Hi, my name is Ryan Marshall; I live on southern Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada, and this site is all about hunting, fishing, gardening, gathering, cooking, and preserving your own food. If I can shoot it, hook it, trap it, grow it, or just find it chilling out somewhere waiting to be eaten, I'll share its story here.
Inside, you'll find pictures and stories from all manner of trips aimed at the procurement of delicious wild critters (with some fruits and vegetables thrown in, primarily to avoid scurvy). In addition to the harvesting of food, I'll show you the complete transformation of it, from animal or fish or whatever it started out as, through all the steps it takes to make it into an edible (fingers crossed) symbol of self-sufficiency. It's a process that instills feelings of pride, fulfillment, and a kind of primal contentment. These are feelings that have developed in us over a long period time; since the beginning of the human race; and we can still tap into them today, by doing the very things that allowed us to survive to this point.
Most people in the modern, developed, urban and suburban world don't really have any concept of where the food they buy at the grocery store comes from, or what processes it went through to arrive in the form they find it there. In most cases, and in most ways, nor should they hope to. It's mostly just a nightmarish blur of cruelty and abomination. Having a personal knowledge of where your food comes from, and what goes into creating what you eat, establishes a connection that can take a simple meal to previously unimagined heights. Just because you did it all yourself. So check out all the stories and recipe experiments I've got on here, and if you've never done anything like this before, hopefully you'll be inspired to give some of it a try. It's only scary or gross for the first few minutes or so, I promise; you'll be surprised how quickly you get drawn in. And if you're already out there making it happen, then you already know that even when things don't go the way you imagined or expected, and sometimes because of that fact, a day in the field is always a pretty awesome day.
I've been hunting and fishing all over Vancouver Island since I was a young lad, making some really egregious monofilament bird's nests, and taking hunter's safety courses with dudes who could easily be my great-grandpa. Only in the last few years have I tried my hand at growing and gathering fruits and veggies, and I'm pretty terrible at the growing part; but hey, I give it a go. It provides a little (very little; I told you, I'm not good) rounding-out of the nutrient profile in my diet.
Everything I talk about and do on this site, I learned on my own. I had people who helped me with certain necessary aspects along the way (it was tough to get access to firearms on my own when I was in elementary school) but all the ideas, locations, and methods I use, I had to figure out the old-fashioned way. And by that, I mean mainly from the internet. I'm actually old enough that I had to start with physical, hard-copy books, like, from the library; but luckily the fantastic electrical internet was invented soon enough, and I made the transition. My point is, if you've never done any wild game procurement or cookery before, it's possible to figure it out without having had the benefit of some elder sage advisor/mentor figure in your life. Old Uncle Google will do just fine. That, and many hours of screwing things up, learning from it, then completely blowing it, and subsequently piecing it all back together again and doing it better the next time. Reading about things will only get you so far; eventually, you have to put it into practice, put your time in, and discover that 90% of what you read is going to need some serious tweaking. It's cool, though; that's the fun part. Ok, it's frustrating at the time, but when you look back on it, you'll remember it as being fun. That's what's important.
-Ryan-