Foragers Diary; Smoked Venison Pytt i Panna

After the weed quiche yesterday I thought I had better do something for the carnivores among us today.

Pytt i panna is something I used to eat regularly while living in Sweden; it is a very simple dish made traditional from leftovers, like bubbleandsqueak here in the UK. It normally consists of potatoes, onion, korv (sausage) or beef, there are even vegetarian versions and it is sold in just about every Swedish supermarket and as I understand is also popular in Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Rraditional pyttipanna with brussel sprouts.
Picture By Triceratops (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

So in the spirit of leftover meals I took some of the 'cheap' cuts of meat from the fallow buck I shot on the 1st and which you can read about on the . These were all cuts from around the neck which I would normally stew or casserole or sometimes mince up for sausages. First they were roughly sliced, not into pieces but just to increase the surface area of the meat so it would soak up a marinade, this would also help the smoking process later. They were marinaded in a mixture of spices (shop bought on this occasion I'm ashamed to admit) and soy sauce for a couple of days in the fridge then they went in the hot smoker.

Two of the pieces in the smoker, it really doesn't take long to cook in here. I can just about fit a whole Chinese Water Deer haunch in this smoker for special occasions. 

Once smoked the meat was diced, as were about a dozen new potatoes and one large onion. The onion went into the frying pan first to soften and then the rest was added until the potatoes just started to go golden. Served with lingon berry sauce (another Swedish favourite, and well worth a try if you're passing an IKEA) and salad it went down a treat. 

The amount of meat shown in the picture above (just over a pound raw weight) and those twelve small potatoes and one onion made a filling meal for two adults and two children (with enough for a second helping for me!)  

Announcement; I am happy to take requests for wild foods to cover in the foragers diary. I can cover preparation, cooking and eating of wild foods but also identification tips, how and where to find them and techniques for foraging. So please let me know. 

Foragers Diary; Weed Quiche

Redshanks and fat hen (also known as lambsquarters) are commonly classed as agricultural weeds in the UK but can be used as a wonderful ingredient in a quiche or as just as greens in their own right. In fact for those who aren't keen on the greens these two wild foods don't even taste like greens they have a somewhat meaty quality.  They are going to be the wild ingredients in this 'weed quiche'.

A typical redshank plant, with it's pink seeds; the leaves are what you will need for this recipe.

Young fat hen plants, if you are familiar with Quinoa you will notice similarities between these two plants as quinoa is a cultivated variety of  fat hen.
Picture courtesy by Anneli Salo (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

You can add a variety of other wild ingredients to this quiche such as chick weed, nettles, sow thistles etc.. but for the basic recipe is as follows;

Pastry

200 grams of plain flour

100 grams of unsalted butter

2 tablespoons water (ish)

pinch of salt

Make the pastry first and allow it to cool in the fridge before rolling it out placing it in the dish to bake. In the meantime prepare the quiche mixture. 

Quiche mixture 

2 eggs

250 ml cream or milk

cheese

onion

wild ingredients 

salt and pepper

Chop the onion and wild greens (about the quantity shown above, so about two double handfuls) then soften them in the frying pan with a knob of butter but don't let them start to go brown. 

Beat the eggs, milk and about two handfuls of grated cheese together and once you have added the greens and onion to the now baked pastry pour the egg mixture over the top to cover it.

ten to fifteen minutes in the oven and this is the finished article

and for the authentic wild food experience you have to eat it outside

Hope you enjoy it

If We Can't Live Off The Land Nowadays What Has Changed?

One of the issues I raised in my last 'Living off the land' article when trying to answer the question  "Can we 'live off the land' just from wild food in the UK?" was the changes in the law over the years which have meant people have less access to the countryside and less freedom to hunt, and forage. However in the grand scheme of things this is a very small, almost insignificant, obstacle to people being able to 'live off the land'.

In fact we now have more access to the countryside than we did 60 or 70 years ago. Remember that before the National Parks Act 1949 there was no open access to upland areas, and the CROW (Countryside and Rights of Way) Act 2000 has given improved access more recently.

This Plaque commemorates the mass trespass on Kinder Scout which was a very significant event in opening up the British Countryside.
Picture Courtesy of; Marcin Floryan [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

While access laws may still restrict certain specialist activities such as shooting and may deny you the right to uproot wild plants (and there are certainly good reasons for restricting these things) by far the biggest factor which limits the amount of foraging carried out in the UK is a lack of knowledge and possibly also a lack of interest. Those who are interested in foraging manage to forage and find wild food on roadside verges, in their gardens (for example in my garden right now you can find nettles, black berries, hairy bitter cress and fuschia berries), in parks and public places but many people just wouldn't recognise what is and isn't edible and I would guess that for the majority the fact that there is a use for just about every plant they walk past does not occur to them purely because they have no interest, why would they you can get everything from a supermarket right?

Berries from a Fuschia bush, quite a subtle flavour but very pleasant, my daughter loves them. 

Even in the 20th Century (especially in times of war) people in the UK would have made a great deal of use of foods such as blackberries, crab apples, hazel nuts, sweet chestnuts, dandelions and nettles. But now except perhaps for traditional blackberry picking very few of our wild foods are used. I think the fact that we can get everything and more that we needs or want easily from a shop has not only taken away the dependence that we once would have had on wild foods, but it has also made us lazy; can we be bothered to go out and dig up burdock roots when it is much easier to stick some frozen chips in the oven?

Burdock roots being cleaned after harvesting. 

So maybe that's my answer; maybe we (as individuals not as a society as I said in my last 'Living off the land' post it would be impossible for the whole population of the UK to live from the land as hunter gatherers) can live off the land (at least to a greater extent than we do now) but we just can't be bothered?

Bear in mind also that to provide all your food by foraging would be a massive time consuming undertaking, to fill all your requirements for food from foraging and hunting would be a full time job. For example last week I shot a roe buck, a fallow buck, four rabbits and a pigeon but the time it took when you bear in mind the travelling, stalking, sitting in high seats, dragging carcasses, graloching, skinning etc.. amounts to about 20 hours and that was a very good result it's not uncommon for me to return from a stalk having never even unslung the rifle from my shoulder. Although that provided a lot of meat, that when preserved could last several weeks, you need a lot more than meat in your diet and to live off the land permanently you would need to dedicate all your time (or at least most of it) to hunting, fishing and foraging and let's face it even if all your food was free you would still have other expenses.

ANNOUNCEMENT; having had a fairly successful week of foraging last week I am going to be starting a new element to this blog; ForagersDiary. In it I will share recipes for foraged foods and instruction on how to identify, prepare and use wild foods. For those of you who use pinterest there is also a board where you can find all the recipes and how to's which will appear in the 'ForagersDiary'; http://uk.pinterest.com/ForagersDiary/foragers-diary/            

  

Underestimating Children; how good is bushcraft for children.

Check out the video I posted on the Bushcraft Education Facebook page of my son Michael demonstrating his fire lighting skills and don't forget there is still a free friction firelighting kit for someone when the page reaches 100 likes. 

It amazes me just how much children can accomplish, i was first inspired to look at the potential of using using knives in a project to see whether prolonged use of a knife could help children develop fine motor skills and dexterity when I saw a young Sami boy with a knife on his belt expertly twirling a lasso to catch reindeer on one of Lars Monsens television programmes. This interest was only increased when I saw a picture of a  very young child cutting up fruit with a machete in a 2003 book by Barbara Rogoff titled The Cultural History of Human Development. I have since tried to give my children every opportunity to get involved in all sorts of activities particularly bushcraft. 

Here my daughter Lillie is cutting tomatoes without help.

Here my son Michael is practicing his whittling on a lump of wax.

I makes me wonder how much more our children could achieve if we gave them a chance and if we were willing and able to support them. Michael and Lillie join me on foraging trips, pick stinging nettles, edible flowers and even help forage for fungi, last autumn Michael made me throw away some mushrooms with white gills because he remembered me saying that another type with white gills was poisonous, once he was shown how the flesh of the shaggy parasols I had collected turned orange when squeezed he was satisfied that they were safe and now remembers what to look for himself. 

This isn't a boast, although I'm certainly proud and please at what my children can do, but it concerns me that craft activities in schools are dummed down to avoid even the use of scissors with young children and lessons about nature are limited to looking at pictures and putting sticks in a flower pot so that wood lice might live there. I think we need to give children a chance, yes they might cut themselves occasionally or get stung by stinging nettles but it will be worth it. 

Besides everyone knows that showing off a few scars is part of growing up. 

Using Bushcraft to Promote Environmental Education

My article from the April 2014 Issue of the National Association for Environmental Education's (NAEE) Environmental Education journal on the topic of using bushcraft to help students of all ages and abilities engage with the environment.

The Yew berry I mention in this article; sugary treat or deadly poison?

For more information about the NAEE follow this link http://www.naee.org.uk/ 

Does Bushcraft Have a Place in Formal Education

Bushcraft and the Law; Legal Traps

Note; this was originally published on the BushcraftUK website as an article titled ''Trapping and the Law' on the 3rd April 2014

The third instalment of Bushcraft and the Law, this article is all about the legal spring and live catch traps that can be used in the UK countryside.

Many of us who practice bushcraft are interested by primitive trapping, but can this mean we fall foul of the law? 

To my mind one of the most telling tests of someone’s bushraft ability is whether they can consistently provide food for themselves in the wilderness. A significant part of that ability is going to be knowledge of effective methods of taking birds, mammals and fish as food. This is where, in practicing bushcraft as a hobby there can be some difficulty. Although our primitive ancestors would not have been restricted in their hunting methods by law and legislation WE ARE. 

Traps have been used for thousands of years to procure food, they are doubly effective when compared to active hunting in that they can be set and left to ‘hunt’ all on their own without your direct supervision or intervention, leaving you to get on with other important things. You can set more than one at a time, maybe even hundreds depending on your needs. In modern terms, at least in the UK, they are used primarily as a means of controlling pests and predators rather than a means of procuring food. Agriculture is the main reason for this as we no longer need to subsist by means of a hunter gatherer lifestyle, but also trapping, especially snares and other live catch traps are stressful for the quarry and catching them by these methods means that due to adrenaline and other chemicals released into the body of a stressed animal the quality of the meat is poorer in trapped animals than ones killed instantly, for example by a high velocity rifle bullet. Despite these limitations traps are a truly effective and efficient method of catching quarry. 

Primitive methods of acquiring food are probably of most interest to those of us who practice bushcraft as we want the challenge of being able to use the minimum of man-made material, and depending on how far we want to test our skills perhaps even resorting to primitive tools to construct the traps or weapons that could be used in gathering food. But please be aware that practicing making primitive hunting and trapping implements is fine but almost all primitive methods of taking mammals and birds are now legislated against on grounds of animal welfare. This means no bows, spears or bolas, for killing anything. No figure four deadfalls or pit traps, build them yes but actually using them to catch or kill something is ILLEGAL! 

Most of you have probably heard of the four basic methods of trapping; mangle, tangle, dangle, strangle, however in modern trapping we have to avoid any of these terms, legal traps now fall into three basic categories. 

Spring Traps
Spring traps are the closest we get to a ‘mangle’ style trap but they are designed to kill instantly by breaking an animal’s spinal column. To be used legally a spring trap must be approved by the ‘Spring Trap Approval Order’ England Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own version of this legislation and these were updated in 2012, in Scotland the last update of the spring trap approval order was 2011. This piece of legislation designates which traps have been approved for use and also designates which species can be targeted with which trap and how non target species should be restricted from access to the trap. 

Fenn Mk IV

For example the traps such as the fen mark IV or the Solway mk 4 are often used for trapping small vermin such as rats, weasels, stoats and grey squirrels the trap must be enclosed in a natural or artificial tunnel which restricts access to non-target species. As well as a tunnel I always place stout sticks or use wire mesh across the front of the tunnel to stop birds, cats and hedgehogs getting caught by mistake (as pictured below)













These traps are all best set along existing linear features such as hedgerows or using naturally occurring cover such as tree roots like in the picture below. 














It is also best to set the traps into a shallow scrape in the ground so they are not as easily visible if you look through the tunnel from ground level, this way they will not put off an animal from entering the trap.
















These traps should all be weathered before use by burying them or leaving them outside for a while so the smell from any grease or lubricant used in their manufacture is diminished and they lose their shiny appearance. These traps are generally not baited although some like the magnum trap (below) can be, the attraction is the cover provided by the tunnel that the trap is set in and when placed in the appropriate location these traps can be very effective. They can be made more attractive by the removal of grass and plant matter from their entrances leaving some bare soil which seems to attract quarry species to enter the tunnels. These types of trap must, by law, be checked at least once every 24 hours.

Live Catch Traps

This is one type of trap where you may be able to use some primitive triggers, live catch traps do what they say on the tin, they catch and hold an animal until it can be identified and either released or dispatched humanely. Common traps which fall into this category are Larsen traps for catching corvids such as crows and magpies. Cage traps for catching foxes, badgers, otters, mink, squirrels etc.. and large ladder traps for catching multiple birds at once. It’s also worth mentioning that when using any trap which requires a decoy bird (such as a Larsen trap) you must provide a food, clean water, a perch and shelter for the captive bird. 


Pheasants and partridges are also caught by game keepers to use for breeding purposes, each year before the end of the shooting season on the 1st of February live catch traps made from steel mesh or from partridge pens are used to catch birds that will later in the year produce the eggs for the next crop of birds. Traditionally a much more primitive method was used and keepers would have used this kind of trap made from willow or hazel sticks and baited with corn or wheat to catch their pheasants and partridge breeding stock. This is where the primitive trapping comes in and these traps would often have been triggered by a split stick trigger and a trip wire. It is still acceptable to use these traps, although obviously with the landowners permission.

I haven’t tried to name every piece of legislation that refers to trapping here, or talk about seasons for catching and/or killing certain species or legislation regarding access to land; all that legislation is available via www.legislation.gov.uk. 


Key things to become familiar with include;

• The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981
• The Spring Trap Approval Order (England, Wales and Northern Ireland 2012) (Scotland (2011)
• The Snare Orders (Scotland) 2010 and 1012
• The Game Act 1831
• The Night Poaching Act 1828
• The Crow Act 2000
• The Hunting Act 2004

These are just some of the legal methods of trapping and some of the legislation which governs how we can take wild animals, make sure you are familiar with what you can and can’t do in the name of bushcraft so you don’t get yourselves in trouble.

In the next instalment I'll be looking at snares.