THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

mardatha

Excellent prepping scenario GQ!

GreyQueen

mardatha wrote: »

Excellent prepping scenario GQ!

Thank you, my dear.

I actually know of two people who had no wages when they should have had wages, the person above, who never did get her money, and another woman who got her money about a week later (employer had screwed up the payroll - honest mistake).

You don't need to worry about a comet hitting the earth/ Carrington Event/ earthquake/ zombie apocalypse/ whatever, to have a need for preps.

My stance is that with a carbohydrate and a protein, I can always find edible greens. With those basics, you can sustain a healthful lifestyle, even if it gets a bit boring. Dmitri Orlov, who has had the fairly unique experience of being a Russian emigree to the USA and also having been there when the USSR failed, posted about one summer when he and his family (in Russia) had the following to sustain them; a big sack of rice, such fish as could be caught in the local lake and many many cucumbers grown on someone's dacha. Not going to starve even if it got a bit boring.

mardatha

Well... if you try to live on rabbit then you starve slowly. If you try to live on dandelion leaves then you starve faster. But if you can make a big rabbit stew, with loads of greens in it, then you might just make it

GreyQueen

Add some starchy veggies to the bunny stew, and some dried peas/ pearly barley/ lentils and it'll stick to your ribs. Some fat is essentially for metabolic processes critical to sustain life, so aim to get some of that.

If you have to eat wild meat, which is less fatty than farmed animals, it's worth considering the stewpot or roasting in a container or in foil rather than roasting over an open fire, one doesn't want those lovely fat bits to escape.

My Nan's first Xmas dinner as a married woman was rabbit - there was a war on and nowt else to be had.

DawnW

GreyQueen wrote: »

Wilding apples are now visible along the cycle paths, blackberries are starting to turn colour, and rowanberries are turning orange. I've never done anything with rowans, have heard they're tart and better as a preserve to accompany meats - anyone preserve/ dry them?

I have made rowan (berry) jelly but it wasn't nearly as nice as those made from other wild fruit such as crab apples (pretty pink colour, and you can add herbs as well if you like, to make sage, mint or whatever jelly), elderberries (nice on toast) or wild plums of various types

[Deleted User]

I think rowan berries have quite a high vitamin C content so even if the taste isn't 'great' if it's 'OK' you have a good stored source of vitamin C which might be missing otherwise in your diet and rowan is free so your cash can go towards what is available!

GreyQueen

Plus, a good thing about rowan is its a commonly-planted street tree and is thus available in urban and sub-urban environments. The world and its wife knows you can eat blackberries but lots of folk think that other things growing on trees are at best inedible and at the worst fatally poisonous.

I've had some very odd looks when harvesting those little wild mirabelle plums, f'rinstance. Dunno if folks think that fruit is grown in test-tubes as opposed to on trees. :rotfl:

[Deleted User]

Oh but wild things are 'dirty' GQ and pollution will have rendered them poisonous to most creatures, especially MAN! I had a neighbour once who was utterly convinced that the berries from rowan were fatally poisonous, she was paranoid about her children eating those that dropped from a neighbouring garden into hers and diligently picked up every single one that fell many times a day until they were all gone from the tree. It didn't matter how many times I explained they were edible but not nice she still had that fear. If the rest of the world doesn't want to harvest or forage well then, there's so much more for the rest of us. Lots of 'wild forageables' are fairly bitter and deeper and darker in taste than what we're used to eating but if you know how (like blanching young dandelion leaves under a flower pot) to treat and then process them they're perfectly palatable and can become an acquired taste.

GreyQueen

Yeah, there are very few fatally-poisonous plants in the UK but there is a huge amount which fall into the unpalatable camp.

I'm just picking dandelion leaves off a few plants which grow in the veggie patch and smacking a knife through them and eating them as salad. I just ate some as I was weeding the other day. If you're only accustomed to eating iceberg or cos lettuces, wild greens will taste a bit strong, but it's only a habit. Plus, now I've gone sugar-free, more subtle flavours are becoming nicer, I'm sure sugar deadens one's tastebuds.

There has been some urban foraging going on here in the past 48 hrs as at least one neighbour is in process of moving out over a few weeks and dumping excellent stuff in and around the bins. Once they're out of sight, the scavengers (inc moi) help themselves to what they can use or sell. I have tucked a few very saleable items of household equipment into my storage shed, with view to carbooting them later in the summer.

One of the wackiest bits of flytipping here in 2017 was a grandfather clock - it was wombled off an upper landing in under an hour. Hope to goodness whoever took into their flat isn't going to let it chime. :eek:

[Deleted User]

I've just found a good sounding book that I'm going to aquire by John Lewis-Stemple. It's a foraging book that is the 'how to's' of processing and making edible too as well as cooking if needed. I read his 'The Wild Life' a couple of years ago where he lived for a whole year only on the wild foods he could find on his farm and that was a most enlightening read so I'm going to aquire a copy of that too. Both will be useful additions to my prepping bookshelf.