Acorns - not just for squirrels any more.

We had a tremendous crop of acorns this year. In September and early October there was a steady rain of oak seeds, keeping me awake at night as they pinged off the neighbor's carport, my aluminum ladder and the roof. I remember boom years like this when I was growing up. We used to gather bucketfuls of them and chuck them at each other. My grandmother, a transplant from Italy, used to talk about making pancakes with them. Well the nut didn't fall far from the tree so a mere forty years later I decided to try it myself.

Recipes for baking with acorns are thick on the ground (sorry) and I have an adaptation of one below. However the most important step is this: Get the right acorns. Find a white oak and use those. Acorns from most red or black oaks have such a concentration of tannins that they would be indigestible if you could bring yourself to eat them. I don't know how the squirrels do it.

Anyway, back at your nice white oak, you can get them right off the ground if they are unblemished and uncracked. Each tree is different, so crack one open on the spot and take a tiny bite of the meat. What you want is a slight sweetness and then maybe a little bitterness. if you get a strong tannic pucker like you do from a big oaky red wine, find a different tree.

Gather up a good couple of pounds of unblemished acorns. Don't worry, there are so many that the squirrels and deer will not even notice your withdrawal. Take them home and rinse them, and snap off any remaining caps. Pop them in a 200 degree oven for a few minutes to dry them out a bit - this makes shelling them easier. Then just go to town with a pair of pliers or a nutcracker.

Put the nuts in a saucepan with enough water to cover. Bring it to a boil for a few minutes (the water will turn reddish brown) and pour off the water. Repeat the process until the nuts have lost their bitterness. I usually only do it twice.

Spread the nuts out on a sheet pan and dry them in a 200 degree F (93 C) oven for a few hours. Grind them to flour in a food processor. (I usually put the machine outside the back door, because this step can be earsplitting!) get it down to at least corn-meal consistency. Store it in the freezer.

Okay, now you are ready to cook! This recipe is an adaptation of one from Russ Cohen's book Wild Plants I have Known...and Eaten.

Acorn Muffins
1 cup white flour
1/3 cup whole wheat flour (could substitute corn meal or white flour)
2/3 cup acorn flour
2-1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp. kosher salt

2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/3 cup melted butter, slightly cooled
1/4 cup real maple syrup

1/2 cup chopped walnuts (could substitute nearly any nut here)

Preheat oven to 400F (200 C). Butter muffin tins - I find that the heavier whole wheat flour "springs" better in the mini type muffin tins. Mix dry ingredients except the walnuts in one bowl and wet in another. Then mix the wet into the dry bowl, stirring just to wet all the ingredients. Quickly spoon the batter into the tins. Fill the cups nearly to the top. Top with chopped walnuts. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes, longer if you use regular-sized tins. When a skewer inserted comes out clean, take them out of the oven and let cool for a minute, and turn out . Let them cool on wire racks. Makes 18-20 mini muffins.

Boston Mycological Club

Don’t you just love mushrooms? I have always been fascinated by them. They are like little gems that pop up in the woods and fields, lasting just a few days before they are gone again. So many shapes and colors and patterns, and a touch of mystery and danger. Their intriguing common names show we have a different, more informal relationship with them than we do with other things in the field and forest: Chicken Fat Suillus. Corpse Finder. Stinky Squid. Deadly Amanita virosa glows so translucently white it almost hurts to look at it. The name Destroying Angel is simply perfect.

Well, recently I was on the web looking for another foraging walk with Russ Cohen. All his tours were either full or a long drive away, then I saw his link to the Boston Mycological Club.  

The BMC, whose website states is “The oldest surviving amateur mycology club of its kind in the United States” is running a series of fall lectures on mushrooms at the Harvard Herbaria in Cambridge. I missed the first one but I was glad to see I could make it to the second - “Identifying Boletes.” Our lecture was led by Noah Siegel, who is an award winning photographer and mushroom hunter. His grasp of the topic was impressive and comprehensive. This guy knows his stuff.

The Boletes are really common mushrooms in North America and contain some of the best edibles out there (the famous Porcini is one of them) They are fairly easy to identify, and there are no deadly ones. So, they’re a good place to start learning if you are interested in foraging. If that’s you, get yourself to a mushroom club and get some guides before you start chowing down.

There is still time to check out some great mushrooms in the Boston area before winter comes!

There are three more lectures in the series this fall - their schedule is here.

If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em!

Well, Spring came on suddenly here on the East coast. After some torrential rains at the end of March, we're suddenly seeing temperatures in the 70's. I had forgotten all about Japanese Knotweed until, at the edge of the woods on a rocky hillside, I saw some little green shoots poking up at the base of last years' dried up stems.  JK is an invasionary species that grows fast and shades out a lot of native plants. It generally gets chopped down in a losing battle to control it. However in the early Spring, the little pencil thin green shoots are delicious!  I grabbed a big handful and took them home. There I stripped off the larger leaves, trimmed the bottoms and rinsed them. Then I threw them in a hot pan with some olive oil and salt. After just two minutes they were bright green and tender, with a little hint of citrus, a lot like asparagus with lemon.

So hurry up and get your Japanese Knotweed now! It will probably be only a week before the stems are hollow stringy tubes that turn to goo when you cook them.

A Visit to Biosphere2

I recently had the opportunity to visit Biosphere2, the famous/infamous futurist biology experiment from the early 1990's. The early scenarios where a crew lived inside the airtight system got a lot of bad press, mainly due to what seemed to be bad planning. Insufficiently cured concrete and highly enriched soils consumed oxygen at an alarming rate, while the cloudy el Nino year reduced the amount of photosynthesis inside. I had heard at the time that the members of the space frame supporting the glass were obscuring more sunlight than they allowed for. The oxygen partial pressure was equivalent to that at about 14,000 feet before some outside air was pumped in. If all this happened now, it would still be running as a reality television show.

All that is past and now the facility is now a University of Arizona research center for students and visiting scientists. I took a guided tour while visiting Tuscon. It's really a blast to walk around and see the different climate regions - check out the album below.

BioSphere2_2009

Link to their website: http://www.b2science.org/index.html

Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo

Okay, I was out of town when Virgin Galactic unveiled SpaceShipTwo, so here belatedly is the link to VG's site and a sexy picture.

http://www.virgingalactic.com/news/item/spaceshiptwo-roll-out/

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...Yes, another invasive species post!

Hemlock Wooly Adelgid is a tiny little bug that has devastated the Hemlock population on the East Coast of the U.S. since it was introduced from Asia in the 1920's. If you have hemlocks nearby, you have probably seen the white puffs of their egg sacks at the base of the hemlock needles. Science Daily is reporting on the release of Laricobius nigrinus beetles into some Cornell reservations in an experiment to try and control the Adelgids. They say the beetles only prey on the HWA - and I hope they're right!


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091113124302.htm

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I don't know why she swallowed the fly,
I guess she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
I guess she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.
How absurd to swallow a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
that wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
I guess she'll die.
...

Drinkmaster Bartending School

"Give me a Woo Woo, a Sex on the Beach, and a Fuzzy Screw!" And I was filling three highball glasses with ice, metering out the vodka, Peach Schnapps and fruit juices with hardly a thought. Monday I had never even heard of two of those drinks, but this was Thursday. I was standing behind the training bar at Drinkmaster Bartending School, taking their Master Bartending Course, and having the time of my life.


I didn't know what to expect the first day, when I finally found the nondescript stairway in Downtown Crossing. I stepped out of the elevator and into a bar. Wait, it wasn't exactly a bar, because there was a desk with a computer there and some people waiting on couches. But the rest of the room - dominated by a large L-shaped bar, beer taps, and rows of bottles in front of a mirror - was a reproduction of the familiar bar landscape. All of it was set up to make the classroom identical to a real drinking establishment.

That first day we learned to nail the free pour - being able to pour a solid ounce is a critical skill in most bars and we practiced that until it was second nature, pouring the colored water that substitutes for alcohol into a measured glass. The booze in the bottles was fake, but they had the original labels and were in the special order they belong in on the back shelves (hey, there's a system back there!) I was like a pig in mud. It was a throwback to my old laboratory days, with a little showmanship thrown in.

So for four hours a day for five days, we students came in, put down our bags and got behind the bar for some quick review of the previous day's drinks before the instructor came and we started in on some new drinkables. The instructors were old hands behind the bar and they led us through drink recipes and how to remember them, wine and beer service, and the subtle performance art of slinging perfect drinks under fire. There were fifteen of us, with only two women and something like 6 of us over 21. We had our share of Natty Light drinkers (really, why take the course?), a few decent hands with an opinion on alcohol, and one forty something (ahem). By our final exam, everyone had their techniques and recipes down, though the Brazilian guy kept asking me which garnish was the lime and which the lemon.

Walking out of there I felt like a whole new world was open to me! I would take a job in a sleepy bar one night a week, see how it went, and go from there. Maybe I could work in a swank place like Drink, stay up late, get to know all the knowable people in Boston. But really, who am i kidding? My bed starts calling me by ten, and if I am not asleep by eleven I am a zombie the next day. But at least I got to see another interesting way to make a living. And I have a lot more respect for a bartender that does a good job under pressure.