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.

There Must Be A Easier Way...

This is tiring work, building up a mini-homestead from a trailer park lot and trying to get it basically done in one season!  A lot of days, I'm starting to wonder if this is all worth it.  Surely, there must be an easier way!

Well, I suppose some people could and would just go to the store and buy all their food, but considering the severe limitations on my budget and near snobbishness about what my family eats, demanding a high quality, all natural product at nearly no cost, that's just not going to happen for me.

I suppose "normal" people with my food budget (about $30 a week for a family of 5-6, if you are just joining me) would probably go to a food bank or two on a pretty regular basis.  Again, I don't see that as an option for us, in part because of the requirement that my family be fed good food...and because I don't know where there are any food banks around here. 

There is one other option that I know about.  No, not stealing, since that has the potential to be extremely costly in other ways, like the risk of getting caught, not to mention any karmic retribution.  I'm talking about wild harvesting or foraging.  I actually did turn to that way years ago, before I had the space and knowledge to garden in limited space.  When my oldest son was about 2 years old, I tried to live with his dad for a while and things were extremely tight then too.  We got absolutely no government help (probably only because I didn't know how to apply for it, since I'm sure we would have qualified!), not even WIC and only had about $5 a month to spend on food for the three of us.  That's right--$5 a month!  At the time, my parents' house was too far away to get help from them in the way of garden produce, so that wasn't even an option for help.  We were on our own.  Every now and then, my son's idiot dad would bring home some fancy-schmancy meat-alternative thing, since were leaning toward vegetarianism at the time, but he was not shopping savvy at all, so sometimes that was the only grocery for the week beyond the $5 I had access to.  And that $5 went toward buying milk for our toddler.  I'd sometimes snag a little for cooking too though--which helped a lot for making the weeds I'd scrounge up more palatable.

I'm sure I did a lot of things wrong on my foraging expeditions.  I had access to field guides from the library, but that didn't always tell me what I needed to know, like how to find the weeds that didn't taste like, well, weeds!  I think I have found such a book for future expeditions though.* Pocket Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants by Kathryn Higgins is a clear, concise guide to wild edibles.  Unlike a lot of the books I used at the time, this "pocket guide" will actually fit in a pocket (yes, I tested this with my jeans' pocket!) and it's spiral binding makes it easy to manipulate and use in the field.  If you are looking for a particular plant, for example, it would be very easy to leave it open to the page with the beautiful photo of that plant to make identification very easy.  Each entry also gives a brief, easy to understand and use description of the plant itself, as well as edible, medicinal, and other uses, so you can see at a glance if that is something worth picking when you find it!

Some other features I love about this book is that it gives clear warnings for a lot of plants that need them, like ones you don't want to use if pregnant or ones that may have a similar looking poisonous plant.  Another thing I love is that it has listings of further resources in the back, including to more field guides (mostly for the western US and Rocky Mountain areas), more books on medicinal uses of plants, as well as cookbooks for wild edibles and books on making medicines from the wild plants.  I especially could have used those further resources years ago!  I had to guess on a lot of things...and I'm sure I guessed wrong more often than not!  The book also has gathering guidelines in the back to make foraging trips more successful and some wonderful blank pages in the back--brilliant for keeping track of where you found things for previous years, or making notes of what worked or didn't for recipes or medicines.

Even though this book was probably written for and about more the western US and/or Rocky Mountains, there were still a lot of plants I recognized as being in Michigan as well.  This is a case where I can clearly see that the price of buying this book would well be worth it, since by using the information in it to feed your family and gather plants to make homemade medicines, it could easily save someone thousands of dollars over a lifetime!

As for me, I probably will use this book quite a bit, once I get the garden going.  However, for now, as I pull the many weeds already growing in my garden, it was also a source of frustration, as I realized that most, if not all the "weeds" I had been pulling out and tossing aside, were also food.  On some level, foraging can be easier than gardening, but I like the assurance and insurance of having fruits and vegetables I know my family likes growing right in my Trailer Park Homestead.

Find the food:  I was just trying to grow spinach here (lower right hand corner), but, if I'm not mistaken every single plant here is just as edible!

*   Disclaimer:  Pocket Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants was sent to me as a freebie to review.  I told the representative of Motherlove Herbal Company, who published the book, that I would only be interesting on doing any reviews if I was completely honest about any products I reviewed.