Friday, September 24, 2010

My Greatest Skill

My greatest skill is to need but little.
That's one of my favorite quotes by Henry David Thoreau.

Its not what I earn, its what I spend. The less I spend, the richer I am.

Freebies, or nearly freebies: panning for gold, wilderness camp outs, hiking, renovating old backpacking gear, playing with new back country recipes (not using Prepackaged All In One Meals), relationship building.
Innovations are what survivalists do. Take junk, twigs, plastic trash and make something out of it.
Taste the vegetation, learn what is bitter, unsafe, doable.

There's an awful lot of acorns falling this year. Its a bumper crop. So, I figure to gather up a bunch, and try the Native American process of boiling them in water, changing the water several times to remove the tanning acids, then seeing what we got.

Its free, its easy, its educational.
I'll tell you what I think tomorrow when I get back from my backpacking trip.

2 comments:

  1. For acorns I will reference Ray Mears from BBC. In his wild foods series, he did process acorns in an aboriginal way. Crush and remove outer shell. Grind seed to a pulp. Put all pulp into some kind of netting. He used a head net. Put net into small stream for 2 days. All tannins are gone. Form into patties, grill, and enjoy.

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  2. Cool, thanks for the information. Thats an interesting low impact way to remove tannins.

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