The DIY Diet: A Video

A couple of weeks ago a fella, R. called me (young and enthusiastic, so young and enthusiastic he sounds about 12 to me) and asked if I'd take him out shooting, he wanted to shoot some video for a vignette about alternatives to rising food costs, and wondered I would show him some subsistance hunting.

At the time subsistance was very much on my mind, I was twiddling my thumbs; diving my time between frantically searching for loose change down the back of the sofa, and writing talismans in my own blood hoping some atavistic god of the hunt would take pity on me and send some gainful employment my way.

So guessing that he's never been hunting before, and fancying a day in the woods, I tell him
"I'll take you, but you're going to have to be a sport about this, all I can promise you is a stunning location. This is hunting not shopping. "

Early one morning I meet R and his friend R in the street. They are both so young and cute I feel about 100 years old. We set off for the country, being journalists by disposition they politely listen to an interminable stream of anecdotes I've brought along to pass the time. Being journalists they have a most excellent line in gossip and salacious rumour, themselves. They are very good company.

Regular readers will remember that I have long and inglorious history of not being able to find 'the permission' when I get there, I've never arrived at the same time or in the climatic conditions twice, I know a few local landmarks so I can get near to near-ish to the place but usually spend a while scratching my head before the penny drops. This time was no exception.

As expected we've left the tarmaced road and are driving down a bridle-way, I'm just thinking 'That's not the house we're looking for' when the front wheels sink into a pool of mud and the Golf goes no further. Bugger.
Sunk it has, the driver side front wheel not only has no traction, but isn't even in contact with terra firma, the car is resting on its floorpan. In a cloud of clutch-smoke. Bugger.

There are sign's of life at the last house we passed, sign's of life like a 4x4 with a tow-bar parked outside, so I send the guys back to the house to ask for help. Where they receive the sour-faced "well you shouldn't have driven down there then should you" of rural scum. Bugger again.

Being a protected English countryside habitat there is agricultural crap lying around all over the place; so we drag a sheet of corrugated iron out of a hedge, dig away some of the mud, and use the sheet as a base for the jack, which lifts the car enough to put some rocks under the wheel. Traction restored we reverse out of the hole, and straight into the next one. About an hour later as we free ourselves from the third hole we end up turning the car around outside casa sourface, it's occupants staring gormlessly at us from the windows. Rural scum.

As we climb the stile the wood is at it's most photogenic, the bluebells are in full bloom, the whole place looks like it was laid out especially for filming. If you wanted to show someone english woodland stalking in the springtime, you'd show them the purple might of the Bluebell woods. Its the woods as we know them: Hornbeam, Yew, Oak, Brich, Beech, Hazel. Just with a carpet hovering 12 inches off the ground made of glowing purple flowers.

Every stalker has their own version of this, but I always remember it the way HunterX says it. "Close the bolt and close the gate" - as soon as you are on the land you have permission to shoot, be ready to take that shot. Your arrival might spook something and that might be your only chance at a shot. The guys are heaving a mini film crew's worth of stuff with them, I do the next best thing and leave them setting up at the hut to take an 'armed ramble'.

There are slots but no Deer, the warren is unoccupied and there's no sign of any Squirrels for the pot, its just as well the guys had bought themselves a Rabbit over the internet. This time is was shopping and not hunting, but the location was stunning.

More soon
Your pal
SBW

How To Get On TV

The Magic of TV: standing on a beach watching a plane pretend to land, so you can pretend to be on it.

A Little while ago this blog got me the chance to be on the TV. Appearing with Paul Merton a comedian who I've been a massive fan of for years. Aside from his weekly satirical news show he also has a travel show and for its last series was exploring what he could get up to close to home. Somehow the production company had hooked up with that 'consumate outdoorsman', blogger, wild and crazy force of nature, goose guide, and gamekeeper Andy Richardson. He pointed the TV folk in my direction. And there hangs a tale.

It's morning and you find me drinking coffee, staring into the middle distance, I'm at home wondering where my next job is coming from when I get an email from a girl I've never heard of who works at a TV company I have heard of 'CALL ME URGENTLY" she says. I take a break from my busy schedule of looking out of the window and scratching my arse to give her a ring. She wants to know about the SBW blog, luckily its my favorite subject so I tell her a bit about it, and because she works in TV and therefore thinks in pictures I email her some pictures. She sounds interested but is obviously not the decision maker.
I engage the 'did I mention I'm 40 and I've heard it all before' part of my brain, put the whole thing out of my mind, and go to make more coffee. Later that day I get Andy on the phone, I've convinced myself this is just another dead-end, but to my surprise Andy seems to think its all happening, so much for the dour Scots gamekeeper image.

A week or so later I'm on a client visit to Hell [aka Ikea], the client is suffering from option paralysis in the kitchen section and I'm dreaming of coffee and a danish when the phone rings. Its TV Chick

TV Chick: Can my boss take you out to lunch?
SBW: Sweetheart anybody can take me out to lunch

On the day itself I've been doing plumbing call outs in the morning but I manage to squeeze in getting a hair cut, then it occurs to me THEY THINK IN PICTURES so I nip home to the pile of mud encrusted  clothes left in a pile on the floor the last time I returned from hunting deer. They really are encrusted, by the time I'm sitting in the marble lobby of the TV company's office there is trail of dried mud leading to my seat. They wanted deer hunter I'm giving them 'deer hunter'.

Over lunch we talk about the star of the show 'a hypercondriac from the suburbs', the producer and director have just done a location visit so we talk about Scotland, we have a laugh about Midges being scotland's apex predator, and some how manage to skirt round the fact that I have no idea what wild and crazy force of nature Andy has told them!

Lunch is a mid price steak house - which gives me the opportunity to casually tell them I only eat steaks when out, ' at home I only eat wild meat I've shot '. I manage to do this with a straight face - They wanted hunter I'm giving them 'hunter'.

I'd sent them a link to The Best of SBW which of course they hadn't read. After I'd answered their questions, and told a few tales something happens which seems to make a difference. Regular readers will remember the time I got Scope Bite from a Muzzle Loader, I still have a bump on my skull. If I tell the tale I usually offer a audience the chance to  feel the bump, as its next to my eye for both our comfort I say 'give me your finger' and put it in place. This time the director was already reaching out for a feel before I got to the end of the tale. Once he'd verified its existence his face took on the satisfaction of a schoolboy in the presence of a 'gnarly scar' and quietly said "best not tell Paul about that". The presence of this wound seems to add veracity to everything else I've told them and at this point they start talking about me being with them in Scotland as though its happening.

I'm still not rising to the bait. Did I mention that I'm forty and I've not only heard it all before but come out with most of it too? I'll believe it when I see it.

When I get home Andy has already posted on his Facebook group that I'm on my way. I call Andy who is full of enthusiasm and tells me how much the film crew loved it when he told them about how I'm an unstoppable optimist who lived as a homeless person foraging the canal paths of London. For three years. 'You told them WHAT?' 'Well y'are, you're always so optimistic"

Ten days later I'm standing in the carpark of a dairy farm re-doing voice overs for the director, as we finish we say our goodbyes and he adds "From the first moment I saw you I knew it was going to work, there you were 'Hunter: Straight from central casting'"

More Soon
Your pal
SBW
PS You can see the episode Andy and I are in here and I'll tell you the rest of the tale another time.


Some Observations About TV People
1. They are simple people - they think in pictures and cliches. Complexity doesn't lend itself to TV. Keep it simple and keep it sexy or their eyes will glaze over.

2. They are not malicious bullshitters, they just appear so - to them every option has the same value until the last minute when a snap decision is made and all other options are dropped in a mad rush to get the camera's rolling. Lots of people will be contacted, very few will end up on screen.

3. They cant read. [OK I exaggerate they 'can' but don't.]

4. They are very very proud to be working in TV, but it is totally against the rules to show any kind of delight - they must be seen to be working very hard. Any shows of excitement or enthusiasm will reveal you as a total naive and not 'one of us'. So they can appear a bit sniffy to non-TV real people.

5.The Director: probably the best job in the world. you get to be an inquisitive child 90% of the time and the other 10% you get your demands met. Nice work if you can get it!

6.The Producer: Its all on your shoulders, but you've got a small army to make sure it works out. You must encourage the director, stop money being spent and get stuff on tape that'll look good on screen.

7.The Director and Producer roles in TV aren't nearly as glamourous as they sound - think middle management in trendy shoes.

8.The Girls Who Can: without the teams of competent young woman the whole thing would fall down in an instant. Shrewd-eyed and extremely motivated; with the opportunism of pirates and the organisational skills of the german army, if they weren't making TV they'd be running the world - underestimate them at your peril.

Paul Merton Meets The Suburban Bushwacker

Do you remember when I went to Scotland during the summer? Finally the embargo is lifted and I can tell you a bit more about the trip. Well, I will tell you a bit more about the trip, but first if you can get UK TV you can see me and Andy on Channel 5 this wednesday at 10pm UK time.

More - oh so much more- soon
Your pal (and TV personality)
SBW

Survival In The Bush: When Bears Eat Your Dinner

Shot in 1954, Bob Anderson a producer with NFB and Angus Baptiste, his guide and minder, are given a thorough drenching and then left dripping wet in the bush with just an axe and Baptiste's knowledge and ingenuity to keep them going while Baptiste rustles up a birchbark canoe for them to travel home in.

Shamelessly hammed up for the camera [in a far more honest way than todays 'reality' TV] but still informative, and interesting to see how Bushcraft was portrayed on TV nearly 60 years ago. We've come a long way, but are we traveling in the right direction?

More soon

SBW 

And Thoreau's Mum Did His Laundry Every Week

Paleo-Survival TV has been on my mind this week and while I would happily sell what few scraps of dignity I have left, and appear on pretty much any one of them for a sandwich and a glass of tap water I've got to say I just don't get it. Sure they are entertaining, I love watching the hippy and the butch military guy bicker like a pair of fishwives and I could watch the posh boy eating rotting meat for hours. The whole genre poses one question, why the pretend adversity? There are lots of things I've learned from the idiots lantern, TV can educate and entertain at the same time, so why is the bar set so low?

The legendary Tim Smith of Jack Mountain must have been musing on the same thing as he posted a link to this article in Mother Jones.

Like any TV genre-of-the-moment, the roster of primitive-skills programming represents a series of variations on a theme. The ur-example is arguably Man vs. Wild, which premiered in the US on Discovery Channel in March 2006. In each episode, the buff and charismatic Grylls is dropped into an isolated and menacing location, then forced to find shelter, improvise tools, and eat carcass scraps, all the while offering lessons on how intrepid pioneers might have handled the situation. The show is phenomenally entertaining, owing largely to the schoolboy enthusiasm of the former British Special Forces host, who manages to sound exuberant even when delivering schlocky, back-from-commercial bumper lines like, "I've just dragged a dead sheep out of an Irish bog."

The TV executives that I've met are very very good at talking up 'cross platform' broadcasting, but when's it going to arrive? There's a HOOJ audience of people like me, and probably you, who want to learn more and are deeply cynical of the pretend urgency of these guys and the fake way in which they offer the irresponsible illusion of preparedness. By faking their way out of another supposedly life threatening situation they are telling a generation of viewers, for example, that its pretty easy to climb back out of the freezing waters and onto the ice. Bullshit.

How would you like to see it done differently?

Your pal
SBW

PS To who ever left the title of this post on the comments on the Mother Jones site, Genius!

Picture credit

The Wild Gourmets Book Review

I quite liked the first series of the TV show and watched a couple of the second series but it didn’t really capture my imagination. So when MCP gave me 'The Wild Gourmets: Adventures in food and freedom' for Crimbo I was intrigued. The authors have managed to pull off the difficult trick of showing hunting in a positive light on mainstream TV. The show is aimed at a foodie audience who, while liking the idea of wild food, may still have some trepidation about up-close-and-personal knowledge of their dinner’s demise.

Guy Grieve is a good deal more interesting a character than the series lets on. Bored of his desk-jockey life at the The Scotsman newspaper; he actually did what so many of us occasionally dream of doing and de-camped to Alaska to live in a self built cabin for a year. I know he’s Scottish and they’re tougher up there, but it’s still no small achievement. You can read more about his adventure here.

Tommi was a former winner of ‘Masterchef’ a TV show with a self explanatory title.

Where ‘Tommi’ shines is that she shows just how frikkin’ easy it is to cook nice food over burning wood. I’ve never believed that campfire cooking should automatically be burned around the edges. She makes some really nice looking food and clearly has a sense of adventure with ingredients.

All great cooking TV has to be to succeed is to show the audience how small the step beyond their comfort zone is, and then entice them to take the step with pictures of the result and the cook being praised for the result. She makes a good fist of it.

Most TV cooks in the UK have used ‘Chocolate and Chilli’ as a cipher for adventure, the mindset that chocolate is always served as a sweet food is so completely ingrained in UK food culture that even when it’s become a cliché of foodie TV it’s still able to elicit a fission of excitement and squeals of unexpected delight at the dinner table. Here’s Tommi’s take on Venison and Chocolate. Feeds 10

Ingredients
2kg shoulder or haunch of venison
olive oil, for browning
2 medium onions, diced
2 carrots, diced
5 celery stalks, diced
2 parsnips, diced
5 garlic cloves, chopped
2 dried chillies, crumbled
500ml game stock (or stock made from bouillon cubes)
½ bottle full-bodied red wine
100g dark chocolate, finely grated or chopped
1 tablespoon redcurrant jelly
For the marinade
1 bottle full-bodied red wine
4 garlic cloves
1 sprig of rosemary
4–5 sprigs of thyme
2 fresh red chillies, deseeded and finely chopped
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
10 juniper berries, crushed
salt and pepper
Method: 

How to make venison braised with chilli and chocolate
1. Make sure your fire has lots of hot embers (or preheat an oven to 190°C/gas 5).

2. Cut the venison into 2.5cm cubes, removing large bits of fat or gristle. Put these into a double-layered plastic bag, along with all the marinade ingredients. Set aside for a day in a cool spot in the river (or in the fridge if you have taken your quarry home), turning every so often so that all of the meat comes into contact with the marinade.

3. When you are ready to cook, remove the venison from the marinade, setting the marinade aside for later.

4. Heat a large casserole over a high heat until it is smoking hot. Pour in a tablespoon of olive oil and when it is very hot add the venison cubes, 6 or 7 at a time, so that you are not overcrowding the pan and thus bringing down the temperature of the oil.

5. Brown the meat on all sides for 1–2 minutes, letting the pan get hot again between each batch and adding more oil if necessary.

6. When the meat is all browned, set it aside while you brown the vegetables.

7. Add a tablespoon of oil to the casserole and sweat the onions for 5 minutes before adding the carrots, celery and parsnips. Cook for a further 10 minutes, allowing the vegetables to start caramelising without letting them burn. Add the garlic and cook for another 5 minutes.

8. Return the venison to the casserole, along with the reserved marinade and the rest of the ingredients. Bring up to a gentle simmer, stirring to melt the chocolate into the sauce. Cook in the Dutch oven (or preheated oven) for about 90 minutes or until the meat is tender and falling apart.

lf you're a regular reader  I think you’ll quite like this book as a read, and find the recipes easy to follow and delicious to eat. If you’re looking to expand someone’s foodie horizons I think you’ll find its the perfect gift.

I’m still waiting for our friends, those bon viveurs afield, NorCal and HAGC to hit our screens. 
I can see it now ‘She Kills it & He Grills It - The Holly & Hank Show’.

Your Pal

SBW

One Of The Good Guys.

A couple of nights ago I saw the first part of a new series on the BBC.  Mastercrafts is  Monty Don's new program about - well der - Masters of  crafts. The first episode is about green wood working and features my old mate Guy Mallinson.

Guy is something of a master of understatement too, the program describes him as 'having been a successful cabinet maker in London' he probably told them 'oh I've made a couple of bits and pieces'. That's like Dave Petzal saying he fired a couple of rifles one afternoon. Twenty years ago Guy was already making incredible furniture, and as the years have gone by although I've not seen a lot of him, every so often I've seen him win an award for the fitting out of some new and ground breaking building. 

He's managed to pull of that great city-dweller fantasy of moving his operation to the wilds of Dorset slashing his living costs and vastly improving his standard of living. He's developed a another career as a teacher of Green Wood Working, the main difference between green wood working and regular carpentry is the craftsman use green or unseasoned wood and all the joints are self affixing - no screws or nails,  just the tension caused by the wood drying and contracting. Literally the pathway from a freshly sawn log to a piece of furniture - unplugged. All without the use of power tools.

Being a TV show certain annoying conventions 'must' be followed, despite the name of the show telling us its going to be about a master of his craft, the program makers felt the need to up the 'human interest' factor and take their cue from the big book of reality television. They found three volunteers and Guy took on the role of gently nudging them towards a finished chair by the end of the show.

Personally I'd rather have seen Guy work his magic from standing tree to siting at a table and chair, but the conventions of TV now mean we have to inject some 'human interest', with some participants first set up to fail so they can be swept along by the redemptive power of their new skill. Yawn. 

"Who cares if she cant Whittle a Skittle, I wanna see your mate do his stuff" 

Ex Mrs SBW [she's all heart, no?]

At one point we see Guy explaining how the tolerance required for two pieces of wood to fit and stay fitted as they dry is 0.2mm (0.007 in.), this caught my attention and as the students look on dismayed at what's needed of them Guy breezily says ' I've got a trick for that though'. Sadly we're never shown just how this piece of carpentarial voodoo is pulled off.

But the good news is if, like me, yew wood [sorry] like to find out what it really takes to do this sort of thing you can attend one of his courses in the stunning woodlands of Dorset. We may even meet there?

Here's the link to his site, the courses look like a lot of fun as you can see from the show Guy is an extremely patient man, who makes sure that no student, whatever their previous experience, is left behind.

Defiantly one of the good guys

Your pal

SBW

PS if you want to watch the show or any other BBC shows but you're not in the UK here's how anonymous proxy severs will let you change your IP address so you can watch.

PPS Guy now has his own blog
http://guymallinson.blogspot.com/