Author Topic: Foraging - finding free wild food  (Read 19928 times)

KCM5

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Re: Foraging - finding free wild food
« Reply #100 on: May 19, 2017, 06:12:49 AM »
You eat squirrels? I didn't know they were food. We see squirrels often and I tend to feed them almonds by hand. But never thought of eating them.

Didn't used to be very many deer around so we grew up hunting small game.  We ate squirrel several times every summer after shooting a few.  Four legs, two pieces of back, and a head if you're gutsy.  You need 2-3 to make a good meal.   Fry them crispy in an iron skillet like chicken, then cover and slow cook until tender.


There is nothing I won't eat if I'm truly hungry, but having been there, I'll tell you squirrel falls firmly into my "got to be existentially hungry" category. Foul-tasting, greasy-ass, little bitty fiddly bits of ick.


If truly hungry, though, the grease becomes an advantage. That's a whole extra meal there, especially if you have some flour for gravy and biscuits or even some cornmeal for cornbread or flatcakes to soak it up, plus you can render it. Meanwhile, though, I'll continue to be grateful for rabbits and deer.

Then I'll keep the cute, red squirels alive. We have been considering catching ducks and phasants. Sometimes they make themselves very easy targets. We have never been hungry enough to do it for real, though. The one time we were really hungry, all there was, was fish to catch. So we ate that.

Pheasant is delicious. I don't particularly like duck, but I know many people do.

On foraging, I found a tree by my work yesterday that is absolutely loaded with yellow oyster mushrooms. They're not native but are often cultivated, so I assume they escaped cultivation? I wasn't positive yesterday (like I said, they're not native) so only grabbed a few mushrooms, did the spore print and looked at other identifying features. I ate one yesterday, it tasted like any oyster mushroom, no ill effects, so I'm going to grab some more today. Probably not all of them - I'd guess its at least 20 pounds of mushrooms on that tree.

Linea_Norway

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Re: Foraging - finding free wild food
« Reply #101 on: May 19, 2017, 07:24:54 AM »
I found 4 morels a few meters from my own garden on some piece of unmanaged land.

Linea_Norway

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Re: Foraging - finding free wild food
« Reply #102 on: May 21, 2017, 12:00:02 PM »
The patch beside my house keeps providing us with morels. I have found 14 in total now.
Today in the forest and later in our garden I picked some dandelion buds, and fresh tops of urtica and used them at dinner today, as well as some of the morels. Tasted OK.

MishMash

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Re: Foraging - finding free wild food
« Reply #103 on: July 02, 2017, 06:39:42 PM »
I think our chant season is hosed.  They started popping, then dry for over a week, first sprinkle was yesterday, so we will see if anything else comes of the season