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?

Perhaps You Are Gobsmacked...Or Perhaps You Saw This Coming

We are back in the USA and things are going well for all of us. But one of us is confused.

If you had to choose one of these two to be confused, which would you choose?
I know, it's a tough call. 

If you guessed Tehva, then you win the million dollar prize. As if I had a million dollars. Let's not go there.

Tehva is in a constant state of confusion but the girl is doing her darndest to catch up with everyone around her. Her greatest struggle seems to be that she lacks a common language with her classmates and with the schooling institution in general.

Period or Full Stop?

“Mom…every time my teacher says, ‘Period’ I just crack up.”

“Does she say it a lot?”

“All the time! It’s so funny!”

I appreciate that this particular visual is bilingual.
Tehva would appreciate that, too, if she could
stop laughing about the period thing.

In Tehva’s mind the woman is menstruating excessively, but I am sure that in Mrs. H’s mind, nothing of the sort is transpiring. “What would you have her say instead?”

“I don’t know. Not that.”

Tian, who is decidedly and very intentionally NOT having any communication issues with ANYONE in this tiny hamlet breaks in to lay down the law. “Tehva, you can’t think of it as a full stop anymore. It is a period.”

“I like full stop. And period sounds dumb. It sounds like someone is bleeding.”

“Well they’re not. So get over it. Speak American.”

We are trying hard to get Tehva to simply understand that speaking American and, well, speaking hybrid-been-overseas-in-a-British-dominant-expat-culture-for-my-early-formative-language-years-English are two different things. It is rough going, though.

Dress like this...

What Are the USA's Colors Again?

To make things even harder, yesterday was Patriot Day, meaning the kids were asked to wear red, white and blue to school in memory of 9/11, but I am not sure that anyone actually said that in Tehva's class. It might have been implicitly understood by everyone. Except for Tehva. 

Tehva came downstairs wearing yellow, black and orange. “Where is your red, white and blue? You look like you are dressed for Patriot Day in…maybe…Germany?” (is there a country whose national colors and yellow, black and orange?)

“Huh?”

“It’s Patriot Day. Red, white and blue.”

“Huh?”

“Nevermind.”

Football or Football?

“Mom, one of my teachers is selling tickets for something. Can we go?”

“What is the event?”

“Ummm, they keep saying it is football. But I think it is something else. Is it soccer?”

Silas, who is also, aside from the fact that he uses vocabulary better suited to a college professor and adamantly insisting that he does not follow sports, fitting in quite nicely here, breaks in to clarify things. “No, Tehva, it is called football but it is the one with the funny ball. American football. No one here would buy tickets to soccer.”

“Oh, you mean the one with the ball that kind of looks like a rugby ball?”

Tian then entertains everyone with a tale of watching boys run up and down the field with their football pads bouncing around their ears because the boys are so short. Everyone laughs, but I can see Tehva thinking, “Does this have anything to do with a period?”