Tim Smith, Registered Master Maine Guide
After describing the turkey on the last post, I felt obligated to post a shot of it when it was done. Ingredients: half a stick of butter, a bottle of beer, an onion, some carrots and celerty, salt, pepper, and half of a 12 pound turkey in a 12 inch dutch oven. 325 degrees for three hours with the lid on. The meat was great – moist and the whole family loved it.
Is there anything dutch ovens can’t cook?
Last week I bought a new dutch oven from a local sporting goods store; a legless, 12″ oven with a flanged lid for holding coals when cooking outdoors. I’m a big fan of cast iron cookwear, using it every day. I have been looking for a legless oven with a flanged lid for some time and the price was right at $25. It was even preseasoned. While my wife doesn’ share my love of cast iron, she likes what comes out of it.
Today I’m cooking half a turkey in it. I’m using 2/3 of a stick of butter and a bottle of beer to cook it in, and I’ve got an improvised dry rub on the bird. The sourdough pot is on the counter, bubbling away for a big batch of biscuits in a few hours. It will be a great meal.
Cooking and food preparation is a big part of living, regardless of whether home is swanky mansion or wherever you set up your tent. We spend a lot of time on it in our programs, because eating well is part of living a good life. Just because you’re outdoors, you don’t have to eat dehydrated backpacker food.
I’m releasing a revised edition of Bush Cookery, my outdoor meal planning and cook book, in a week. If you like cooking and eating outdoors, it might interest you.
My son told me he liked cornbread last week, so we came up with a simple recipe we made together for a sourdough cornbread baked in a 10.5” square cast iron skillet. It differs from our old cornbread recipe because it uses eggs and milk (our old recipe uses no perishable ingredients), so we’re calling it Sourdough Cornbread Deluxe.
Ingredients:
Preheat the oven and dry skillet to 350. Mix the ingredients in order, being sure to add the flour last. When the oven is hot, take out the skillet and add enough butter to coat the bottom and sides, then pour in the batter. Bake at 350 until done, about half an hour. You can adjust the amount of sugar to suit your taste buds, or substitute it with honey, maple syrup, or any other sweetener.
My son loved this, and we had a good time making it together.
This recipe is included in the second edition of Bush Cookery, which will be released in mid-December.
I’ve added a new category to the Jack Mountain Bushcraft Blog: Food. Look for posts on recipes, wild foods, and general food-related topics.
I’ve got a couple of jugs of wine bubbling away and wanted to share another fermentation project I’ve got on the go; cheap and simple hard cider. I just started this the other day so it will be done in time for the holidays. While there are lots of books and websites with a lot of details on how to make your own alcoholic beverages at home, sometimes they have too much detail. If you’ve never made wine or beer before and want to try, this is a good first project.
You’ll need a 1-gallon glass jug of apple juice or apple cider (the difference between the two lies in filtering), an airlock and drilled rubber stopper (size 6), a packet of champagne yeast and one cup of sugar.
If you get it started this week, it will be done for a holiday celebration. I’m assuming you’ll have some friends over and won’t bother bottling the cider, just serve it from the jug. There will be some sediment on the bottom of the bottle, so when you pour it try not to mix this in with the cider. If you get into doing this there are much more refined techniques, but this will get you started.
So for less than $15 you’ll have a gallon of homemade hard cider, and the jug and airlock can be used to make thousands of gallons more.
Here’s a link to another simple recipe for making your own wine from the author of The Joy Of Home Winemaking: Winemaking 101.
Good luck and let me know how you make out.
Eating acorns is a hot topic these days as I’ve gotten several questions about it. If you haven’t read it, check out this page for a great essay written by my friend Dan Fisher. He explains how he does it, and i chime it at the end with a short blurb.
To answer some recently-posed questions:
1. With regards to how long to boil the acorns, (or how much tannin you need to leach out), let your taste buds be the judge. This goes for whether you need to boil different species of oaks as well. To test them, do the pucker test. Try a small piece of the nut. If it tastes good, you’re done. If your facial expression looks like you just bit into a raw lemon (ie. puckered), you have to leach out more tannins.
2. You can crack the shells with anything handy. A rock works just fine.
3. If making flour, you can grind the nuts with a mortar and pestle, coffee grinder, or any other appliance you’ve got. I like it when there are lumps of acorn mixed in with the meal, so I don’t worry if it’s not evenly ground.
4. If you’re boiling the nuts, don’t worry too much about worms. The boiling water will kill (cook?) them, and they probably add a bunch of protien to the finished product. The nut meats don’t have to look perfect like they would if you were eating them by hand such as you do with peanuts.
Good eating!
Our new sourdough cookbook is finished and back from the publisher. It has all the sourdough recipes we use on our trips, as well as recipes for simple baking powder breads, easy pie crusts, bannock, and more. Unlike other sourdough cookbooks, our recipes have no perishable ingredients that you probably won’t have with you on a long trip. We do have two cake recipes that call for eggs, but other than those you could keep yourself in fresh-baked sourdough goods in a remote cabin until you ran out of flour.
A print copy is $8. There’s more information on the book in our online store, where you’ll also find our famous sourdough starter.
Knowledge of identification, harvesting, processing and use of edible, medicinal and otherwise useful plants makes up a vast amount of practical and intellectual knowledge that was highly valued by cultures living off the bounty of the land. In our modern culture, where many people can’t identify the trees in their yard or the ones they pass every day on their way to work, such knowledge has become almost non-existent, or at least increasingly rare.
In our courses we spend time every day studying wild plants. Plant identification walks where students press samples of the common plants and photograph or sketch the less-common ones occur regularly, and each day students complete background studies on a single plant that they’ve identified. This exercise is cleverly named the “Plant of the Day”. Focusing on the background knowledge of a single plant at a time has worked well for our students as it allows them to process, taste, and use the plant, as well as read what many of the different authors have said about it. We don’t pretend that they’re experts on the plant after their day of study, but they have usually greatly increased their knowledge of it and taken an important step towards knowing it intimately.
There are numerous useful wild plants in our region, but to aid in the learning process of our students we’ve written up some of the more common ones that they’re likely to encounter on our courses. You can get that list as a .pdf file here, or by visiting our Online Articles page. There is one plant on the list that doesn’t grow in or near northern New England, but I included it because it is a useful plant and people will often buy the wood in order to build a specific craft. Can you tell which one it is, and what the craft is?
Studying plants is an important part of our naturalist studies curriculum, which, in addition to plants, focuses on weather, the night sky, mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, reptiles, amphibians, insects, fungi, rocks, minerals, soil, water, ice, limnology and ecology. The goal is to know something of the natural world around you and how it works. Bushcraft, then, is our human interaction with the natural world.
The Beech trees have begun dropping their nuts in the nearby woods, creating a glut of food in the local bush economy. A favorite of black bears, who have been known to climb the trees for better access, the nuts are good to eat and have also been pressed to extract an oil that was used in cooking. Because bears love to eat the nuts and the trees have smooth bark, stands of Beech trees are a great place to look for bear sign. Check the bark for claw marks where bears climbed up to eat. In addition to being a favorite food of bears, I believe it’s the only nut that became the namesake of a chewing-gum company.
Yesterday a friend stopped by who had just come into possession of a bunch of blackberries. She was thinking about making a pie with them, but was put off by the idea of making a pie crust. She’s not alone. Making pie crusts ranks up there with public speaking on people’s list of fears. I assured her that it isn’t that hard, then gave her the recipe I’ve used in the bush countless times. It’s simple, tastes great, and you don’t need a rolling pin. Here it is:
1 cup of flour
1 stick of butter
2 tablespoons sugar
Soften the butter, then mix the ingredients together. Put the resulting ball of dough into a pie tin (a 9 inch tin works well) and press it out until the dough fills and covers the tin. Then add your filling and bake it.
This recipe is featured in my upcoming book Bush Cookery. If you use it let me know how it turns out.
My name is Tim Smith and i'm a state-licensed Registered Master Maine Guide. Since founding the Jack Mountain Bushcraft School in 1999 I've been a full time guide and bushcraft instructor.
