How To Store Fat….. for Longer!

Rendered animal fat typically has a shelf life of 1-6 months, a year if you’re lucky. In my frantic research I recently discovered a method of storage that extends fat’s shelf life to 3+ years.

This is good news!

The only hitch is that this method is dependant on an unsustainable resource: canning jars and lids. Still, if you have too much fat to immediately consume or want to put some away in the proverbial `larder`, this method is super cheap and requires almost no extra energy. One simply pours freshly rendered, burning hot liquid fat into a jar, plops the appropriate sterilized lid on, fastens and it seals itself. It`s just simple hot pack canning.

New Website!

Check out my new website: www.re-wild.org!

It’s a platform for teaching the skills I have been sharing on this blog to the general public, which could include you if you’re on Vancouver Island and interested!

Possum Living, and what I’m up to

I just rediscovered a link to a great book, Dolly Freed’s classic ‘Possum living: How to live well without a job and with (almost) no money’. It’s an interesting read, lots of useful tips and hints. You can read the whole thing online here.

In other news, I’m nearly done writing a book(let), a collection of essays and endangered skills. It will hopefully be on paper in the next month, once I figure out how to do that, and available for folks to buy (gasp!). I am really excited about it, it’s somewhat a distillation of the most pertinent ideas and skills I have to share at the moment, that I can fit into a smallish booklet. Some stuff has appeared here, much of it is fresh.

Getting to Know Hazel

I remember first reading about hazelnut trees in a book, ‘food plants of the northwest coast’, when I was maybe 18. I had flipped through and seen that hazelnuts grow where I live before, but at this time I realized how significant this was. I’d never noticed a hazelnut tree, or heard people talking about them, so their presence seemed unreal to me. I looked at the photo in the guide, remembered the shape of the leaf, and kept my eyes peeled as I went about my days. I started seeing them everywhere. Things got really crazy when, in mid summer, I noticed little nuts starting to form. Totally outrageous I thought – nuts, from trees?!

Something In the Rain

We took one of our 50 gallon rain barrels inside over a month ago, and covered another outside. We heard the rain was going to be coming with poison in it. Not much, not enough to see taste or smell or get sick right away, but that nobody really knows either. One night as I listened to the rain beating down on our tin roof, rain that we drink, that the plants and animals we eat and love drink, there was a sinking feeling in my gut.

Jellow Time…. plus some new ways to enjoy testicles!

“The truth is there’s only one level of technology that’s sustainable. And that’s the Stone Age. And we’ll be there again some day. And the only question really is, what’s left of the world when we get there?”

-George Draffan

Some friends and I were sitting around eating jello together the other night, made from deerskin, water and flavored w/ blueberry juice. Really good stuff. One friend said: “When things go back to the stone age, we’ll still have Jellow!” This is good news. This is especially good news for me cause I’m not into tanning hides all the time these days, and what better use for them than to chop them up and make one of the best desserts ever?!

Okay…

Okay, it’s been a while. And I have some writing I’m working on that I’m gonna put up here in the near future, but in lieu of thoughtful prose and obscure skills, for now I thought I’d share all of the google search terms that brought readers here yesterday:

GUNDRU

Gundru is a traditional fermented food that has it’s origins in Nepal. By far one of the most amazing vegetable ferments, it requires no salt or brine, just the juicy dark leaves of any member of the brassica family (kale, turnip, rutabaga, mustard etc.). One simply harvests leaves, mashes them up, and then stuffs them densely into a container until it is full and they are submerged in their own juices. The gundru is then left for at least a month, during which lactobacilli proliferate and transform it into an enzyme enhanced, easily digested delicacy, as well as preserving it!.

Rendering Marrow

“I went to the woods because… I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”

- Thoreau

Bark Tan Leather – primitive waterproof technology?!?

The ability to make waterproof clothing, footwear, and containers from indigenous materials is an incredible asset for those trying to reduce their dependance on industrial society, survive ‘the collapse’, or deeply connect to their landbase. Using the tannins in local tree barks to preserve skins as leather – bark tanning – is a simple, magical and utilitarian method of providing ourselves these things. Bark tanned leather resists rot, is water repellant to 100 percent waterproof depending on how it’s tanned, and, of course, is extremely beautiful. Several years ago, when thinking about the eventual fall of civilization, I would sincerely worry about how we would survive on this rainy coast without plastic raingear and gumboots when the system that produces them halts, and whatever we have around from before falls apart. Well, turns out we don’t need ‘em (the system, the gumboots). The art of bark tanning has almost been completely lost – it is shrouded in myth and obscurity, but, what we have uncovered so far makes me confident that we can make our own gumboots, rainjackets, and water bottles, independant from industrial society.