Acorns can be turned into a tasty flour, but you’ve got to be on the lookout for acorn weevils.
Bob Frye/Everybody Adventures
This is why my wife is sometimes leery of going places with me, at least in my truck,
I’ve got it in mind to make some acorn flour this year. It’s time consuming, laborious work – you’ve got to collect acorns, soak them to remove the tannins and grind them into flour, among other things – but a seasonal treat.
If you’ve ever sampled acorn flour bread or pancakes, you know what I mean.
One day while wandering the woods with my bow, I picked up a few acorns. Not many, for sure.
I pocketed a half dozen or so, for no particular reason other than that I like the way they look and feel. That’s not enough to do anything with certainly, but I dropped them in my vest. When I got back to the truck and reached for my keys, rather than toss them to the ground, I absentmindedly stuck them in the truck’s cup holder.
That was that.
Two days later, a buddy called. Would I meet him at the range, he asked? He’d just bought himself a muzzleloader and had no idea how to load and fire it.
The early muzzleloader season is already open, and I’d planned to sit the last few hours of the day daylight looking for a deer. But I agreed to meet him at the range.
I’d still be outside doing something outdoorsy – enough to qualify as another day, day nine, checked off my outdoor odyssey challenge – while helping a friend.
Grabbing my son’s muzzleloader, I left the house. He’s away for work, and wouldn’t get home to hunt the early season, but I thought I’d sight his gun – new and never before shot – in. He can always fine tune things to his own liking later, I thought.
Stopping for gas, I bought a bottle of water. I put it in the cup holder and it went cockeyed. Ah, those acorns are still in there, I though.
I picked the water bottle up, moved it to the other cup holder and saw something white around the acorns.
I’d been eating hard sourdough pretzels in the truck a day earlier. That had left crumbs on me, the seat and the floor. A few must have fallen in the cup holder perhaps.
Nope. Worms.
My cup holder had perhaps 10 or so acorn weevils – small, white, maggot-looking worms – in it. They weren’t slimy or squirming or anything. Imagine soft rice. That’s what they looked like.
But still.
If my wife had set her water bottle or tea cup in there, and picked it up to find weevils on the bottom? Let’s just say things would have gone poorly for me.
I scooped them up with a napkin and threw them in the gas station trash, then went on to the range. We shot, laughed and had fun. So no harm, no foul.
But I’ll check – or try to remember to check – the cup holder before Mandy gets in the truck next time.
