Apart from the display of vibrant yellows, oranges and dark reds, autumn here also provides the opportunity to go out and harvest free food, thanks to the many woods and ‘patches of nature’ which can be found within a relatively short radius from home – thus on foot, not by car.
My wife nurtures a genuine passion for picking* nuts, berries, mushrooms, wild herbs and other edibles that grow outside in the wild. Owing to the many uncertainties that lie ahead, this year I accompanied my wife three or four times on her outings into the woods or to the spots which she had noticed as being worthy of more attention on previous errands of hers.
Here are some of the goodies we brought back home:
From the top left to the bottom right corners of the above montage of pictures I took specifically for this entry (which I had been wanting to write for a couple of days to account for my silence over nearly two months), we have chestnuts, rose hips, figs, autumn olives and, of course, a nice red apple.
Finding such goodies is only half the story. The other half entails the tedious processes of having to clean the food harvested from the ground, trees or bushes and then prepare it for conservation. In the case of the chestnuts (of which we brought back home some 46 kilos), these processes include the removal of the nuts with worms, cutting the chestnut husks, putting the chestnuts in the oven, then taking them out and removing their husk, finally grinding them into sufficiently small grains to make chestnut flour (which we then keep in the freezer for future use, usually chestnut/chocolate cake).
Intellectually, it was a different
harvest – namely, my first real foray into miscellaneous important (and
less important) alchemical writings and my second into the works of
Paracelsus. Then there is this crazy world we are in – I
presume that, for our so-called elites, the alchemical process we are at
now is the caput mortuum:
Source: Robert Fludd, Anatomiae amphitheatrvm[...], 1623
Hopefully, they are in for a bad surprise…
* Foraging is a term I tend to shun because it derives from fodder (via the French words fourrage and fourrager), a Germanic word for stall-feeding (i.e. horses, cattle, etc.), as explained in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Middle Low German vōder, Middle Dutch & Modern Dutch voeder, Old High German fuotar (German Futter), Old Norse fóðr, from Germanic, from base rel. to that of food.’
