Bush Food... Sweet Cornbread

This is probably one of the oldest and most loved of all the outdoor bread recipes and it has more derivations than any other bread recipe I know, so do experiment with this to see what suits yourself...

the ingredients we tend to use are

1 cup flour

1 cup fine corn meal

2/3 cup of sugar

1 tsp salt

3 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 large egg

1 cup milk

1/3 cup vegetable oil

2 oz butter

2 tbsp Honey

mix it all well and put in the oven at 180 degrees celsius for 30 mins or until a knitting needle comes out clean when poked into the bread

it's an easy recipe to do outdoors in a dutch oven, just mix all the dry ingredients at home and mix all the wet ingredients in a separate container, combine them when ready then put in your dutch oven and keep an eye out so that it doesn't burn

it works well on it's own or as an accompaniment to any main dish.

Gutweed

This particular seaweed (an intestinalis) is one of the ones you're likely to find in a Chinese restaurant usually deep fried

Very abundant and easily gathered this is a great fall back food  and can be eaten as is if the water ispure enough or deep fried or steamed.

Woundwort

There are anumber of different woundworts out there, this particular one is Hedge Woundwort..



As the name suggests this plant isused in healing wounds. Made into a compress or ointment it has great antiseptic properties and is also a great styptic and indeed was particlularly used for just this purpose in County Galway,as a matter of fact some herbalists say it rivals Yarrow in it's blood staunching abilities!

A good one to know.

Windfall Apples

It has been a particularly bad year for soft fruit over here, hardly any plums,blackberries,elderberries or their like, even the apples have been in short supply compared to previous years...

still at least we managed to find a few, just in time for Halloween... apple pies are delicious, pity there's no blackberries to pair them with!

Edible Firelighters

The 2 main buzzwords of any bushcrafter should be "Dual Purpose", all items that we carry should have more than one use, and here is a perfect example.. Get yourself a bag of Corn chips, be they tortilla chips, nachos or doritos, as a matter of fact any cooked corn chip/crisp like product will work..Their dual purpose? ,well obviously you can eat them, and secondly..

..they burn very easily and for a long time providing a great firestarter in wet weather or in emergency situations.

Introduction to Blacksmithing

I had the opportunity to have a go at a little blacksmithing project at the R space Gallery in Lisburn run by Anthea McWilliams, it was just a brief affair to show a few simple techniques but which should stand in good use for any future attempts

Eamon giving a brief safety talk and a quick demo of various hammer techniques

They had a great set up with 6 forges all on the go at once, the idea was to make an ornament of some form, most people settled on a leaf

we used cold rolled mild steel to forge our leaf from

Angie and Graham with their "irons in the fire"

Chris demonstrated some of the more intricate manouvers that were needed

giving it some welly!

and my finished piece, there were leaves of all shapes and sizes made,but I wanted a willow leaf, maybe not botanically correct but I'm happy with my first attempt at forging. Maybe some day we'll progress onto firesteels, knife blades and arrowheads!!

Omelette in a bag

If you work with kids groups then this is an easy way to prepare a breakfast for them, Davy has been doing it this way for a long time and I now see it used a lot in other places, it's an idea well worth experimenting with.

All the needed ingredients, eggs from the hens in my back garden, ham, cheese and Davy found some tricorn garlic growing where we set up, perfect for that added little kick

add all the ingredients to a good quality zip lock bag and mush them up

All ready to go

Put the bag in your Trangia and on to a boil for about 15 minutes

looks odd, but tastes fantastic, well done Davy !!!