A Thanksgiving to the Food

My friend and mentor Barry Moses suggested that I gave a Thanksgiving to all the food that supported me during my month. I liked the idea and cooked a final meal of wild food and shared it with my friends. Barry, who is a native from the Spokane Tribe, did a blessing in Salish, the native language from around here. This was a very cool ceremony and left me with a sense of completion and thanksgiving for the beautiful land that I live on.

We ate the wild turkey that my brother and I hunted the previous month, combined with wild amaranth and an apple huckleberry cobbler made with cattail flour and dock seeds.
It was delicious and it was great to share it with friends!

my brother Nathen

About Jake, about time

Jake was the lead rooster. I had so many memories about Jake, that I couldn't just put him in soup. I had to appreciate him to the fullest. I baked him in the oven.

Jake was the leader of the flock. He was the dominant chicken and always won the fights with Zac. He could also crow the loudest. One of my strongest memories of Jake was when the neighbors dog got loose and chased all my roosters. All of them came back, except for Jake. I went looking for him, but couldn't find him. I thought he was gone for good. The next morning I heard a crow in the backyard and knew it was Jake. About a week later I found out he had been trapped in a neighbor's garage overnight. He was smart to come back, and loyal to his chicken flock.

I don't know why people use the term: 'You're too chicken to do something", because I saw those chickens do stuff I am sure people would never do. They just don't think the way people do, but they certainly weren't stupid or scared.

Jake was the rightful leader, the biggest, the fastest and the smartest of them all.

A couple of pictures I would like to share, because they are fish and fish are awesome.

The biggest salmon I caught and ate, it was 24 pounds

The biggest bass of the year, it wasn't anywhere close to the salmon, only 3 pounds, but it was pretty good for Twin Lakes

First ever King Salmon, I sure enjoyed eating salmon during my month of wild foods.

This was my first pike, I didn't actually eat it yet, but I can't wait to try it. 

Stay posted

I just realized that there are some loose ends I need to blog about. There are a couple of recipes and I have to write about Jake. I will fill you in about that tomorrow or Thursday.

The End

It has been a very eventful month for me and I am kind of sad that it is over. It feels weird to get up in the morning and make myself a bowl of cereal. Although I will have more variation in my meals, you can't beat the raw quality of nature.

My transition to normal food was rather abrupt. I found out what happens if you eat junk foods after you have eaten wild foods for a whole month. I got sick and was throwing up for four hours. I only ate some cheese fries at a hot springs in Montana where we were for Thanksgiving.

I was thinking today while I was doing Spanish, how unnatural it is that we import food from far away. How weird it is that in the middle of winter, when there is nothing growing and people should be eating their stored food, that you can go to the store and get fresh produce like pineapples and tomatoes and other things.

I'll never look at normal food the same, I will always be thinking about the people that grew the food and prepared it. It took a lot of time and effort to collect and prepare my food over the last month, for example it took about six hours to get half a gallon of cattail flour. You can go to the store and buy a five pound bag of flour for five bucks. That is such a bargain! It took me hours of digging to get a bag of wild carrots, and in the store you can just buy carrots that are three inches thick by twelve inches long. And we think nothing of it.

Although I don't eat wild foods for staple foods anymore, I will include it in my diet as much as possible. I tasted the power of wild foods, I know where my food came from, I felt really good and alive while eating it. Wild foods to me are the REAL food.

Thanks for following my blog and for your support. It really helped me in the moments that I was feeling sorry for myself for not being able to eat whatever I wanted.

Wild Foods To Go

This weekend I did a scouting workshop with Twin Eagles Wilderness School. For that I brought Wild Foods To Go! It was Salmon jerky, Salmon pemmican, apple huckleberry crumble, soup, five smoked trout and dried apples.

It made me feel like I was in a nomadic tribe and I was eating food on the go. Here was all this dried, concentrated and powerful food and it was sustaining me. All I needed to eat were a few pieces to keep me going. I didn't think much about food until way past everyone else was feeling hungry. I felt proud that I was doing this, while everyone else had to rely heavily on what they were being given. Overall it made me feel much more confident and very grateful to the food I was eating.

It has been an incredible experience eating only wild foods these weeks. Eating all these amazing things that before I never thought you could eat. And they are tasting very good to me. Everywhere I go now, I find and acknowledge edible plants. Like the other day, when I was crawling through the snow and brushed up against a burdock plant. It shed all its burs on my coat. Instead of being annoyed, I thought of  how it would sustain me if I were hungry. After all, the burs on my coat will grow up to be edible plants.

Recipe of the day

I made the rest of my dried cattail roots into flour, and I have about half a gallon! I had enough to make myself an apple cobbler. I am planning to make myself a whole apple crumble tomorrow since I will be going away for the weekend and I need to take food with me. I also made flour with my dried kinnikinick berries.

The apple cobbler turned out better than ever. Here is the recipe so you can all try it:

slice up apples and cover the bottom of your pan well.
sprinkle huckleberries on top
fill the pan with more sliced apples and sprinkle on more huckleberries
cook, covered, in the oven for 45 minutes @ 350

For the topping:
(my pan is about 5 inches by 9 inches)
1/2 Cup of cattail flour
2T (heaping) seed flour (ground up dock seeds and lamb's quarters seeds)
OR
2T (heaping) ground kinnikinick berries
1T (heaping) ground red clover flowers
1/3 Cup honey
optional:
1/3 Cup butter
(this will make it taste more buttery and delicious)

spoon the topping on the cooked apples and bake for another 25 minutes

This picture shows the sources of my flour and what the flour looks like.   There is Kinnikinick berries on the left, red clover in the middle and cattail root on the right.

A WHOLE jar of cattail flour!!!!!!!!!!!

Powerful Fish

In all of american history, salmon has been one of the most important foods for natives. In the last weeks, it has been one of my most important staple foods. Today I am experimenting with salmon jerky. I am making this by slicing salmon steaks thinly, and dipping them in a marinade of water with sea salt, oregano, ground-up elderberries and a little honey. I am going to dehydrate the jerky overnight. I am very thankful for the salmon, I would have so much less to eat if it wasn't for salmon.