With our traditional off-grid lifestyle, it’s only fitting that our Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays follow suit. Our families are 2,500 miles away, so we’ve created new traditions of our own while still holding tight to old traditions. I would love to share some of those traditions with you (including a recipe for bacon buttermilk skillet cornbread), and I look forward to hearing your traditions — wilderness or otherwise.

Holidays in the Wilderness

We use both traditional as well as primitive skills on our homestead. We harvest our meats each fall during hunting season; this eliminates the need to purchase store bought meats. We do this as a family (my husband, my son and I). You will not find tastier, finer and healthier meats anywhere. The additional bonus: unlike animals that we raise, we don’t have to pay to feed the wild ones!

We look forward to wild turkey each spring and fall. Some people feel that wild turkey is very tough, but this is truly in the preparation. As with any game meat, the trick is cooking it on low heat for a much longer cooking time.

We cook up our wild turkeys a little differently every time, experimenting with what makes it the tastiest. So far we haven’t been able to decide which is our favorite because they are all good! We enjoy adding things to our wild meats while cooking, like sliced apples, onions, bacon, maple syrup, molasses, garlic cloves, garlic powder and a little bit of season salt.

If you are interested in butchering your own turkey, check out our YouTube videos here, here and here. You will learn how to harvest, butcher, and enjoy your own wild turkey. You could use these techniques on a turkey you’ve raised, too.

For this year’s Thanksgiving, we actually had moose roast with many fixins’! Carrots were cooked alongside the roast. We prepared basmati rice with seasonings and slivered almonds. And bacon cornbread. Yes, bacon cornbread.

So today, I’m sharing that recipe over at GNOWFGLINS.

VISIT GNOWFGLINS TO VIEW THE RECIPE.