Near and around our house many squirrels have been visiting us. Some say that this is due to a nearby artificial lake that has been drained. We don’t mind them too much as of yet, because they haven’t done any damage and they are cute. But as we daily walked our nephew and niece to school we noticed the plethora, the abundance of acorns. It made me think of a book a read about a year ago called, “Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia Butler. It’s a great read, and I think about it quite often during the economic hardship so many are facing. The book is set in the future, perhaps a not too distant future, when there is more or less a total economic collapse in the United States ruled by chaos and unfettered predatory capitalism. The protagonist of the book, Lauren, re-imagines both life and faith. An ongoing theme of the book is the acorn. As a girl, her community in southern California, a gated community hanging onto some semblance of middle class life by the skin of their teeth, are incredible dependent on gardening and living off the land in their own back yard. One way they do this is by harvesting and eating acorns. Lauren enjoys acorn bread. So I decided to give it a try. The squirrels can share, believe me, there is more than enough.
Our daughter Rebecca, nephew Steve, and niece Ashlee, each got an empty milk jug and we spent about an hour picking acorns off the sidewalk along our residential street. Even our baby, little Chaz helped out (shhh don’t tell Sheri). We took them home and spent some time splitting open the shells and digging out the raw acorn nut. This is a painstaking process.
Next we blended the acorn nuts in water and put them in mason jars and since I only I have one, we put the rest in plastic containers. Now, according to what I read on the internet we need to spend a few days leaching out the tannins.
So there you have it, day one of making Acorn bread. We had a lot of fun doing this on day one. It was a great way to keep the kids occupied for a morning, it was educational, and it was green. I hope the world never comes to what is described in “Parable of the Sower” but if you’re in need of stretching your dollars like we are, you might enjoy scavenging/harvesting wild acorns too!
Thanks to www.californiaoaks.org/html/reference.html for the free information in: “Acorns and Eat ‘Em.”
Stay tuned for more Acorn action to follow!
You’ve got to let us know how the bread turns out. So glad that “Parable” was so inspiring – and that it was great family-time too.
Thanks Dr. Coleman, I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out!