The first time I picked up a book on wine making at home, I quickly became discouraged. As I scanned the pages, I noted such wine ingredients as Campden tablets, various types of wine yeasts, yeast nutrient tablets, malic acid, grape tannin, and peptic enzyme. As though this hadn't confused me enough, I scanned a little further and found such terms as hydrometer, must, racking, yeast starter, gravity and bung.
These ingredients and terms, which later became known to me, left me totally baffled at the time. I quickly decided that making wine was not a good project to begin on a quite Sunday afternoon. I ended up using my freshly picked berries in pies.
Some time later I came across a recipe, published in an outdated copy of Farmer's Almanac, for Dandelion Wine. The recipe contained no foreign sounding ingredients and the instructions were easy to follow. For a novice winemaker, such a recipe proved inspirational. Winemaking, using wild fruits and flowers, later became one of my casual pastimes.
Since winemaking is not a full-fledged hobby of mine, I have not become a connoisseur of fine homemade wine, nor an amateur scientist with a well equipped laboratory. My wines are flavorful and palatable, even though they begin their existence in a cracked crock I purchased at a garage sale.
The methods I employ in winemaking are very basic and unsophisticated. And a book such as this, Wild Wines, was exactly what I was seeking when I first began my winemaking adventures.
More from Darcy Williamson: Basque Cooking and Love; River Tales of Idaho; The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook; Ten-Minute Meals, Five-Minute Workouts: For People Who Never Have Enough Time; How to Prepare Common Wild Foods; Salmon River Legends and Campfire Cuisine; Cooking With Spirit: North American Indian Food and Fact & many more!
Sisters of a Different Dawn is the tale of two women ~ New Englander Sara Gray and the Shoshone, Umentucken, of southeastern Idaho ~ two women who are as different as the Shoshone Indian is from the Methodist-Episcopalian in the 1840s.But Sara Gray and Umentucken have a common bond in Sara's brother Myram, who left his Boston home to adventure west as a trapper for the Hudson's Bay Company. Sara's own travels across the country in search of her brother are filled with danger and excitement. Meanwhile, Sara is unaware that Myram has married a beautiful, spirited Native American who is totally unrepentant about her non-Christian upbringing.Sisters of a Different Dawn is the tale of two women ~ both striving to retain their individuality during a time when change threatens all that they had once believed to be truth.
Cover by Claire Remsburg
They were hunters, trappers, bear fighters, Indian killers who lived off the land and survived annual rendezvous. The sun, the wind, the harsh winter climate tanned and dried and leathered their faces until those without beards (and there were a few) had to roll up their sleeves to bare white arms as proof of their Caucasian identity.
The majority dressed more in Indian fashion than Indians. Fringed shirts. Buckskin leggings. Feathers. Beads. And bones. They wore their gee-gaws with pride ~ each trinket a momento of some rendezvous, Indian maiden, daring feat, or gift of friendship.
Possessions were bare essentials, scaled down so that all could be hastily gathered and spirited away at the first sight of trouble. Those over-encumbered easily lost the over-flow to Indians, if they didn't first, lose their lives trying to protect their property.
It was a life of extremes. Days of hunger would quickly be forgotten while consuming ten pound of sizzling buffalo steak. A day of cold and misery could thaw before the blaze of campfires as the memory of its harshness trickled away with each sip of Old Jamaca rum. Loneliness would give way to wild get-togethers with rivals or friends. The men would become engorged on gaming, drinking, pitting wit against wit, and brawn against brawn that solitude would become, once again, a desperately needed state of being.
Mountainmen were mountainmen for the sheer joy of freedom, endurance and oneness with nature. Any one who said that it was for the money, lied.
This book was written in hopes of unveiling one of America's best kept secrets - delicacies of the desert. The high and low desert areas of the southwestern United States provide a cornucopia of solid foods ranging from succulent fruits to rich nuts; spicy seasonings to exotic meats, juicy berries to tangy vegetables.For the hunter, backpacker or camper, these foods offer a welcomed addition to the camp menu. Once the outdoors-man becomes familiar with desert foods and their seasonal availability he can plan his provisions accordingly. The backpacker can lighten his load in anticipation of supplementing his diet with foods gathered along the trail. Each following chapter contains a section for the outdoors-man, providing simple methods of preparing wild desert plants and game out-of-doors. But, desert foods shouldn't be limited to use in the field! Their unique flavors and textures lend themselves to gourmet cooking as well. Wild foods from the desert can open a whole new dimension in food preparation and entertaining. Juniper berries, Pinion nuts, acorn meal, pickled nopalitos and prickly pear jelly are a few of the wild desert foods which hold prominent positions on the shelves of specialty and gourmet shops. These same high priced delicacies are abundant in their natural habitat. The following chapters provide hundreds of rarely seen recipes offering the homemaker and gourmet cook a galaxy of fresh ideas for using desert foods.
It might be called a cookbook ~ if you want to prepare stewed dog in a buffalo bladder, or make "Midge's Navajo Reservation Macaroni and Cheese," modern Indian fare concocted with government-issued commodities.It might be a natural healing guide, if you're willing to talk with medicinal plants before you pick them.Or it might be a folklore anthology, with American Indian stories about the origins and adventures of the eel, the coyote and other wild creatures.But authors Darcy Williamson and Lisa Railsback reject these categories when describing Cooking with Spirit, Native American Food and Facts.Williamson is an award winning writer who lives near the small central-Idaho town of McCall. She has more than two dozen books to her credit, including several natural-food cookbooks and an at-home schooling guide. She has recently completed a historical novel, Sister's of a Different Dawn, about a Shoshone Indian woman and her proper Bostonian sister-in-law and their conflicts during the mid-1800's.Railsback is a Navajo-Apache artisan who has visited Indian reservations throughout the country, collecting information on Indian foods, healing methods, folklore and crafts. When she's not on the road she operated a store in northern California, selling rare traditional Native American crafts. She also teaches seminars about symbolism in American Indian art.The two women met in 1984 and became instant friends. Cooking with Spirit is a product of this friendship that has now spanned over a quarter of a century.PHOTOS: Book cover; sample pages; author.
PHOTOS: Book cover; sample pages; author
More from Darcy Williamson: Basque Cooking and Love; River Tales of Idaho; The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook; Ten-Minute Meals, Five-Minute Workouts: For People Who Never Have Enough Time; How to Prepare Common Wild Foods; Salmon River Legends and Campfire Cuisine; Cooking With Spirit: North American Indian Food and Fact & many more! PHOTOS: Book cover, sample pages, back cover.
Salmon River Legends and Campfire Cuisine by Darcy Williamson and Steven Shepherd. Illustrated by Shannon Dee
