Pancakes, the limp dicks of the bread world… er… the carb darlings of the American breakfast. I’ll admit, I never liked ‘em. Pancakes always seemed like a sucker punch – refined flour and maple syrup taking turns until you were forced to go curl up in a corner and take a nap. Of course I always loved making them – they were the first food I learned to cook when I was about two. Mom would turn around the kitchen chair (so I didn’t tumble over onto the stove top) and let me (slowly now) ladle the batter onto the griddle. I’m sure there was a lot going through my kid brain at the time, but all I remember was making little dinosaurs and A, B, Cs.

Matt and I have been planning to live in a campsite in the woods for over 6 months now. On September 18, our plans came into fruition on a small homestead in Annapolis, California. Our woodland adventure is an opportunity to reconnect with nature and start to learn primitive survival skills – which we will ultimately hone over a lifetime if we keep up with them. To some this conjures up images of secret stashes of spam and artillery. While we expect at some time to learn our way around guns, planes, and blades, we don’t share a doomsayer outlook nor an appreciation for meat “foods” that will outlive humans. We simply want to expand our awareness and learn to adapt, survive and enjoy the experience of the wilderness. Of course we’re still working remotely, so it’s not an entirely off-the-grid dirty hippy holiday.

I did not grow up in a family that did a lot of jelly making or canning of anything whatsoever. My Mom was very happy about the frozen vegetables that were newly available to her in the 50s and was quite content to go buy a bottle of Smuckers strawberry jam.

My grandmother had canned on a routine basis in her day and made lots of jams. By the time I was six, though, she was already 65 and winding down a little. But she would take me to pick wild strawberries. We would come home and put up a jar or two of strawberry jam from that very precious fruit. So I knew theoretically how it was done. In other words I knew just enough to be completely intimidated by all those huge pots of boiling water and the necessity to sterilize bottles and lids. It all seemed rather mystical and out of reach to me. But I had such fond memories of those delectable little jars of wild strawberry jam and how different they tasted from a store bought jam.