The Tale of an Acorn

Back when we could still wear short sleeved t-shirts outside, we spend some afternoons gathering acorns nearby.

I read that it's possible to make acorn flour and thought, why not? It's been a while since I indulged a completely unnecessary experiment.

When I say we spend a couple afternoons, it was because I made the rookie mistake of picking the green acorns instead of the brown. After we spend some hours de-shelling the acorns we gathered that day, we found out that we needed to use the brown ones and had to with a couple off weeks before we went back.

Acorns need to go through quite a long process before you can actually eat them. They contain a lot of tannin, and I am sure you could get a mean stomach ache, if you ate them unprocessed. First they need to boil, then you need to dry them (I did this in the oven), and to make flour you obviously need to mill the dried acorn pieces (or as I did: use a very good food processor). After all this work, we ended up with around 250 g of flour, which doesn't sound of much, but it was enough to make a couple of batches of acorn cookie during the fall. I used a normal short bread recipe and replaced half the normal flour with our the acorn flour.

I was wondering if the taste would be worth all the work, and even though it is not the best cookie I've ever had in my life, it was really unlike anything I ever tried - not at all bad, but very sweet. So I won't reject that I would go through the same laboursome process when next years fall when the ground once again will fill up with acorn en masse.

Paris 2

Vincent and I also had the opportunity to spend an afternoon alone in sunny Paris. We meet in the south and went through a new neighbourhood where we found a little place to have steak frites. Afterwards we went to a gallery and ended up enjoying the last of the afternoon sun at the busy Tuileries.

Arboretum

As always the Aboretum near Vincent's mum is really beautiful, especially with all the great colours of fall that I love so much. As you might be able to see from the pictures, it sometimes feels like an enchanted forest and other times just like a regular park.

Earlier we noticed a lot of parakeets here, but this time we definitely saw more than hundreds of them painting the sky green. I also manage to get up close to one and take a snap shot while it was busy eating.

Paris 1

A month back, we went to Paris for a week to visit Vincents mom and introduce Fleur to the rest of the family. We came at just the right time and had great weather almost the entire week.

I had the change to spend an afternoon alone, trying to chase down some stuff for my winter wardrobe. Sadly I didn't really find anything, but it was still nice to take a stroll in the narrow streets and on the big boulevards in the city center.

Zucchini

As part of our balcony garden, we also planted zucchini this year. It was not really because of the zucchini itself, if so we would have been terribly disappointed as we only managed to harvest one zucchini throughout the season. But we planted them so we could get to eat the tasty zucchini flowers because they are hard to come by here in Berlin, even at the farmers market.

And we had many flowers during June and July and they were as decorative as they were delicious. I love them filled with a ricotta mix, dipped in batter, and deep fried. It is a great summer dish. They certainly brightened up both our balcony and our dinner table this summer and perhaps they will be part of the seeds in next years balcony pot mixture.

Our balcony pots are looking rather sad right now that fall has really taken over, but there is still the occasional flower. Today we put some chestnuts in the soil so if we are lucky one of them will sprout sometime during the next couple of months.