Acorn. The fruit of the oak tree, shaped like a tear drop. Some varieties are edible and can be ground to use as a coffee substitute or mixed with flour and used in bread.
Black boletus mushroom. Excellent to eat from August to October whether raw in salads or cooked or preserved and also freezes well.
Juniper. The berries are good with strongly flavoured foods such as venison and they are used in making gin. In Norway the branches, along with birch, were traditionally used in making pinnekjøtt, though this practice is now illegal. The branches were gathered in May, when the bark was most easy to strip from the branches. They were then laid out to dry until around Christmas time. They where then worked into a kind of thatch, almost submerged in salted water and the meat laid on top. This picture, sent in by Gary Maloy, shows how the juniper used to look at the end of the process, and demonstrates the ideal size for the branches.
"Real goat's milk cheese." Ekte geitost is a cheese made with whey from which the water is boiled out, slightly caramelising the lactose residue, which gives it its characteristically sweet flavour and brown colour It is made with the whey, added milk and cream from goats. It is then moulded into a pale reddish brown block of low fat cheese. In general, the darker the colour the stronger the flavour. It is a cooked cheese made generally from pasteurised milk and can be kept in the fridge (not the freezer) for up to four months. These cheeses is often seen on breakfast and lunch tables with a cheese plane, which allows you to slice manageable slivers of cheese for inclusion in your open sandwich.
