Apple Acorn Crumble

Just a quick recap from previous acorn posts:  this can be made gluten-free by substituting acorn flour for the whole wheat flour;  also, if you don't have any acorns but want to try this recipe, hazelnut flour could be substituted but it is a lot more expensive!

This recipe is for a larger sized crumble, like to feed my family or to take to a potluck, but could be halved for a less piggy family.

Apple Acorn Crumble

1/2 cup honey

2 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp butter, melted

1/4 cup apple cider

9 cups peeled, thinly sliced apples

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup acorn meal

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 cup butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Combine honey, lemon juice, melted butter, and apple cider.  Pour mixture over apple slices and stir well, so each apple slice is coated.  Pour into a 9x13 baking pan.  

In a separate bowl, mix together flour, sugar, acorn meal, and cinnamon,  Cut in butter until mixture resembles fine crumbs.  Spread crumb topping over apples.  Bake for 40 minutes, or until the top is crispy and lightly browned.

Acorn Griddle Cakes (with gluten-free alternative)

I started to get a urge to make these the other day when I was looking over ideas for a possible unit study on pre-European-influenced Native Americans in the area (because, really, there are/were so many nations of Native Americans, it is kind of silly to try to cover all of them in any sort of general unit study like they used to, and I'm guessing they still do, in schools) and I came across mentions of dishes involving acorn flour and maple syrup.  Since I have both of these items in my house (doesn't everyone?  No?) and I remembered I had this recipe in my stack of recipes to try, I figured now would be a good time to try them out.  Yum!

One note on this recipe, as opposed to some I've posted, it really does need to be acorn flour, not acorn meal, since the meal would be too gritty for an ideal griddle cake experience.  Remember, all you have to do to transform acorn meal into flour is just grind it more finely, so no biggie.  Just make sure to do it.  Also remember that acorn flour can be used as wheat flour substitute, so you can easily make these gluten-free by omitting the whole wheat flour and upping the acorn flour to 1 cup.

I made these "fun sized" for the kids and of course served them with real butter and real maple syrup.  It would almost be a crime to serve such great, wholesome natural food with the abominations that are trans-fat-laden margarine or maple-flavored corn syrup marketed as "pancake syrup" or "breakfast syrup" or whatever it is they call that garbage!

Acorn Griddle Cakes

2/3 cup acorn flour
1/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp honey
1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup milk
3 tbsp butter, melted

Combine flours, baking powder, and salt.   In a separate bowl, combine honey, egg, and milk.  Mix liquid mixture into dry mixture, creating a smooth batter.   Add butter.  Drop batter onto a hot, greased griddle or skillet, by the tablespoon for "fun sized" or 1/4 cup for regular sized.  Cook, turning each griddle cake over when it is lightly browned on the bottom and puffed and slightly set on top.

Chocolate Chip Acorn Bar Cookies--Week 3 of the 12 Weeks of Christmas Cookies

I made a very exciting discovery when figuring out this week's cookie recipe.  Acorn flour can actually be used as a straight wheat flour substitute.  This is fantastic!  That means people on gluten-free diets don't have to be slaves to the super high grocery store prices for gluten-free products.  There is an alternative.  It is also fantastic since flour was one of the few things I was still feeling like I'd have to buy from the store until I get some fairly serious land to grow my own, and now that isn't true either.  I probably will still have to buy quite a bit this year, since I found out this miraculous tidbit so late into the acorn season, but next year, gathering acorns will definitely take more of a priority!  Acorn flour does make a denser baked product though, so for flavor/texture preference, I probably won't use anything stronger than a blend of acorn flour and wheat flour for now.  In theory though, you could make these cookies gluten-free by upping the acorn flour (at least some would have to be flour and not meal at that point) to 2 1/2 cups and omitting the whole wheat flour.

(Note:  if you're new here and haven't started gathering acorns for these great recipes, or you live in one of the few-ish places in the world that doesn't have acorn trees, but still want to make these cookies, you should be able to find hazelnut flour at a health food store.  It should give you a fairly similar flavor, I would think.  It is expensive though!)

So how do you make acorn flour?  Once you've made your acorn meal, as described in my previous post on this subject (or one of the many other ways floating around the internet), just grind it again to get a finer, flour-sized product.

Chocolate Chip Acorn Bar Cookies

1 cup butter

3/4 cup honey

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup acorn meal or flour (or combination)

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 375.  Melt the butter in a medium saucepan.  Remove from heat.  Beat in honey, sugar, and egg.  Stir in flour, acorn meal, baking soda, and salt.  Stir in chocolate chips.  Pour into an ungreased jelly roll pan, 15 1/2 x10 1/2 x 1 inch.  Bake 20 minutes.  Cool before cutting into desired sizes.

Here's what everyone else has been baking this week for the 12 Weeks of Christmas Cookies:

Acorn Pound Cake--acorns have never tasted better!

I'm so excited that I learned that sprouted acorns are still good to eat the other day, especially since all the acorns around the wonderful tree I found were sprouted.  From my quicky research, it looked like some experts actually prefer sprouted acorns since they are less likely to be buggy (one thing I saw said they flat out weren't buggy, but I found some that were, so that isn't necessarily true!), sweeter, and actually more nutritious once they are sprouted.  I discovered when shelling them that they are also a lot easier to get out of the shell when sprouted, since it is basically already started for you!

I made my first batch of acorn meal for the year last night.  I was quite pleased to discover that the acorns I collected were very low in tannic acid and it didn't take long at all to flush the tannic acid out and move on to other things.  (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll want to read my earlier post on acorns.)

Anyway, as I've been promising, here is the first of the acorn recipes I have available to share (which I'll be sharing as I make them).  It is a long time favorite, as I can remember helping my mom gather acorns as a kid so she could make a version of this (I added whole wheat flour and changed the seasoning) and I'd take small loaves of it to school for my teachers, who had strangely never eaten acorns in any form before.  The two loaves pictured above is actually a double batch.  The recipe makes one loaf.

Acorn Pound Cake

1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup acorn meal
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350.  Grease a loaf pan and flour the bottom of it; set aside. Mix together oil, sugar, eggs, and acorn meal in a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, combine flours, salt, cream of tartar, and baking soda.  Slowly mix the flour mixture into the acorn mixture, alternating with the milk.  Add vanilla and cinnamon and beat well.  Pour into the prepared loaf pan.  Bake for 1 hour.  Let cool before removing from pan.

Free Food All Around

It boggles my mind how much free food goes to waste in this country because either people don't see it as food, see it as an option, or just flat out don't realize what it is.   When driving down the road with my family yesterday, we noticed scores of black walnuts, smushed into the road, a man raking apples out of his yard (we presume to throw away.  If we hadn't been in a rush, we might have stopped and asked him, since windfall apples could still be made into some pretty awesome cider!), and my 2 year old excitedly was yelling "PEAR!  PEAR! PEAR!" when we approached where we had gotten a total of about 1 1/2 bushels of pears free recently because they had three pear trees in their yard, didn't want the pears, so they stuck a sign on the side of the road offering "free pears", an offer my kids and I were glad to accept!

I was actually contemplating this during my son's most recent soccer practice, as my 2 year old and I gathered black walnuts from schoolyard.  A woman was out walking her dog and approached me to see what I was doing.  She said she'd seen those green balls a lot when she was out walking and even stepped on a few.  She thought they might be some kind of apples or something and was quite fascinated as I described how they went from being annoying green balls that got in the way of the lawnmower to being high quality food for my family.  Later, as I was shelling acorns while supervising my kids on the playground after practice, she came up to me again and told her friend that was with her (who didn't seem so fascinated) about the walnuts and asked what I was doing now, if this was the next step in the walnut process.  I told her that walnuts were much too messy to be dealing with at the playground and that I was working on more free food, but a different kind of nut.  She seemed to think this was somewhat interesting, but I doubt it made any sort of long lasting impact in her life.  Like a person commented on my article about how everyone can afford healthy food, "I don't know many people who are willing to scourer <sic> around for fruit and nuts, that's just not realistic."

Why isn't it realistic?  Free food is all around us, from the broadleaf plantain and dandelion greens that I'm constantly tempted to slip in with my spinach that I'll be blanching and freezing (so no identifiable leaf could later be separated out and I couldn't then be asked "what's this?"), to the pears and apples I mentioned above, to the walnuts and acorns I've been "playing with" the past few days.  It wasn't even a big time commitment to gather the pears, just a quick walk with the family or popping out of the car for literally 5 minutes or less when we were on our way somewhere else.  The acorns were gathered at the trailer park's playground (yes, I should finally be getting some acorn recipes up soon!) while I watched my kids play, until they and their friends joined in the "fun" of helping to gather them.  And like I mentioned, the walnuts were gathered while I had to be at the school for my son's soccer practice.

You want to wear your grubbiest clothes when processing black walnuts...and thick, impenetrable gloves when handling the husked walnuts.  They are called "black walnuts" for a reason (and I now have blackened thumbs and fingers, as well as tanned palms for not heeding that advice more carefully.  Fortunately, I am not a princess, so I don't care).

The processing of nuts can be a bit trickier, but still can be very doable, even if one is short on time.  The neighborhood kids joined right in the fun of stomping the walnuts to get them out of their husks, then it was just a matter of separating them out from the goo, washing them off (with the freakishly warm weather we've been having, I mostly just "powerwashed" them with the jet stream on the sprayer nozzle), and setting them in a cool, dry, dark place (the back of my garage) to cure for two or three weeks.  Yes, the acorns are time consuming to shell, but I'm doing them at odd times when otherwise my hands might be idle, like while watching television or during the car ride I mentioned above (for the rest how to process acorns, see this post).

With the growing number of people going hungry in this world and even in this country, isn't it nuts that so much of this fantastic, free food just goes to waste?

Eating Acorns--How to gather and make acorn meal

My 6 year old proudly brought home a small collection of acorns from his friend's house yesterday.  Of course, they had holes and so weren't good for eating, since they'd be full of bugs or worms or something, but it is a hint of things to come...and a hint that I probably should let y'all know you need to get out there and start scouting for oak trees!   Oak trees don't produce acorns every year, so the tree(s) you found acorns under last year may not help you out this year, so you'll want to head out and figure out which ones are producing this year.

Once you find this year's acorns, you'll want to look at what stage they are in now.  Are they still green?  Are they starting to drop brown acorns with no caps?  If you are finding these under the tree, you don't want to collect them, since they are going to be buggy.  You want to wait for the nice, brown ones with the caps still on to fall, since those are going to be nice and ripe and not be as likely to have bugs.  Once you notice these are starting to fall, if possible, you may wish to spread sheets out under these trees to catch the acorns as they fall.  Then, rather than having to search for them amongst the earlier fallen acorns, grass, and random debris on the ground, you can just grab the corners of the sheet to make a makeshift bag and carry the whole lot home in seconds, laying down a second sheet to catch then next batch for harvesting.  If you're lucky, you'll be able to do this for the next month or two and get a whole bunch of acorns easily.  If the oak trees are on a property you can't do this on, the other easy way to harvest a bunch of acorns is to get kids to do it!  Kids seem to love collecting acorns, even more so if you let them know it will result in treats being made from them later, so might as well put them to work!

Once you get your acorns home, whether it be by sheet or by child, or, as a last resort, hard work on your own part, inspect each one for holes or cracks that may indicate bugs.  Discard the yucky ones and the rest can either be laid out to dry or can immediately be shelled.  I find it very satisfying to use a hammer, since I don't have an actual nutcracker to use, but a nutcracker would actually work better, I'm sure.

Acorns from white oaks can generally be eaten without any further processing (I don't, but I've heard they could be), but other varieties will contain too much tannic acid so need to be processed further before consumption.  There are a number of ways to do this, but I've always put my acorns in a blender (a food processor would probably work better, but I've never had one until this year) with a bit of water and blended them until they are a wet meal.  Then, I've dumped the meal onto a clean cloth that I don't care about (since it is about to be stained forever), placed the cloth in a colander, and run water over it until the water runs clear.

Once the tannic acid has been removed, the meal needs to be dried.  To do this, it can simply be spread out on a thin layer on a baking sheet and set in a warm, <200 degrees, oven until dried.  It may cake during this process to the point you need to regrind it.  If you wish, you can grind it finer at this stage to produce a flour rather than a meal, but I never have. 

I always freeze the meal if I'm not going to use it right away to be safe, but if you do a good enough job drying it, you should be able to store your acorn meal at room temperature for a few weeks or refrigerated for a few months.  If it develops a musty smell after storing it, be sure to discard it.

Once I have some usable acorns, I'll be sure to share my recipes to use them here, so be sure to check back often!