecting a bagful every week, free and healthy food. Then the work began, separating the
acorns with obvious worm holes, learning how hard to hit the nuts, then
dragging the meat out. Tapping
away I thought about some of our colloquial sayings such as “he’s a tough nut
to crack,” used when it is difficult to really understand a person or to get
that person to open up and talk about himself. I cracked open several acorns to find brown dust instead of
healthy yellow meat, and I thought about another phrase we use, “He’s a bad
nut.” My husband might watch me
tapping away at these acorns and think of another use of the word nut, as in
“she is nuts to spend her time this way.”
The next step is to grind the meat
into a watery powder with my food processor. I end up with a brown gooey mess. Next I pour this acorn paste on a kitchen towel over a
strainer. I rinse the paste with
cold water and squeeze out the excess liquid, repeating to get rid of the
tannins. Tannic acid gives acorns
a bitter taste, but after rinsing only a couple of times I try a bite and am
pleased. My acorn powder has a
light nutty flavor.
My next step was to dry the nut
paste, so I spread the acorn powder out on a dish and put the dish into a warm
oven. Now I am excited again. A single day of work yielded enough
acorn flour to fill one pint jar, but the flour had a good taste.
I think back to when my children
were babies. I remember buying the
little jars of premade baby food, until one day someone told me I could feed my
baby other things. We mashed a
banana and fed it to him. I was
shocked, for some reason I had thought babies could only eat official “baby
food.” From that moment on I
enjoyed creating my own healthy food, and I felt good feeding it to them. This was a similar feeling, a
revelation that not all food has to come from big box stores. I gardened when we owned a house, I
shop farmers markets, but eating edible wild foods seems even more natural,
more sufficient. Even so the
work to gain ratio is high and it is hard for me to imagine living off of
acorns and acorn flour like Sam from the book “My Side of the Mountain.” As modern men and women we really take
our healthy, tasty and plentiful food for granted. Preparing the acorn flour really was a lot of work but we
will all enjoy eating our pancakes tonight with supper.
Has anyone else tried this, or
anything similar? Do you have wild
edible food recipes or stories about using gardens and canning to teach
children where food comes from? If
so, please feel free to share.
The following link to PBS Foods will take you to the recipe I used. If you fix these pancakes please let me know how they turned out. I learned that I need to spend more time in the grinding stage, a few of my pancakes had acorn parts instead of acorn flour.
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