A couple of weeks ago we welcomed some new friends up to a patch of woodland we help maintain. Making the arduous journey up from South to North Wales (if you know, you know…) were Abi – aka Whitetail Abigail – her wife Vic and Buck their dog.
Abi is the creator and host of The Grit Podcast: Stories from Women in the Wild and beyond. It’s exclusively focused on women in hunting and fieldsports – so of course there is absolutely no chance of me appearing there. Even if I wear a dress (I asked…)
From Friday to evening to Saturday night we gathered some local and seasonal wild food, cooked it over open fires in the woods and then on Sunday morning we recorded the next episode of our wild food podcast.
Up into the hills in search of Bilberries
On Saturday morning we headed up onto one the hills overlooking the Vale of Clwyd – Moel Arthur. It’s an accessible location for foraging one of my favourite mid-summer wild foods – Bilberries. Using berry pickers we were able to gather a couple of kilograms of fruit in less than an hour – along with some heather flowers and other herbs for use later in the day.
We returned to the cars in the tiny, lofty car park in the narrow pass and drove back down to the woods – but not before dropping in on Huw at Pentrefelin Dairy for some milk.
Check zero and some practice
Abi is a hunter already, and we had planned to spend some time shooting while they were up – but does not yet have a firearms certificate.
In the UK it is entirely possible for somebody to use a legally-owned firearm belonging to someone else – but under certain conditions and circumstances. We had arranged to visit a local farm that evening, as part of my ongoing ecological management of that farm – and planned to make use of some of what we shot in a meal that night.
Any safe and responsible hunter will ensure that their tools perform as expected, and before we drove up to the farm we broke out some paper targets and checked that the accuracy of the scope remained true.
It also gave me an opportunity to run through the workings of my .17HMR calibre Sako with Abi, and so she could familiarise herself with everything. While bolt-action rifles are all broadly similar in layout they each have their own idiosyncrasies. With something as important as firearm safety you need to be comfortable with every aspect of using the firearm – and the digital Sightmark scope also takes a while to get used to.
Up to the 'rabbit farm'
Abi shot very well, and after packing up we drove further up the valley to a hill farm I have been working with for several years. We help the landowner with several ecological and conservation tasks – from hedgelaying and tree planting to drone vegetation surveys – as well as controlling the rabbit population on the farm.
Our American readers may be surprised to learn that not only is there no ‘closed’ season for rabbits in the UK – there’s actually a legal responsibility on landowners to control their numbers. I suspect that this particular farm has the densest population of rabbits in the entire valley – possibly in the whole of North Wales.
Fortunately (for me more than the rabbit) rabbit meat is both tasty and healthy – and a year-round part of our wild food diet at home. Our visit tonight would not be for sport – but it would be useful for our meal later.
Abi and I wandered the fields for a couple of hours, using hedgerows and undulating ground as cover and shooting several rabbits. The views across the Vale of Clwyd were a constant distraction, and any visit to this farm reminds me of why we chose to live up here.
We also kept an eye out for any mid-summer edible mushrooms that might be about, but our only success was with some stunted Chicken of the woods, sprouting from the side of a long-dead oak gatepost.
The Rabbity Taste of Rabbit
All wild-sourced meat will have a stronger, deeper flavour than the farmed equivalent, and rabbit meat is no exception.
The problem for a lot of people is TOO MUCH flavour – whenever I offer rabbit meat to certain friends they grumble something about “gamey taste…” and wander off.
To those friends – and anyone else who holds similar opinions – you’re doing it wrong.
They key to improving the taste of rabbit meat begins in the field – literally. If you dress and butcher the animals quickly after shooting them you can help prevent (or slow) the immediate chemical changes that meat undergoes after death.
We came prepared with butchery tools, a block and a bucket of ‘brine’ (salt, water, herbs and apple cider vinegar in this case). This brine is the real secret to improving the flavour – it simultaneously removes the residual blood from the meat, locks in moisture and any herbs you add will help nudge the overall flavour in that direction.
We keep the meat in the brine for a couple of hours at a minimum – even longer if we can. On this occasion it was just long enough for us to return to the woods, light a fire and start cooking over fire and Primus stove.
Denbighshire Fried Rabbit with wild mushrooms and bilberry sauce
Any time we hunt and cook in the same night we end up eating late – but it’s always worth the wait.
While the fire crackled and conversation flowed Amy and I prepped some potatoes and perennial kale (pinched from the garden at home), and Vic and Abi sifted through the bilberries to remove leaves and livestock. The bilberries were then reduced down to a thick compote – with a little lemon and sugar to balance out their natural tang.
The rabbits were destined to be fried in a seasoned flour, making good use of the salsiccia game seasoning we picked up from Game Larder last month. Each leg and piece was fried separately, working my well-travelled Primus Omnifuel hard to keep things at the perfect temperature.
Cooking outdoors with limited equipment (and trying to get everything ready at the same time) is something of an artform – and I reckon that in another 25 years or so I will get the hang of it.
We managed to sit down to eat before midnight – just.
The morning after - and a podcast
On Sunday morning we had only one thing left to do – sit down and record the podcast.
We had been talking around the edges of these topics all weekend, covering everything from neurodiversity to how shooting organisations might be heading in the wrong direction with a drive for inclusivity. Most of this came out in more detail in the episode – which turned out to be our longest yet.
We managed to get it down to 1hr 22minutes for the public version of the show – with a much longer edit available over on our Patreon channel.
Every year Wild Food People run a calendar of foraging and wild food courses in North Wales.
From forests and meadows to seashore and coastal – all of our courses are focused on food, ecology and giving participants the confidence to go and find these foods for themselves.
We work with nature.
We deliver expert foraging and wild food training as part of our wider work managing habitats in North Wales.
Every single one of our courses and events feeds back into improving those habitats, helping to provide healthy ecosystems for our local wildlife and communities.