Asakiyume mita

Acorns and acai are lovely to read about—thank you!

The Native Americans in my part of this land ate acorns as one of their staple foods, but I think they mostly ate it as acorn gruel or mush. I have heard of one very fancy Indigenous-owned-and-themed restaurant out here that serves acorn bread or possibly acorn crackers, but I think you are the first non-Indigenous person of my acquantaince who has made their own acorn meal and cooked with it, so I am very impressed!

Do you happen to know what kind of oak trees your acorns came from? The most common oak trees in my immediate neighborhood are California Live Oaks, but there are some other kinds of oak trees around here, and I think I remember reading that the CA Live Oaks' acorns weren't the best for eating.

If you ever decide to cook with acorns but not combined with flour from wheat, I am thinking that you might find it helpful to consult recipes for gluten-free diets. (I don't think acorns have gluten.)

At one point, years ago, I ate gluten-free for eight weeks, as part of figuring out what I needed to change about my diet to help manage some persistent health problems. I was lucky enough to be able to go back to eating gluten, but during those eight weeks, I tried some really interesting non-wheat flours. My favorites were barley flour and amaranth flour, for their tastes, but it was really hard to get the flatbreads or ~pseudo-tortillas that I made out of them to cook all the way through, and they were very brittle. Relatedly, I recall that at least some gluten-free bread recipes call for using things like xanthan gum to add some flexibility, but I never tried that, so perhaps that was part of the problem.

Cool to know more about how Acai grows and is harvested!

That much high water every 15 or 20 years seems to me like a pretty amazing thing for a culture to deal with. I recall a little bit about the Christmas Flood of 1964-1965, including seeing signs marking its high water levels for years afterwards.

I was only very slightly affected by that flood, personally—my kindergarden ran out of paste, and there were an unusual number of helicopters flying around, and my Grandma & Uncle Roy telephoned to ask if we were OK, which we were, as we were not all that close to the flooded areas, and I believe that food was airlifted in. But it was a really big disaster for other parts of the particular county that I then lived in, as well as a lot of other places in California, Oregon, and Washington state. It was described as a 100-year flood, or even a 1000-year flood.

Dealing with that kind of thing every 15 or 20 years strikes me as seriously hard-core. Do the people there resign themselves to rebuilding in every generation, or do they set up as much as possible above old flood levels, or how do they cope, do you know?

I hope it's going well for them, as much as that's possible!

By the way, if you have any interest in branching out from drawing in MS Word, I've been really happy with using the Sketchbook app to create digital art on my phone, although I do use a came-with-my-phone stylus for that. I used the limited-function free version of the app for a long time, but I eventually purchased the premium version, and was happily surprised to find that it was VERY cheap, like about a $2.00 one-time charge! So, I recommend it to anyone I think might be interested. 🙂