Wild food?

[Hunt anything]

I'm not sure if this qualifies as "wild" but I found a couple of pepper plants in my garden I didn't plant. "Volunteer" plants I'm guessing. If you like hot sauce and like growing your own peppers, fermented hot sauce is amazing! That jar rig was about four dollars. (No! It's not a water bong! You know who I'm looking at!)
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Can you make Kim-chi in that thing?

 

[Hedge774]

Can you make Kim-chi in that thing?

The best you've ever had. Plus, amazing kraut!

 

[Hedge774]

You can also make a very good wine. Just be careful with it. Its double the proof of store bought. (Also a very sweet wine, so it'll trick you into one more glass.)

 

[Andrew NOLA]

Blackberries is the only thing I forage

I grow pears, apples, peaches, figs, Satsuma, and blueberries and pecans and pomegranates

Have about 40 fruit trees, and 50 blueberry bushes

What is the best time to plant a tree?

20 years ago. Second time best time is today.

 

[Flbt]

I'm not sure if this qualifies as "wild" but I found a couple of pepper plants in my garden I didn't plant. "Volunteer" plants I'm guessing. If you like hot sauce and like growing your own peppers, fermented hot sauce is amazing! That jar rig was about four dollars. (No! It's not a water bong! You know who I'm looking at!)
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I am trying something different this year beside pepper sauce. I have made pepper sauce bell pepper, some strange looking Japanese pepper and tabaco pepper.

But the different one was wild garlic.
I am sure it grows other places besides down here. The shoots are like green onions while the tops get garlic buds/ blooms
So I am trying them with regular vinegar and apple cider vinegar
If they turn I I think next year of trying it with malt vinegar ( good on fryed fish)

 

[Flbt]

You can also make a very good wine. Just be careful with it. Its double the proof of store bought. (Also a very sweet wine, so it'll trick you into one more glass.)

My aunt had a old resipe for making homemade wine.
The suger volume is
Add enough suger to the juice ( blackberry , grape , mulberry,elderberry)
To float a raw egg.
It makes a very sweet wine.
Her aunt that never had utilities all ways kept a cold jug in the. Well in her dairy basket
A wire basket they she used to keep butter and milk cold in the well water

The wine resipe is supposed to go back generations ps I don’t know how but it makes a good brandy to

 

[ArmyAV8tor]

@Redleg....my friends in Namibia make jelly from the prickly pear.

 

[Flbt]

Prickly pear!! I am trying to imagine a corner of the country where that is deliberately planted. It is a scourge in Texas.

A Mexican buddy got me to eating them with eggs
And I Tryed the juice form the fruit not to bad.
And I hope it was not a tx cowboys bs. He said y’all kept them to burn the needles off to feed during bad drought.
And really for the most part in front of my barbed wire fence before the rd ditch start.
Don’t think anything but hogs will go through them

 

[Hedge774]

My aunt had a old resipe for making homemade wine.
The suger volume is
Add enough suger to the juice ( blackberry , grape , mulberry,elderberry)
To float a raw egg.
It makes a very sweet wine.
Her aunt that never had utilities all ways kept a cold jug in the. Well in her dairy basket
A wire basket they she used to keep butter and milk cold in the well water

The wine resipe is supposed to go back generations ps I don’t know how but it makes a good brandy to

You don't want my recipe if you don't like sugar!

 

[Hedge774]

A Mexican buddy got me to eating them with eggs
And I Tryed the juice form the fruit not to bad.
And I hope it was not a tx cowboys bs. He said y’all kept them to burn the needles off to feed during bad drought.
And really for the most part in front of my barbed wire fence before the rd ditch start.
Don’t think anything but hogs will go through them

I've had them roasted. It is a different experience for someone who has never had such, but a good one.

 

[Flbt]

You don't want my recipe if you don't like sugar!

Lol you think it’s more than enough to flot a egg?
Had a buddy that made a lot of wine he did it the proper way with the mesents and the hydrodrimiter ( the thing that float in mash to fuger out potintal achole
He said the egg floating was completely off any charts.
I want to say he tested some and siad it 22% abv and still sweet.

All I know for sure it’s a sipping wine you don’t get drunk off of it. Well more than once anyway lol

 

[Tubby’s Canteen]

When making corned beef or deer meat and also when making salt fish we salt the water until a potato floats so a raw egg floating on wine mash isn’t out of the question for an old time home gauge.

I forage a fair bit of my one food the wife and I just finished canning 25 jars of apple sauce and we rendered 6 litre jars of pig lard today.

Here’s an interesting one I played with for my own entertainment today while rendering pig lard.

Homemade candle from lard made with an empty carnation milk can a washer a piece of hemp twine.

 

[Velo Dog]

Greetings fellow Hunter-Gatherers,

First off, I agree with Hunter Habib on the berry pie thing.
Generally speaking, I do not favor sweet food.
However and that said, I would walk barefoot through thumb tacks, just to eat a slice of berry pie with ice cream on it.

Here in South / Central Alaska, many locals, including my wife and myself pick wild berries in the fall.
Blueberries, rose hips, red currants, high bush cranberries, lingonberries (aka: low bush cranberries), raspberries, cloudberries, watermelon berries (aka: wild cucumber) and wild strawberries are available here.
There are probably others but I cannot remember them at the moment.

We do also have another edible one called “crowberry” that I almost forgot.
It possibly got its name because it is jet black (we have crows in Alaska but they are the coastal Fish Crow variety, not the cornfield variety so common elsewhere).
Anyway, the abundant crowberry is very bland, almost tasteless.
I’ve eaten many while deer hunting on various islands within Prince William Sound.
But not because of any possible good flavor, mostly just due to boredom while glassing for deer.

Some varieties of Alaska’s berries are so tiny as to not be worth picking.
But although tiny, most have good flavor for those who carry tweezers and a magnifying glass.
Also, many if not most of our berries, large and small, here are too sour (some are almost bitter) to eat until after a serious frost.
That event makes them sweet for some reason.

And although an invasive species, Chokecherries are somewhat available here.
Seems like I read somewhere that they are not a cherry at all but instead a wild plum ?
They grow on a beautiful tree, not a bush or a vine.
Anyway, they actually need a good solid freeze before they loose their strong bitter taste and become tasty.

After a forest fire, then a soaking rain and then a few warm sunny days, the wild mushrooms sprout quickly.
They are becoming an ever more popular tradition here.
I don’t know how to determine the edible mushrooms from the toxic ones.
So unfortunately, we don’t try to go out picking them.
We just always buy the various indigenous and delicious wild mushrooms from a local expert who sells them in one of the open air produce markets, during our short summers here in Anchorage.

Last but not least, in the spring just as the millions of birch trees in this part of the state, begin to show tiny leaves peeking out from the new bright green buds, I always tap a couple of the birches on our property for sap.
It takes a gallon or more to simmer down into a cup of syrup, but worth it.
Again generally speaking, I do not favor sweet foods.
My wife is the same in that regard.

However, once a year we treat ourselves to blueberry pancakes one morning and pecan waffles one morning, both with birch syrup (heated) and melted butter.
Then we are done with it until the following spring.
It is a fun treat.

Cheers,
Mr. & Mrs. Velo Dog.