Primitive Tips:
FORAGING:
Preparing wild foods
Once you’ve determined that the plants you have collected will not cause you any undue difficulty, you need to prepare them. Milkweed, dandelion, and rumex,
for example, all contain various bitter components that must be removed before eating. The easiest way to do this is to put the plant material in boiling water, boil it for a few minutes, drain, and repeat. Do this two or three times. The last time, cook until tender. The various greens all have their own flavors, and can be combined to make interesting dishes. They may be used as one would use spinach. Amaranth greens are used in making a cream soup. Rumex can make an excellent sauce for pork or duck.
The young leaves of dandelion, rumex, and chicory are very tasty when cut up into a salad with iceberg lettuce. They tend to be bitter, but this bitterness is much less in young leaves and works well with the bland lettuce. Use your imagination, read your cookbooks, and you’ll find many niches in your diet for wild plants. They not only provide greens (these are the most common and easiest to gather), but a variety of cooked vegetables, seeds for flour and porridge, items for the pickle crock, and a number of seasonings and thickeners.
When using an absorbent material such as sawdust to degrease a pelt, warm the pelt first. The warmer the grease, the better it absorbs. When scraping to degrease,chill the pelt to as close to freezing as possible. Cold grease firms up, which make it easier to scrape off. For faster action on a counterweight snare, grease the pole your cord slides over. This is particularly effective in cold weather when things are slow and stiff. Make trap triggers out of hardwood rather than softwood. Hardwood compresses and sags less, so the trigger will respond more quickly and better maintain its original set. Also, because of the relative strength of hardwood over softwood, trigger components can be made thinner. This will increase the speed of the trap. When you do not have a steel or stone knife to slice meat thinly for drying, mash it out with a stone or wooden pounder. Some soft flesh can be rolled flat, as one would flatten dough to make cookies or pie crust. The occasional piece of meat can be torn apart by hand.
Bring Out The Primitive Awareness
Time to bring out the primitive that most of us have buried in our modern lives. Someone comes up behind you in the mall and startles you. Play a game. Okay, you have been had. Tag, you are it. This illustrates that we are used to being around people and do not seem to notice when we are startled by a stranger who, most of the time, is an innocent person, doing his own thing. Use this to your advantage for our private awareness class
. Make It A Game, A Personal Game
Start right now to improve and test yourself. Make it a game until it becomes second nature. Being aware is a skill you can work on all the time. Right now — do not dare look up from reading this article. How many lights are on in your home? What color shirt does the person closest to you have on? What is on the front cover of this magazine?
Use those experiences in your everyday life to sharpen your awareness skills. Keep score for a few weeks. How many times were you surprised or startled? Do not be in denial about this. Do not fool yourself. Be brutally honest with yourself. I will take bets that you will be amazed by the number of times someone gets you.
A Lesson Learned From the Dog
A dog, a 110 pound Akita who fears nothing, never just steps outside. She stops in the doorway and observes everything, looks both ways before she commits to moving out through the door, like the head samurai in Kurasawa’s “Seven Samurai.” I like that, not moving blindly into an unknown situation. Most of us feel comfortable in our own environment, moving outside to retrieve a newspaper or going out to our car. I like what I have learned from that dog — being aware of what is there.
Eating Bugs
Following is an exerpt from an article "Hunter-gatherers were sometimes very labor-efficient, 'A Grasshopper in Every Pot'" by David B. Madsen
Madsen and colleagues found that one person could collect an average of 200 pounds of the sun-dried grasshoppers per hour. At 1,365 calories per pound (compared with about 1,240 calories per pound of cooked medium-fat beef and about 1,590 calories per pound of wheat flour), this amounted to an average return of 273,000 calories per hour of effort invested. According to Madsen, "Even when we took a tenth of this figure, to be conservative, we found this to be the highest rate of return of any local resource. It is far higher than the 300 to 1,000 calories per hour rate produced by collecting most seeds (such as sunflower seeds and pine nuts) and higher even than the estimated 25,000 calories per hour for large game animals such as deer or antelope."
Madsen places Mormon crickets (Anabrus simplex), another food of early Native Americans, collecting in a modem context by saying, "One person collecting crickets from the water margin for one hour, yielding eighteen and one-half pounds, therefore, accomplishes as much as one collecting 87 chili dogs, 49 slices of pizza, or 43 Big Macs." He concludes, "Our findings thus showed that the use of insects as a food resource made a great deal of economic sense."
Be careful, because as you know, you are what eat. On the other hand, may be an improvement for some.
SOAP
Soaps can be derived from many plant materials. A couple are any of the yucca plants and of course soap-root. What you need is a plant that contains soponin, and as you can imagine it tastes like .!. SOAP!! There are many more but I want to give you
instead, a simple receipe for soap you can make. To make soap in the wild you will need two basic ingredients, and four will do. The first is wood ash, the white is best but even charchoal will do. Soak the ash in water (third ingredient) for an hour or so, then strain the solids out. Second mix with melted animal fat (rendered is better, but even bacon fat will do). Third dump the fat in the strained solution (lye or alkali), and cook slowly until the water is boiled off, and you have soap. The strength of the soap is regulated by varying the proportions of fat with ash. And fourth, if you want, you can add wild mint, pine or spruce needles, or another aromatic plant (fourth ingredent) to make it smell better.
CAUTION: Always be very careful with the ash solution as it is very caustic and will mess your skin up permanently, until it is cooked with the fat. While cooking, stir with a stick.
