{"id":1615,"date":"2018-11-27T09:28:42","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T17:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/?p=1615"},"modified":"2018-11-30T07:38:42","modified_gmt":"2018-11-30T15:38:42","slug":"fall-foraging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/2018\/11\/27\/fall-foraging\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall foraging"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are some good foraging opportunities near my apartment. The best is a pear tree \u2013 I believe it is ornamental since the pears are small. It wasn’t clear to me if the owners were interested in the pears, so I just collected ones that had fallen onto the sidewalk, and made pear-sauce! I strained the cooked pears through a mesh strainer, and used the remaining fibrous matter to make alcohol.<\/p>\n

There are also a ton of sugar maples. If I had tapping equipment, I could make maple syrup.<\/p>\n

And lastly, there are a ton of chestnut trees. Unfortunately, they are horse chestnuts<\/a>, not true or sweet chestnuts, which were largely killed off in the early 1900s by chestnut blight<\/a>. The only trees that survived were those far enough (about 10 km) away from other chestnut trees.<\/p>\n

Horse chestnuts contain high levels of naturally-occurring saponins, which make them taste really bitter. Apparently, they are also poisonous<\/a>. Before realizing this, I collected a bunch.\u00a0I was super excited to find chestnuts since they’re pretty expensive to buy.<\/p>\n

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Horse chestnuts really look quite similar to true chestnuts. The main difference, besides taste, is the lack of a tassel on the tip of the shell. True chestnut husks also have more closely-set spines.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As far as I’m aware, horse chestnuts only have one use: making liquid soap! You can soak the nutmeats in water to dissolve the saponins, and use the soaking liquid as liquid soap or detergent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are some good foraging opportunities near my apartment. The best is a pear tree \u2013 I believe it is ornamental since the pears are small. It wasn’t clear to me if the owners were interested in the pears, so I just collected ones that had fallen onto the sidewalk, and made pear-sauce! I strained … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Fall foraging”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1615"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1621,"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions\/1621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beansproutadventures.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}