Alder catkins, early spring. A good salad ingredient.
My "refrigerator" keeps fresh food. Later in the year a carefully selected spot dug into a mossy area and covered with a very thick layer of moss will maintain temperature at about 4C.
A snowshoe hare roasting over hot coals.
Lake trout, early June when lake waters are still cold enough for these fish to be caught in shallow water.
Morel mushrooms grow profusely in recently burned jack pine or mixed forest areas.
Labrador tea. The flowers make excellent salad ingredients. The leaves can be used for tea.
Spruce buds are good salad ingredients.
Birch and alder leaves make good salads. The latter is my mainstay, available and tasty right up to the period of autumn frosts. The best are those new shrubs growing after they have been cut or burned the previous year. Both contain salicin, related to acetylsalicylic acid (ASA, Aspirin), so to be avoided if allergic.
A mixed salad incorporating the above ingredients, seasoned with sugar water, lemon pepper spice and parmesan cheese. And a frypan of morel mushrooms.
Lingonberries (bog cranberries), tart but very tasty.
Pincherries. I eat the entire fruit, including the centre pit; not too much of the latter as it contains cyanide.
Saskatoon berries, one of the best fruits if you are lucky enough to find them.
Harvested pine mushrooms, showing the various stages of growth from the smaller button stage to the large open stage, which can be as large as a dinner plate in diameter. My favourite mushroom, growing in the sandy soils shared by jack pines and reindeer lichen.
Birch bracket (birch polypore) mushrooms, the new growth being the ones you harvest.
A meal of fried pike fish fillets (coated with cornmeal and Montreal steak spice), fried pine mushrooms (seasoned with lemon pepper spice), and my favourite colourful salad of fireweed stems, leaves and flowers. Pike is my mainstay fish ... because it is the easiest to catch.