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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.