Category Archives: Woodscraft and Lore

The Homestead, Wanderlusting, Woodscraft and Lore

Cold Cookout Culinary Concoctions

skiersAnother annual cookout at the homestead and as usual there were plenty of creative ideas for outdoor cooking.  We began the day with a snowshoe trek up to the saddle and down the south side, looking for tracks and other sign.  A few brave souls tried skiing on the crusty snow and got a bit of thrill careening down the narrow old road with tree hazards strategically placed.  The upper meadow was smooth as white paper and for once we humans were the ones who left the story of our passing for other creatures to find.

While we were skiing my son and his friend Grant, newly returned from Namibia where he’d spent two years in the peace corps, built a fire and got the tea water started.  Grant mixed up a batch of barbeque biscuits and had the dough slowly rising by the side of the fire.biscuits

applePackets of succulent concoctions simmering away soon covered the grill and coals.  The usual mixed-  grill  dishes of meat and veggies in various combinations were the main course, but the deserts were what intrigued me.  Judy made a baked apple, filling the cored center with brown sugar and cinnamon.  Sharon split a banana lengthwise with the skin still on, then filled the center with peanut butter cups and melted it all slowly at the edge of the coals.  Grant’s biscuits were slow to cook in the cold temperatures, but the crusty outsides and warm fluffy innards were delicious.  When we are finished I threw Sharon’s banana peel on the fire and listened to it sing.banana

Looking forward to next year, I happened upon a great cookbook on a recent trip through Ennis.  Titled Over a Fire: Cooking with a Stick and Cooking Hobo Style, it is filled with intriguing ideas and campfire lore.  I’m planning to try the Fry Brownies made in hobo skillet.   Check it out:

Fry Brownies

Before leaving home, stir together I cup flour, ¼ cocoa power, ¼ cup sugar, 1 tsp. baking powder, ¼ tsp. salt and 2 tbls. Nonfat dry milk.  Add chocolate chips and walnuts if desired.  Divide mixture among six zippered plastic bags, placing ½ cup of mix in each bag.  Each bag will make 1 serving.

To prepare brownies, create a flat foil skillet.  Find a sturdy Y-shaped forked stick and cut off the forked ends to matching lengths, 4” to 8” long.  Cut two pieces of heavy- duty foil, extending 3” beyond the edges of the fork in all directions.  Wrap foil tightly around the fork and joint.  Use the skillet on a grate or tin can stove. (A portable frying pan was sometimes called a “banjo” in hobo terms.)

Place the pan over medium low coals or embers.  To one bag of prepared brownie mix, add 1 teaspoon of vegetable oil and 1 ½ tbls. Water; knead mixture in bag until blended.  Heat 1 tsp. oil in skillet.  Cut off a large piece from one corner of plastic bag and squeeze spoon-sized mounds of brownie batter into hot skillet.  Cook until bottoms are browned and tops are no longer shiny.  Flip brownies over, flatten as needed and cook until other side is lightly browned.  Let cool before serving.

Field Notes, The Cabinet of Curiosities, Woodscraft and Lore

Memento Mori

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Last fall, when Ted had a successful hunt and filled our freezer with elk meat, we wanted to do something to honor the magnificent animal that would provide us with a year’s sustenance.  We were not interested in making a trophy of it, that is not the spirit with which Ted hunts, so a head mount was out of the question.  Instead we took the skull to Big Sky Beetleworks where it was cleaned by a colony of dermestid beetles.

Dermestid beetles are a species of carrion beetles used by museums, taxidermists, schools and wildlife agencies to clean bones.  Gary Haas, who runs Big Sky Beetleworks was kind enough to let me watch the beetles in action.  He took me into a room which is temperature controlled–the beetles can’t fly below 80 degrees–and protected from the infestations of other insects, such as spiders which readily feed on the beetles.

The tiny bugs were swarming over several trays of small mammal and bird skulls, some provided by trappers and others by wildlife agencies.  The rotted flesh and ammonia smell was heady.  Haas doesn’t have a sense of smell anymore, but the stench stayed lodged in my nostrils for days.  Still, I couldn’t resist the chance to see the beetles at work.

Three months later our elk skull was finished.  People have always had a fascination with skulls and bones.  As Mark Elbroch says in his guidebook, Animal Skulls, “The diversity and complexity of life is ever apparent in the equally varied and beautiful forms that are animal skulls.  For skulls are sculptures in a vast array of shapes and textures that excite and inspire our imagination.”  Ever since Neanderthals, people have used skulls in rituals and ceremonies.  Artists have used the sculptural quality of bones in their work, probably most famously Georgia O’Keefe, whose bone paintings from the desert country first initiated me into an appreciation of bone’s beauty.  She said, “When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home…I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”

In many medieval and renaissance paintings, a human skull is depicted as a “memento mori”, a reminder of our own mortality and impermanence.  For Ted and me, the elk skull which hangs above the entrance to the kitchen is a daily reminder of our dependence on the earth for our very survival, the interconnectedness of all creatures and our gratitude to this elk for our daily nourishment.  Looking at the skull I silently repeat the zen Buddhist meal gatha:

First,  Seventy two labors brought us this food.  We should know how it comes to us.

Second, as we receive this offering,we should consider whether our virtue and practice deserve it.

Third, as we desire the natural order of mind to be free from clinging, we must be free from greed.

Fourth, to support our life, we take this food.

Fifth, to attain our way we take this food…

Reading Nature, The Herbarium, The Homestead, Woodscraft and Lore

Having My Cake and Eating it Too

      Today, while my husband prepares for his annual hunting trip, I am up at the homestead gathering.  As convenient as my garden is, right out my front door with its neat rows of produce ready for the picking, its domesticated flavors can’t compare to the wild tanginess of a berry foraged from the forest.  Half the experience of eating a huckleberry or spreading thimbleberry jelly over your toast is the memory of finding it–the day spent in the mountains taking careful notice of things, discovering not only the berries you were seeking, but stumbling upon the carefully built midden an industrious chipmunk has gathered against the winter snow.

I read recently that women are better suited to gathering than men.  It seems that we see colors more vividly than the guys and I wonder then, what the world looks like through their eyes, slightly less saturated, a bit duller perhaps.

Anyway, on this fine summer day I am gathering rosehips to dry in the sun–a winter’s bounty of vitamin C rich tea.  And of course, a few kept by to make a rose hip cake.  When the boys were little and we spent our summers rangering in Glacier Park, their favorite stories were the Broughton Bear books, by Susan Atkinson-Keen.  The main character was a little boy who lived in a cabin in the wild, just like my sons.  And the boy in the stories lived with a grandfatherly bear who took him out in the woods to share some natural history and gathering adventure which always ended in the preparation of food, recipe included.  Thus began our tradition of gathering the fat red rosehips to make a summer rich treat in the middle of winter.

ROSE HIP CAKE

2 cups dried rose hips
1 cup water
blob of butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 tsp. baking powder

Cover and simmer rose hips in water for 20 minutes.  Strain to remove seeds, hairs, and pulp.  Set aside 1/2 cup of this juice with a blob of butter.

Beat eggs in large bowl.  Beat in sugar.  Add flour, baking poweder, and hip juice.  Mix well.  Pour into greased 8″x8″ pan and bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Remove from oven.

Topping

3 tbls. butter
3 tbls. brown sugar
2 tbls. cream
1/2 cup sliced almonds

Mix topping in small pot and heat until butter melts.  Pour over cake, then brown slightly under the broiler.

Enjoy!

Field Notes, Ground Truthing, The Homestead, Woodscraft and Lore

Learning to Boil an Egg

Photo by Sharon Dill

 

Last week I hosted the Tuesday Hikers annual winter cookout at the homestead.  I felt honored to carry on the tradition Lois began many years ago.  And I felt privileged to share this special place with my wildland family.  Despite growing up in the mountains cooking over fires, there is always something I can learn from my “elders” in the group.  Like cooking a hardboiled egg in a paper cup in the fire.  Carol taught me this trick–fill a dixie cup with water, drop in the egg and set it on the coals.  Incredibly it doesn’t ignite.  Only the lip of the cup will catch fire and burn to the water line.  The egg will boil in the water and after 10 minutes or so you have a perfectly cooked hardboiled egg.

It was a stunningly clear day and from the meadow where Ted and I had set up the fire pit you could see the receding mountain ridges to the west.  Gene, who has been the fire lookout at Blue Mountain for 37 seasons has an aerial map in his head and he was able to instantly identify Petty Peak and the Cabinet Mountains shining white in the far distance.  I envy this mental relief map he has of the region.  I can look at a topo map and get my bearings.  I can download satellite pictures of the area and have an overview of my place in the world.  But these are only snapshots.  Gene has a dynamic and deep knowledge of the landscape that comes from years of watching its constant change.  He has seen storms come in across the peaks and where the clouds tend to lay low in the valleys.  He knows where rain falls the heaviest or misses the lowland in the rain shadows.  He has seen the changing face of the mountain peaks as the snowline recedes, the cloud shadows pass over, or the aplenglow hits in the late evening.  He knows these ranges in a way few of us ever will.  I hope as the years pass I will come to know this small slice of the Lolo Range through the same attentive and intimate acquaintance.