David Smith 7/27/13 David Smith 7/27/13

40 miles to milk a goat

What kind of crazy person would drive 20 miles (10 each way) twice a day for a week to milk a single goat? My kind of crazy I guess, because that's just what I'm going to do. My friend Christine is going to New York for a week and asked for a little help with her critters while she's gone. So yeah, I'm helping a friend, but I'm also just having a bit of fun. I thoroughly enjoy Christine's goats, and am happy to have any excuse to hang out with them when I can.

I was hoping that more than one goat would require milking, but right now it's just the one from her small herd. Cali, short for Calliope, is the doe in question. That's her below, the one I've got my hand on.

She's a sweetheart. There are sure to be some goat cheese and yogurt blog posts in the coming days.

David Smith 7/23/13 David Smith 7/23/13

Walnut Liqueur: Nocino

Ever since I started doing small liqueur experiments a few years ago I've wanted to try to make Nocino, the Italian dark liqueur made from unripened walnuts. Last year our friends Christine and Brian Mittnacht purchased a small farm south of town, on which are a couple of walnut trees. Christine had the exact same thought I did about making nocino, and has three or four bottles in-process right now. Yesterday I stopped out to her place and picked three dozen unripe walnuts for the very same purpose.

I'm picturing a group of us sitting around the campfire after a great meal, everyone with a small bowl of homemade ice cream drizzled with dark, nutty, slightly spicy nocino...or little apéritif glasses of the silky liqueur (after dinner we would call it a digestif, before dinner an apéritif).

The recipes for nocino you may find are all rather similar. Some use more or less sugar, add or omit certain spices, vary the length of time the liqueur should sit and mellow, and so on. Some also add the spices and sugar right at the beginning while others add them after the green walnuts have steeped for a few weeks. I chose to add the sugar and spices after the initial steeping time (40 days), really only because I found that I had run out of cinnamon sticks (used them up making pickled grapes the other day).

So, here's the nocino recipe I'm using.
Part I:

around 3 dozen green, unripe walnuts, washed & quartered
zest of 1 lemon - use a vegetable peeler to peel strips from around the lemon
1 bottle vodka (most suggest using a cheap vodka; I say use a decent vodke, one you'd drink on its own)

1. Place the quartered walnut wedges into a large, sealable jar with the lemon peel strips scattered throughout.

2. Fill with vodka; seal the jar and set it aside somewhere cool to sit for 40 days. Give it a shake or back-&-forth every day.

Part II:

1/2 cup water
1 cup cane sugar
1 or 2 cinnamon sticks
5 or 6 cloves
I may add a tbl or so of honey too, I'm not sure yet

1. Combine the water, sugar, cinnamon sticks and cloves (and maybe the honey) into a sauce pan and heat to dissolve the sugar and steep the spices. When finished steeping remove the cinnamon sticks and cloves and let the syrup cool.

2. Strain the walnuts and lemon peels from the vodka. Add the cooled spiced sugar syrup to the vodka and now let that sit for another month or so. I understand that the longer it sits the mellower it gets.

3. After 5 or 6 weeks strain the liqueur to remove any sediment or bits that may be left. I'll likely use my coffee chemex and filters to strain. Bottle and cork it, make a funky label for it, and bring it out for that after dinner ice cream wind-down.

Ready to sit and work its magic. Patience required.

We'll update you again in 40 days.

David Smith 7/3/13 David Smith 7/3/13

Seeding greens into elevated garden beds

I haven't quite nailed down how to place and format videos onto the blog page so that they also get added to the video page. I'll have to figure that out as we'll be adding more videos to the site this year, the higher production quality Creative Sustenance videos that Josh and I produce together, and simpler, less visually impressive videos that I do myself.

I certainly don't have the skills or equipment to do the kind of film work that Josh does. He's a true artist with video. I'm just a guy with a Flip video or cheap Kodak camera. Also, our schedules and locales are such that it's not always easy for both of us to get together to shoot on the spur of the moment.

But I do have some things I'd like to share via video that are perhaps a little more off-the-cuff and low-brow than our official Creative Sustenance video projects. This little video on seeding greens into an elevated garden bed is that sort of thing. Someone asked me about the elevated beds we have in the yard and I thought rather than making a written blog entry about it, it might be fun and more effective to actually show what we do.

These kinds of rough video tutorials and varied subject matter videos will also lack the structure, format and time parameters that the Creative Sustenance videos have. Maybe I should call them Creative Sustenance Home Videos or something like that (how about CS Low Brow Videos?). In any event, here's our latest blog entry, in my own simple video format. (If nothing else, the quality of this video indicates, by comparison, just how brilliant Josh is at his job...hop over to the video page and take a look at our Milkweed episode again.)

David Smith 6/27/13 David Smith 6/27/13

Pickled Ramps with Apple & Cucumber in Honey & Fish Sauce

I've had a bag of cleaned ramp bulbs sitting in the bottom of the fridge for more than a week and thought I better put them up today. So this morning I put up 5 pint-&-half jars (24 oz. each). I've concocted and used a good number of recipes for preserving ramps over the years, and while there are one or two that I consider tried-and-true, I nevertheless enjoy playing with the process more often than not. This morning's effort reflects that experimental urge.

Ramps have such a powerful garlic/onion flavor, so I often try to balance that with some sweetness or sometimes even fruitiness. Late season ramps, which is what this batch was, are even more pungent than their earlier, fully leafed versions. I also prefer my pickled things to be weaker rather than stronger concerning sourness, so I try to use less vinegar when it seems prudent. You'll see in this recipe a tad less vinegar and a little more sugar (in the form of cane sugar and honey) than some other recipes call for.

I also added an ingredient, Asian fish sauce, I've never used before when pickling vegetables, but my post-processing tasting tells me it might become something of a regular ingredient in many more canning sessions.

I've been reading and enjoying Edward Lee's beautiful new cooking volume Smoke & Pickles (Artisan, 2013). Lee's riff on his grandmother's recipe for "Pickled Garlic in Molasses Soy Sauce" caught my eye, especially as he described it as going particularly well with fried quail. Not that I eat a lot of quail, but the pairing conjured a mental image that stoked my creative furnace a bit. I didn't use Lee's specific recipe, which calls for an impressive 2 cups of soy sauce and 1/2 cup of molasses, but it did get me thinking and inspired me to try something different with my pickled ramps.

Lee's heavy use of soy sauce and molasses got me thinking about umami , the alleged fifth taste we humans can discern. Rather than using soy sauce I turned to fish sauce, and ingredient I am finding more and more places for in the kitchen. A little fish sauce goes a long way, so I added only 2 tablespoons and a splash more, which i think provided the right earthy note I was looking for to play off of the pungency of the ramps and the sweetness of the sugar and honey.

I also added slices of seedless cucumber and tart apple to the mix. I felt that the cucumber would act as something of a neutralizer, mellowing some of the slightly harsher character of these late season ramps. The apple adds that element of sweet tartness that I liked in the recipe for Ramp and Apple Pickled Sucker a few weeks ago.

So, here's my recipe for Pickled Ramps with Apple & Cucumber in Honey & Fish Sauce.

Pickling recipe:

white vinegar 2 cups
water 1½ cups
cane sugar 2 cups
pickling spice* 1½ tbl
fennel seed 1 tsp
dried juniper berries* 1 tsp heaping
fish sauce 2-3 tbl
honey ¾ cup

Also:

ramp bulbs cleaned and trimmed, enough to fill 5 pint-&-half (24 oz) jars.
1 tart apple, sliced into thin wedges
1 seedless cucumber, sliced thinly

Sterilize everything like you normally do when canning. Boil the pickling ingredients together, stirring constantly (you don't want the sugar to cook or caramelize, just dissolve fully). Stuff the jars with ramps, cucumber and apple slices, alternating a few ramps with an apple and cuke slice or two, until you get to the top. Push everything down into the jar as tightly as you can, and add more if you're able to.

Pour the hot pickling mix over the ramps, sliding a butter knife down the sides of the jars, jostling the contents a bit to make sure you get any air pockets out of there. Add more pickling mix if you need to, but don't go any higher than about a 1/4" from the rim. Seal the jars with lids and bands, and process in your canning bath for 15 minutes. Gently remove the jars and space them out on your counter while you wait for that exciting "pop!" of the lids, ensuring a good seal. Mark with contents and date.

My Atlanta friend Bryan asked me what the ramps taste like. Well, I let the jars sit for a few hours this morning, to make sure everything had time to get acquainted, before opening one up. The smell was nice...sweet, a little oniony, but also faintly herbal and even a little floral. I took a sip of the liquid. Didn't make me pucker, which is good, and I thought, "Hmmm, I wonder how this would taste in a cocktail." (Might find out tonight.) I bit into a ramp, judged it to have the slightly tamed, sweet, umami vibe I was hoping for, and immediately sliced a few up to cover some natural casing hot dogs for lunch. Thumbs up.

* The pickling spice I often use is one I get at an Amish General Store in the country outside of Shawano, WI. I buy it in small bulk containers and it contains mustard seed, allspice, corriander, cassia, ginger, peppers, cloves, bay leaves and a few other spices.

* I pick juniper berries in early fall - September to October and later - let them dry and store in empty spice jars. If you too want to harvest your own, make sure you know what you're picking.

David Smith 6/19/13 David Smith 6/19/13

The "busy work" of gardening, beekeeping & foraging

We've been engaged in quite a lot of what I'm going to call "busy work" since my last blogpost back in May. The garden has been a struggle thus far this year, with a significant number of our vegetable seedlings dying from the wacky pseudo-spring weather we had. I reseeded portions of the garden beds and restarted plants for transplanting two or three times in the last four weeks. We're also experiencing something of a chipmunk plague this year. The little beasties seem to be everywhere, beheading sunflower, okra and squash seedlings and showing themselves with an almost mocking impudence. I'm half expecting to walk out onto the porch one morning to find several of them playing cards, using my radish greens as chips and eyeing me with an air of dismissive contempt.

Our foray into the world of beekeeping has also had its ups and downs these past few weeks. Our first package of bees didn't make it. The queen and a majority of the workers perished in the first week or so. I blame the erratic weather, which was hot for the first day or two after we installed them and then dipped to freezing for several days. We purchased another, larger packet and successfully installed them into the top bar hive I built and they seem to be moving forward with determined purpose, building combs and adding to their numbers at what seems to me to be a staggering pace. However, they've also had to work extra hard to repair some of damage we unintentionally did to the hive during our first few examinations, as we inadvertently broke a few combs and killed a good number of larvae. More on that in a succeeding post.

And of course we've been foraging and filming. We've got a good amount of film in the can, so to speak, and need to begin editing and releasing additional episodes of Creative Sustenance. We'll need to get into a production rhythm so that we're releasing episodes on a somewhat consistent schedule. Getting out into the field to forage and film is such fun. We truly are fortunate to live in a state with such an incredible abundance of wild edibles and beautiful locations. I think you'll like what we've got on deck with Creative Sustenance.

David Smith 5/11/13 David Smith 5/11/13

More pickled sucker recipes

Since my April 30 blog-post I had those suckers we caught chunked and soaking in brine, and yesterday finished pickling them, using four different pickling recipes. I found a great new cookbook at the library, Scandinavian Classics by Niklas Ekstedt, and it includes some wonderful pickled herring recipes that I used for the suckers.

My grandfather used to pickle small northern pike in a more traditional vinegar/salt/spice pickling solution, the kind that you might normally use for pickled cucumbers. They were fantastic and I always liked seeing an open jar of his pickled northern in the fridge, so I could steal a piece or two. The foundational recipe for pickled herring in Ekstedt's book is not like the recipe my Grandpa used. Ekstedt's version is a sweet pickle, using no salt at all in the foundation pickle, and very little (a pinch) in the follow-up flavoring pickles.

I had the sucker pieces soaking in a light salt brine for 5 days, before moving onto the sweet pickle as outlined in the book.

Here is Ekstedt's "Basic Pickling Brine for Herring", which I adapted for the amount of sucker I had:

6 cups water
2.2 lbs sugar
2 cups white vinegar
10 allspice kernels
4 bay leaves

Bring all of that to a boil and cook for a bit.
Let it cool and keep in the fridge.
Rinse the salted fish chunks in cold running water. Then rinse them again. Then again...rinse the dickens out of them, for 20 minutes.
Place the rinsed fish pieces into a large container and cover with the cooled brine. Put something like a small plate over them fish to weigh it down a bit and to keep them under the brine. Let sit in the fridge for a day.
The next day make another brine like you did above and let it cool. Remove the fish from the brine (I just placed them in a colander), dump the old brine, rinse the container, replace the fish pieces and cover with the new brine. Weight them down again too. Let it sit for another day.

Now you're ready to create various flavor brines that will give the fish distinctly different profiles (tastes and textures). I veered a bit, as I am wont to do, from Ekstadt's recipes in a couple of these. I'll just give you the recipes below as I did them. You ought to feel free to do fiddle and play with these as well.

Ramps and green Apple Pickled Sucker ["Ramps and Apple Herring"]

The recipe for the first batch I pickled sounded like the most interesting: "Ramps & Apple". I have plenty of ramps from the week's foraging harvests and so I was anxious to give this one a whirl. I followed Ekstedt exactly on this one.

1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup sour cream
2 tart green apples
bunch of ramps
pinch of sea salt
freshly ground white pepper

Grate the apples coarsely and finely chop the ramps (the whole ramp,from bulb to leaf top).
Mix the mayo and sour cream, along with the salt and ground white pepper.
Add the grated apples and chopped ramps and mix well.
Add the fish pieces to the sauce and gently but thoroughly mix it all together.
Divvy up the sucker in sauce concoction into clean jars with lids. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

Herb Sauce Pickled Sucker ["Herring with Herbs"]

This one was really tasty.

1 cup yogurt (Ekstedt called for crème fraîche)
1 cup mayonnaise
1 scant tbl olive oil
Chopped parsley
Minced garlic
Minced onion
Chopped ramp leaves
Dried tarragon
Sea salt
Ground white pepper

Mix everything together in a large bowl.
Add the fish pieces and gently but thoroughly mix.
Divvy up the sucker in sauce concoction into clean jars with lids. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

Fennel Pickled Sucker ["Fennel Herring"]

2 or 3 cups of the foundational pickling brine, strained (amount depends on how much fish you have to pickle).
Fennel bulb, thinly sliced.
1-2 tbl fennel seeds, lightly toasted.

Fill the jars with the sliced fennel and sucker pieces.
Add 1/2 tbl of the toasted fennel seeds and a fennel frond (Why the frond? Because it looks cool).
Cover with the strained pickling brine. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

Tomato/Garlic/Onion Pickled Sucker ["Tomato and Sherry Herring"]

Can of crushed tomatoes
Chopped onion
Chopped garlic
2 tbl olive oil
Sea salt
Ground Black pepper
Bay leaf

Mix everything together, season to taste with salt and pepper.
Add the fish pieces and gently but thoroughly mix.
Divvy up the sucker in sauce concoction into clean jars with lids. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

I plan on trying these recipes, and more, with any small "hammer handle" northerns I catch this year. Sucker meat is ok, but northern pike is firmer and smoother tasting. Let me know if you do any fish pickling yourself, and how it turns out for you.

David Smith 5/3/13 David Smith 5/3/13

We missed the sturgeon but found another cache of wild edibles

We spent yesterday and today in Shawano County, at my parents' cottage. Kim had a job interview in Wittenberg and I wanted to check the countryside for more potential foraging locations. If you happen to be a friend on my own facebook page you may be familiar with our forays to the cottage. They usually involve a hammock, a few cigars, some good craft beer and grilling of meat. This week, however, Shawano seemed to still be trying desperately to shake off winter's chill and grab hold of spring. It was rainy and nippy, but a most enjoyable reprieve nonetheless.

A trio of wild edibles harvested from a beautiful hardwood forest in Shawano County. l-r: Virginia Waterleaf, Ramps, Trout Lilies.

Virginia Waterleaf. I would not normally dig up the whole plant like this, rather only a portion of the young leaves, but the spot from where these were harvested was being logged and dug up to make what looked to be an entrance road. This image pro… — Virginia Waterleaf. I would not normally dig up the whole plant like this, rather only a portion of the young leaves, but the spot from where these were harvested was being logged and dug up to make what looked to be an entrance road. This image provides a look at the root system.

Handful of Virginia Waterleaf. The oftentimes dappled or lighter "watermark" spots are not especially visible in this image, although they are there.

As far as it concerns Creative Sustenance, I did indeed discover several new locations that look quite promising. One area in particular had me very excited. So much so that when I pulled into a muddy track entering a hardwood forest, where some heavy equipment had parked during the clearing of the area, I did so a little recklessly and risked getting stuck in the deeply ridged muddy tracks of the logging vehicles. But I was too pumped about seeing the acre upon acre of ramps, trout lilies and virginia waterleaf plants that covered the forest floor.

Virginia Waterleaf leaves, the primary edible part.

I grabbed my spade and quickly dug a few plants from the edges of the clearing where the big rigs had been working. I didn't feel guilty about the few shallow holes I dug nor the handful of plants I removed in their entirety, something I would normally never do, because I knew that this spot would soon be leveled and graded of all plant life as the road was put in. When I return and hopefully get the okay to walk the woods proper, I'll do so with my usual thoughtful stewardship of the woodland I'm responsible for when in it.

I was a little surprised at how deeply the trout lily bulbs were buried. Some were 8-12 inches or more below their mottled leaves, attached to creamy white "stalks", or scapes, blanched by many inches of mulched soil. The bulb depth told of an old forest, with decades worth of decomposing leaf matter. It was also an indication of the age of some of the plants that had seeded or reproduced vegetatively many years ago.

Trout Lily bulbs, cleaned and sweet as clover.

Ramps, cleaned and trimmed. They blanketed the forest floor for acres.

The soil was incredibly rich and black, like the most beautiful compost created from the hand of a master gardener. A half-dozen to a dozen worms seemed to be in every spade-full. Even though we're already into May right now, climatically it's still very early spring. Winter is still letting us know he hasn't given up the ghost quite yet. (Last night saw 17" of snow fall in Rice Lake, I was told. We saw a car pass us covered in several inches of the white stuff.)

This morning Kim and I drove over to the Shawano dam area of the Wolf River, as two of our cottage neighbors told me this morning that the sturgeon were spawning with great theatricality just a couple days ago. They described the big fish as looking like logs bouncing around in the water, swimming over one another, as thick as cordwood. Every year the sturgeon spawning run draws people to the river to watch the giant prehistoric fish do their thing. Unfortunately for us, the day was cold and the dam had been opened, changing conditions pretty dramatically. A good number of other people were also at the river, hoping for a glimpse, but we saw no fish. Still, it was cool to know that they were in there, hiding in the deep water.

Addendum: I call this my Wittenberg Sandwich, because I got all of the ingredients in or a bit outside Wittenberg this day. Jack cheese, sweet/hot mustard and vinegar&herb sulze from Nueske's Meats, ramps and virginia waterleaf greens from a forest a few miles from town. But the swirled rye I did get from a sweet little local butcher shop in Shawano. If you're not familiar with sulze, it's just head-cheese with herbs or spices and vinegar added. It was fantastic.

David Smith 4/30/13 David Smith 4/30/13

Suckers, Ramps and Trout Lilies

While scouting for young burdock rosettes today, I stopped at a small bridge a mile outside of town, just to see what I could see in the river below. The fast moving water was greenish but clear and, lo and behold, I could see several small groups of suckers. So, I drove home, grabbed the dip net and called my Dad to ask him if he wanted to join me for an hour of fun.

I set up the net on the bridge while Dad walked downstream a-ways and started "herding" suckers to my net. We had a blast, hollering, "Here they come!" "He went under the net!" "Got one!" (used that line several times). We thought we'd give it a whirl further downstream from the bridge, where I just threw the net into the river, watched for suckers speeding past and pulled hard and fast when one or more passed over the net. "Got one!" became "Holy cow!" when on one pull I hauled in six.

I cleaned , cubed and salt brined the fish for later pickling. The jagged odds and ends I breaded and fried for a tasty snack before heading back out to the woods for more wild edibles scouting.

The ramps are well on their way now; it won't be more than another week or two before the forest floor is carpeted with them. Trout lilies make good opportunity in the spots where ramps choose to share the ground. I harvested one modest cluster of ramps and a few sweet trout lily bulbs, enough to give everyone at home a bite or two.

Mottled trout lily leaf next to young ramps.

I love trout lily bulbs. They're one of the real treats of the early spring edibles. Sweet, crunchy, easy to harvest. I wish they were larger than pea-size, but were that the case I might make a pig of myself with them. As it is, they do well as simply a lovely little candy treat.

Trout Lily bulbs next to a bunch of ramps.

David Smith 4/23/13 David Smith 4/23/13

Pickled Suckers and a few Ramps

It seems that this year's "spring" has been stalled in winter-mode forever. April 23rd today and it's a crisp 42°. Someone said close to a foot of snow fell last night in northern Wisconsin. I'm not one to complain about weather; I enjoy all of our region's elemental inconsistencies. But even I am tired of waiting for spring warmth and sun. Mostly I'm tired of waiting for the flush of wild spring edibles that I covet each year.

Today my impatience got the better of me and so I went out and dug up just a few fledgling ramps, their leaves with no more than an couple inches of nascent growth. I don't normally like to do that, as the leaves of mature ramps are as flavorful as the bulbs. But I needed something now! Ramp and duck egg pizza is tonight's dinner entree.

Early spring ramps, with only an inch or two of new leaf growth.

Last week saw my daughter Jesse and I doing a bit of sucker fishing with our dip net. The suckers are running now, though not impressively, and as the larder is bereft of last year's pickled sucker I had a hankering to make some more. We scored a couple of modestly-sized males from the Little Manitowoc River, enough for two jars of pickled meat. See my recipe from last year's (2012) May 5th blog post (the only difference in the recipe is that this time I used apple wine instead of regular white wine).

Dip net. A lot of smelt and suckers, and even crayfish and a few snapping turtles, have made acquaintance with this small net.

Jesse with two small male suckers, our only fish on a cold, rainy day.

We hope to get a few more suckers this week, as I want to pickled at least a dozen jars-worth.

Pickled sucker. See the May 5, 2012 blog post for recipe.

The rainbow trout are running now as well. The day after Jesse and I went out, which was a weekend, I went out with rod and lure to try my luck alone. One beautiful, silvery 19" male rainbow was my reward, just enough to satisfy my wife and I for lunch that same afternoon.

Rainbow trout, caught in Little Manitowoc River on a small cleo. Pan-fried with a coating of toasted sesame seeds, he was just what the doctor ordered.

Yes, it's been cool to downright frosty this phony spring month of April, but a few fish and a handful of small ramps are enough to keep the fire in my belly alight.

Several days of rain made for a high and swiftly moving river.

David Smith 4/17/13 David Smith 4/17/13

Hello old friends

Our last post was on March 29, almost 3 weeks ago, and I thought spring was right at the doorstep. Fooled again! I'd been scouting the woods and fields every day or two since then. We noticed the first new green of the year only yesterday, with ramps making their 2013 debut.

Ramps (Wild Leeks) breaking through a soft bed of pine needles.

The ramps I transplanted along the side of the house last year - perhaps six total root clusters - also showed themselves yesterday. That project looks to be a success, and I'll be transplanting even more this year, possibly 50 or more root clusters along the north side of the house.

Cluster of transplanted ramps from last year sprouting at the side of the house.

During a short walk through the woods I did find a single, small garlic mustard seedling making a lonely first appearance. Of course its solitariness was just a ruse; no doubt it will soon be joined by an army of its invading brethren. We found no morels, which did not surprise me, as we haven't had more than a few hours total of adequate temperatures in the last month (it did hit 63° for a couple hours two days ago, before quickly dropping to the lower 50°s). But there were plenty of other interesting things to see in the still naked forest.

A few Great Horned Owl pellets with the remains of mice and squirrels.

I picked a few bones from some owl pellets, saving a couple of mouse jawbones for my daughter to make a necklace charm with (I suppose that does perhaps sound a tad unusual, but she's an unusual girl...the apple didn't fall far from the tree with her). A group of seven whitetail deer were unafraid and curious, as urban deer are wont to be. One young buck was showing the knobby beginnings of what will become his headgear this year. We also enjoyed watching three beautiful and glossy mallards making use of a small rainwater puddle. They looked so pristine that it made me slightly embarrassed for our own ducks at home, with their natty plumage.

Mallards enjoy a puddle swim in the middle of the woods. These fellows were so glossy they appeared to almost be holographic.

We plan to start filming again early next week. Stay tuned and, as always, please feel free to let us know what you think or would like to see in the way of Creative Sustenance episodes, wild edibles and other food projects.