This is one of those years where we seem to have a million acorns falling from the trees. Yesterday I even got hit in my back with one as I walked to the hen house. Beware the falling acorns!
When I was younger, I was a devout follower of Euell Gibbons (pre-Gape Nut cereal days) One of his tricks for eating from the wild was to eat acorns. But as anyone who has ever eaten an acorn knows, they are incredibly bitter, mouth-puckeringly bitter. There is no way you can eat more than a few of those babies without getting a nasty stomach ache.
Euell’s work-around for this was to boil the acorns in several water baths. Eventually, the heat and water leached out the bitterness and you could eat the nuts or let them dry and then grind them into powder to make acorn flour suitable for yummy pancakes while on the trail. Continue reading