October 2016 - Afternoon In The Woods

This post is different than my usual field journal entries. A couple days ago I was working in our basement, getting the windows winterized and getting the room organized so that we could start storing more boxes. My wife was working on some seasonal projects as well. The poor kids had to entertain themselves for awhile until I was asked if I could turn a video on. With cooler temperatures and snow coming, we put in one of the Mark Baker Longhunter videos. We have all five sets and the kids have seen them all, though not all the “talking” parts. They prefer the parts when Mark is out in the woods.

At one point I came up from the basement and my son just wanted to sit with me for awhile, so I sat

down on the couch with him and watched some of the video with him. The part I caught was where Mark was frying pieces of salt cured bacon on his fire and then made Johnny cakes out of corn flour. Garrick asked me if we could make Johnny cakes and bacon. I thought about it and asked him if he would like to go out to our small spot of woods and make some there after church the next day. He thought that was a good idea so he came up with our shopping list of things we’d need to get after church.

After church the next day we went to the grocery store. We asked Garrick what we needed and he picked out the options. We had unfortunately used up all our salt cured bacon, so we had to pick up some of the regular stuff. Garrick picked out some peppered bacon. He then took us to the baking aisle and picked out some of the corn flour too. We then went back home, made lunch and napped for a bit.

When we woke up I started getting things ready. This short jaunt to the woods wasn’t going to be a period correct affair like we usually do things with our family. This was a quick outing to our woods just for us to be outside and have some fun. We along with the bacon and corn flour we brought also brought our tin cups, a small trivet, Kim’s 1830s japanned tea kettle and hot cocoa. We also brought along the girls’s .22 that they’d gotten for their birthday.

When we got to the woods the kids and I picked out a spot and began to trampled down the grass by making first a small circle and then making that circle bigger. Then I had Garrick and my daughters Signe and Brynja help collect kindling, tinder and firewood. We used matches this time, however, it was agreed that next time we came out to our woods we would all bring our flint and steels and practice making a fire with those.

The fuel that was collect wasn’t exactly dry. I had to perform a

fair amount of CPR on it to keep it going until it got established. That being said, we did practice putting a fire lay together and talked about how and why we did what we did. After the fire was going we put the trivet on it, pulled out our skillet and started frying some bacon to get the grease we’d need to make our Johny cakes in. We brought along some paper bowls to put the food in. In one bowl we would put all the fried bacon. In the other bowl we put the flour, added water and the kids mixed up the “dough”. They made patties and little balls of the mixture which we placed into the the hot bacon grease and fried up.

While the cooking was taking place, the girls make their own fire lays and Signe even make a little drying rack for the bacon, thinking that we’d be making dried meat out of the bacon. They both did a pretty good job. After we ate our fill of bacon and johnny cakes we heated up water in Kim’s tea kettle and we had hot chocolate.

Finally, we finished off the afternoon with starting to teach the girls how to shoot their .22. Signe hit the target every time, Brynja hit the target all but once and Garrick...always hit the backstop. Kim even had some fun shooting my lever action Winchester .22 WinMag. It was a good afternoon out in our woods with my family. -- Leifer