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.

Some recipes

There are some recipes that I would make even if I was eating regular foods. They taste better than what I've eaten before. My favorites so far are the baked moose heart, cream of chickweed soup, apple-huckleberry cobbler, salmon wrapped in comfrey leaves and the rosehip/apple fruit leather. I think you should give them a try also, because they are very delicious.

Here are some recipes to start out with:

Cream of Chickweed Soup

Saute wild onions in butter or animal fat
add a couple of big handfuls of washed chickweed and saute for a bit longer
Add water or stock (about 4 cups)
Add sea salt and herbs if you like
Bring to a boil and simmer for a couple of minutes.
Blend everything up in the blender and return to the pot
Add more salt for taste
(if you want it creamier, you can add milk or cream)

Rosehip / Apple fruit leather

Add an inch or so of water to half a gallon of rose hips and bring to a boil.
Simmer for a couple of minutes until the rosehips are soft
Mash the rosehips in a strainer and force the pulp out with a cup or something, you should have a thick rose hip puree
Put about five medium peeled apples in the blender and puree them with the rose hip puree.
Pour the resulting mixture on a dehydrator tray and dehydrate on 140 degrees for about 12 hours.

I hope you will give these a try. I'll reveal the other recipes later. 

Did you know that three rose hips contain as much vitamin C as a whole orange?

Different ways to cook fish

Over the weekend I went to Twin Eagles Fall Harvest Festival where I led a workshop on the different ways to cook fish. The first method was the butterfly fillet that I showed on the previous blog. This time I didn't have enough time to smoke it, so I just made a bigger fire so it would cook faster. That worked really well. The second method was clay-baked trout. This involved wrapping the fish in clay and putting it on the coals to cook inside of it's clay shell. I forgot to put seasoning with the fish, so this turned out a bit bland. The third method was Flat Rock, which is basically the same as cooking it in a frying pan, except you use a flat rock. I made a keyhole fire pit and elevated the flat rock with two smaller rocks over the small area of the keyhole. I then scooped coals under this to heat the rock. I put butter on the rock and cooked the fish. This turned out very well, it was some people's favorite.

It is getting very hard for me to eat only wild foods because I have a limited supply of everything. I end up eating the same thing over and over and that gets boring. It would be different if there weren't other foods around me that my family is eating. For dinner today I was eating bland amaranth, while my family was eating Risotto.  When I see and smell regular food, I remember the best taste of it, and because I haven't eaten it for a while it gets even better.

At this point I don't think it is practical to just eat wild foods. I think it is better to cook your food with wild ingredients, but also with local and organically grown foods. I am so used to the variety of foods that we eat, that it is really hard to give up something that is so available, easy and delicious.

I will do my very best to make the best food yet in the coming week. I still have a wild turkey that I got with my brother, Nathen. As a Thanksgiving, I am planning to share that turkey and some of my other wild food with friends.

Precious Food

I eat every morsel of my food, because it is just too precious to waste. When I prepare my food, I think of how I harvested every little bit of it, and of how hard it was. I want to appreciate it to the fullest I can, because it took so much effort, and I don't want any of it to go to waste.

Today I spend a long time smoking fish, so now I am grumpy and have a headache. But at least I have snacks for the next couple of days. I also made soup from Alex. This time I had burdock root and that added a great new flavor to it. I had it for dinner. I am happy that I don't have to put much thought into my meals for the next couple of days. 

Alex was not too smart. He was the one that would come up and eat stuff from your hand because he was so greedy. He had yellow eyes that would look at me between pecks. He looked like a friendly little chicken until you saw his eyes, they were mean, squinty, yellow eyes. Alex was Jake's follower, if you found Alex, you found Jake. Alex just was kind of stupid, all he could do is follow Jake around. Now I think about it, chickens are somewhat like people. I know some kids that act just like Alex, Jake, Zach, Itsy and Bitsy. I am grateful that Alex was the fattest because he ate so much, he made a delicious soup.

Smoking fish in the backyard

Here you can see the butterfly method

Delicious end result

Wild food extravaganza soup, good and filling

Thank you Alex

I love fish!!!!!!

I have noticed so far that my blog does not mention that I am a passionate, bordering on fanatical, fisherman. At the beginning of this month I had over 30 trout, about 20 crappies, and a couple of bass. I caught all of these over the summer and froze them for this time. I was also lucky enough to go salmon fishing in September with my friend Charlie.

This afternoon I smoked a trout in the back yard over a fire. I am still wondering what the new neighbors thought about this, me sitting by a small fire in the back yard, cooking a fish. While I was sitting there, my neighbor was bringing a barbecue into the back yard and I was thinking that the fire was my barbecue.

The fish turned out really, really good. It tasted very much like smoked salmon. I butterfly filleted the fish by removing the back bone. I skewered the fish horizontally with three small sticks, and then I split a longer stick lengthwise and inserted the part of the fish where I removed the backbone into the split stick and tied the end. The fish was vertical, spread out by the horizontal little sticks. Now I had a fish spread out on a stick that I could angle over the small fire. I smoked it like this for about an hour above the fire. It was a huge success and I think I will do a bunch more tomorrow. I will take a picture tomorrow so you can see how I did it.

I ate the smoked trout with a apple-huckleberry cobbler. I am really enjoying my new flour stash, I used it in the cobbler.

If anyone is wondering, I am definitely not getting skinny. I am eating three good meals a day that are satisfying and delicious. I am not hungry all day and I am not even craving regular food anymore.

Half way mark

Today is a special day, it means that tomorrow I will have gone one day further than the person I read about in the Inlander, who ate wild foods for two weeks. Being half way also means that today I have to make all the flour provisions for the next two weeks.

I am in the middle of making a batch of cattail root flour. I took a break to eat my lunch which is:
a stir fry of mustard greens, shredded apple, oregano and cubed moose heart.

Back to the flour. I am using cattail roots that I harvested and dried three weeks ago. I thought of putting them in the blender instead of pounding them out with a rock. This is working very well. I am getting a lot of flour so far.

In the beginning all I wanted was normal food and sweet foods and candy and stuff. But now I am realizing that when this project is over, I will actually miss eating wild foods. Now whenever I look at a candy bar or something, I see the ingredients with words I don't even understand. I think: "what will that do to my body?" I have a really good feeling about my food, I know where it came from and I harvested it myself. No unknown ingredients here!

There are still foods I would like to eat though, foods that my mom cooks. Organic and local foods and a little more variation than what I am eating now. But I will never look at food the same.

Hunting trip

Yesterday I went hunting but sadly, I didn't get anything. I went hunting with Tim and since he is also a butcher, someone brought in a moose. The person didn't want the moose heart, so I got it.

Therefore today for dinner I had stuffed moose heart. It is amazing how big a moose's heart actually is. It was about the size of a football. I made the stuffing with wild onions, salt, apple, cooked amaranth, cattail root flour and oregano. I cooked the heart with the stuffing for four hours. It tasted pretty good, especially since I haven't had red meat for a while. It was a little tough. Tomorrow I am going to try to fry some slices up.

I also tried something new for lunch today. Cattail flour breaded fish fillets. They were excellent. And I made a big batch of applesauce with huckleberries.

Another day of not just surviving, but thriving.

Royal dinner day

The highlight of my day today, was definitely my dinner. I cooked salmon wrapped in comfrey leaves, cooked amaranth and my mom made me the first real dessert. She made an apple and huckleberry cobbler with my wild flour. It was by far the best dinner of the past few weeks! Delicious!

It might just be my mind, but today in the kitchen I was able to identify more smells than ever. Maybe I am just having a good 'smelling' day, or maybe my sensory perceptions are increasing and I am finding out how people are really supposed to live. Just a thought.....

A challenge it is

For breakfast this morning I was making a pancake and I realized I didn't actually really want one. It is getting a little boring eating the same thing every day. I think it might just be the clover flowers in the flour. I never really liked them very much. I will try it without it tomorrow morning and maybe I'll like it better. Eating it every day with plum jam is definitely getting boring.

Eating soup is a little better,  but even that is not very exciting. It is good in a way, because now I am thinking of ways to make my food more interesting. I already thought about making fish fillets breaded in cattail flour and cooking butterfly fillet fish over a fire in the backyard.

I am really hoping I can get a deer, maybe on Saturday.

Itsy and Bitsy's wonderful soup

This morning I went foraging for burdock root, but unfortunately I didn't find any. But when I was looking I found some amazing rose hips. They were really big, sweet and pretty juicy. I made them into a apple-rosehip fruit leather.


The other big food product of the day was amaranth. I harvested wild amaranth a couple of weeks ago and left it to dry. Over the weekend I threshed all the stalks to get the seeds out. I was going to blow the husks off, but then found out that the blow dryer works pretty good. The seeds are very tiny and black, and the blowdryer started blowing them away as well. I put the seeds and the husks in the blender and that chopped up the husks and not the seeds. It made the husks lighter than the seeds and I was able to blow off the husks really easily. I have about three cups of tiny black amaranth seeds. I cooked 1/3 of a cup with 2 cups of water, and it made two cups of delicious cooked amaranth. I can't wait to try it with huckleberries!

Now about Itsy and Bitsy. I made a second pot of soup today. This time it was Itsy and Bitsy's turn for the pot. Little Itsy and Bitsy that never did the world any harm. They were always the last in line, eating whatever they could, picking leaves of the plants. Itsy was the smallest one, always doing his own thing. Bitsy sometimes left and joined Jakes group, the little traitor. At least they are keeping each other company now.

Here is a picture of the amaranth husks flying away.

 Harvesting Cattail roots:

 Harvesting Bull kelp:

Oh, and did you know that one gallon of sea water makes about a cup of salt.

Happy Halloween

It was strange to go trick-or-treating and not being able to eat anything. Although my mom made me some honey and rosehip candies as a special halloween treat.

I have been having surprisingly tasty food. Especially with mom helping me with the recipes. Today I had cream of chickweed soup, made with chickweed that I harvested outside today, and wild onions. I am still eating my biscuit/pancakes and I am liking these as well. For lunch I had salmon and apple.

Tomorrow doe season starts, and I am REALLY hoping to get a deer. I would like to make jerky and add some variety to my diet. Wish me luck

the weekend

The weekend was pretty easy. I had all my food already harvested, all I did was thresh amaranth seed and go fishing a couple of times. I also did a load of dried apples and a rose-hip leather. I caught a trout on Friday afternoon, and I had it for breakfast on Saturday with a fresh apple.

I didn't blog yesterday, because I went to a friend's halloween party. I was dressed up as a Hillbilly, complete with mustache, dirty tank top and beer can. It was a bit of a challenge to only eat wild foods at the party, instead of eating the chili, I brought my own soup. I thought their roasted pumpkin seeds were wild enough, and I ate those as well. 

Eating has been easier, since I have flour ready and a big pot of soup. I haven't had to think very much about what I was going to eat. It is a bit hard sometimes, like today when I smelled the smell of fried chicken. I wondered what we were going to have for dinner, until I remembered there was no 'we'. There was just 'what am I going to have for dinner'. Which was a little boring, since I have been having the same soup for a couple of days. But it was filling and I was grateful for the food.

In remembrance of Zack, the chicken

Last night I got carried away listing all the foods, and I forgot to mention who was in the soup. Zack was the second in command in the chicken flock, the beta male, always battling for first with Jake. He always got second choice, after Jake and Alex (his hench-chicken) were done picking the compost for worms.

I raised five roosters in my backyard. In order of status: Jake, Zack, Alex, Itsy and Bitsy. I butchered them when mom told me they were getting too big and loud, and that they were ruining the back yard. I brought them to my friend and mentor Tim van Valen, who showed me how to butcher them.

Butchering them was easier than I thought it would be. I killed them by chopping their heads off. It wasn't very hard to kill them, I always told myself I couldn't get attached, since I was going to eat them. Everyone knows what dead chickens do after you chop their heads off, and these were no exception. I still can't quite believe how they landed some of the flips they did. After they stopped bleeding, I dunked them in a pot with boiling water and plucked all the feathers off. This was surprisingly easy. After plucking all five chickens, all I had to do is take the insides out and freeze them.

And just so everyone knows, Zack made a delicious soup.

Apple day!

Today was a lot easier because my mom was home. She helped me out with meals and meal ideas. I am actually FULL right now, and I ate really good food!

In the morning I worked on my flour supply by threshing and grinding up dock seeds and lamb's quarter seeds. I added red clover flowers and some dried service berries. I already had a healthy supply of cattail root flour that I prepared a week ago. In the afternoon I picked two bags of wild apples, and I am very excited about making dried apples and applesauce.

This is what I ate:

Breakfast:
Fried bass fillets with roasted dandelion root tea

Lunch:
Flour biscuit / pancake with the flour that I made earlier. I ate this with a little wild plum jam. The first pancake I made had a combination of all the flours and it was really good. The second one I made with just cattail flour and service berries. This one was a bit too rich and I couldn't eat it all. I liked the first one better so I think I'll make it for breakfast tomorrow.

Dinner:
I made chicken soup with sea salt, wild onion bulbs and flowers, wild turnips, wild carrots, stinging nettle, mustard greens, bull kelp and oregano. I am hoping that this will keep me going for a  couple of days.

Dessert:
Applesauce, made from the apples I got earlier, with huckleberries and service berries.

Day 1, Start Off

Even though this was  a hard day, there was a good omen that happened to me today. While I was looking for mushrooms and mullein, I saw a long tailed weasel. The first one I have ever seen behind our house. I stood there, watching it, and it slowly came closer and closer, to within a foot of me. Then it ran off to a nearby log where it stood on its hind legs, and I saw that it had a vole in its mouth. It just stood there for a while and looked at me, and than it ran into the bushes.

It is way harder than I expected. I have been continuously hungry all day, I am not sure if I am making it up, or if I am really hungry. All I can think about is how good regular food would taste right now. I am especially missing granola bars, granola and peanut butter. What a surprise, I don't even eat that much granola and peanut butter. It just seems so easy to pull out a bowl and fill it with granola.

Here is what I ate instead:
Breakfast: Trout with sea salt (that I harvested by evaporating sea water)
Mid morning I went outside and ate mountain ash berries (which were supposed to improve in flavor after frost. It did, which made them ALMOST edible), yarrow leaves, dandelion leaves, plantain leaves and a little bit of chickweed. It left me far from being full.
Lunch: Salmon with plum sauce which was actually very good. I was so hungry that I gobbled it up really fast.
Dinner: Salmon again, just with salt. I ate that with a wild greens salad that had some salmon and huckleberries. I also had mullein tea.

Right now it is 8:30 and I still have a tiny gnawing edge of hunger in the pit of my stomach. I was a little lost today and didn't do enough planning. Tomorrow is looking brighter, I am going to make chicken soup and try some cattail flour pancakes.