Acorns...A Childhood Dream

When I was a youngun', I read My Side of the Mountain and thought, "Man-o-man...one day I want to hollow out my own tree in the woods, cure me some deer skin, and fill my food stores with acorns so that I can too enjoy acorn flour pancakes." I read and reread that book, scheming and planning, memorizing the technique for acorn collection and storage because you never know when you might need to know how to deal with acorns.

Well low and behold, that day has come and acorn collection time is upon us.

My rationale for what you will soon see was a foolish endeavor was that going from this

To these fine products was as simple as

Pick and dry...and we have dried apples!

Pick and boil...and we have apple syrup!

And so off we headed into the world of acorn processing. 

Damn those apocalyptic, end of world blogger types who swear up and down that acorns are well worth the time it takes to process squirrel fodder. And damn them again for claiming that six changes of water will take your acorns from bitter, inedible nuggets of nastiness to healthy, delicious, satisfying treats. It has been six weeks and we still aren't there. 

Once again, the thing that rankles me is the blogosphere, where folks claim that this acorn processing stuff rocks. Really? I just have to set the record straight, dammit. 

So here is what you get if you decide that you need to play with acorns.

First you have to pick them up which, if you have middle schoolers, is potentially embarrassing. Thus, I recommend the first step in this process very highly. There are any number of different kinds of oak trees and even, so they say, a sweet oak that drops acorns that need hardly any processing but I think that might be a load of kaka. 

The next step. getting the acorns out of their shells part, also ranked pretty high on the fun-stuff-to-do-when-you-have-no-money scale. It got high marks because you get to smash stuff with hammers. Next, though, comes the poopy water stage.

Yup, that muck comes out of acorns (and yes, there are acorns in there, under the muck) through a process called leeching, which involves lots of boiling water and baking soda. Is it any wonder our forefathers decided pretty quickly that importing flour from Europe was the way to go? 

You get about six weeks of poopy water before the acorns stop being so full of tannin that they constipate you and their bitterness curls your toes. Then the water looks like this instead:

 Many hours of drying in the dehydrator and they start to look like mouse turds.

And they then can be thrown in a jar and placed in the cupboard until the trauma of having undergone this experience begins to fade.

I think the next thing you are supposed to do is grind them into a sort of acorn meal and make things out of them--like bread, noodles, and coffee (and My Side of the Mountain pancakes). Really! However, the same idiots who swore that this whole process would take days are also the ones who posted recipes for all that stuff so we have yet to eat these shriveled, blackened nuggets.

Anyone in the market for some acorns?

What You Don't See...

Many downsides of moving exist and, having grown up a product of the US military, I know them all. But there are also downsides of staying in a place for too long. Chief among them is that you forget to see.

If we had lived here in Sweet Little Town, USA, for forever, we would forget to notice that the leaves went from green to stunning scarlet almost overnight last month. We might even fail to see that our house is freezing cold all the time. Or that we can never dress in fewer than six layers these days.

But I digress (because I am freezing cold and even my brain feels numb).

This week has been the most amazing week ever because this week it snowed. And because we are suddenly living in a manner that includes very little structured anything aside from the multiple hours that The Man requires we spend everyday getting smart at the local school house, we had lots of time to go out and see the snow.

We were stunned. Snowflakes have shape! Snowflakes are cold! Snowflakes get stuck in cobwebs and on mittens and sit there staring back at you, definite in their shape. Snowflakes are, in short, quite astonishing and worthy of constant comments.

A snowy miracle

Yes, that's snow on the roof of the car. We
were
nearly wetting ourselves.

Also of note was the amount of snow that fell without anyone else in this town taking much notice. I mean, there was a WHOLE DUSTING OF SNOW! And some of us were outside running around in it with photo-taking equipment because, well, it's SNOW!









Some of us (anonymity is important in this blog, but only when I cannot remember which child says what) wanted to go sledding in the pathetic dusting of snow that fell during the afternoon and early evening hours. However, when the physics of sleds was explained, that plan was quickly abandoned in favor of snowman making.

And I shall call him Bob...

To lend a bit of perspective, that is a mini carrot for a nose, and balled up next to Bob there is a black glove, child's size extra small. Bob is, shall we say, petite.

It is still snowing out as I type, but none of it is sticking too much. Bob lays slumped on the front porch and a squirrel made off with his nose at some point during the morning. However, we are seeing snow as I have never seen it before because, well, it's like I have never seen it before.

Snow is cool (okay, that's bad, I know).