Friday, June 30, 2017

Farm to Table

Enjoying a nearly 100% farm-raised meal: BBQ chicken (yard bird and canned BBQ sauce), cucumbers in a goat-yogurt-dill sauce, sautéed new potatoes and last fall's sweet potatoes with home-made ketchup, fried summer squash, and sautéed mixed veggies.  Only the salt, flour, and beer for the squash batter were store-bought.

Come to our August workshop to learn more about food preservation hands-on!

   

Monday, June 19, 2017

Primitive Skills Weekend

This past weekend was such a treat.  Our workshop was supposed to start at 9am, but by 9:30 my family and our fellow instructors were still huddled in the house looking at the downpour and pouting thinking no one was going to show up.  But in the next 5 minutes three vehicles came, and they kept coming! 

We had a great start to the weekend with our good friend Dave Gahn, who led an inspiring introduction to bird language followed by a chill 35 minute individual bird sit, in which we got to watch the birds return to baseline, our their status quo.  The alarm calls quieted, and hopefully so did our minds. 

After a potluck lunch, we got down to fire building.  We all failed at the one-match fire, but everyone who stuck it out with either the bow-drill or the flint-and-steel got a coal!  We even lit our dinner's campfire with a coal made from the bow-drill. 

Some of us cooled off in our "pool" and then helped harvest the evening's supper from our garden.  We had a salad of lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, and cauliflower; a stew from new potatoes, last year's sweet potatoes, carrots, some of our pastured pork, and garden herbs.  We also grilled pork back strap and zucchini.  This complimented James' coconut curried chicken that he was kind enough to share.  Yum!!

We sat around the fire for a few in the unseasonably cool evening before crashing for the night in our tents.  We awoke to a light rain that increased as we ate breakfast huddled under the pavilion.  But luck was on our side for once, as it quit raining in time for us to practice archery.  Michael brought a huge assortment of traditional bows for us to use, and also taught us how to throw with an atlatl. 

We took an ethnobotanical stroll before a late lunch.  We tried different local plants and trees to make cordage (i.e. string - or an anklet) and also learned a few edible and medicinal wild plants. 

A big shout-out of thanks to everyone who came and made this such a successful weekend!