A weekly gardening checklist prevents “Garden Gone Wild” overgrowth in the backyard and ensures that your project gets the needed attention to produce the best veggies around. It’s all about watering, weeding, mounding, thinning, and guiding the ...
Food
Discover the Life-Altering, Mind-Melting Power of a Wild Turkey Cheesesteak
A good cheesesteak will make you question your whole life and then scoop another dollop of Cheez Whiz. It's like driving too fast or smoking a cigarette — part of the appeal is flirting with the inevitable. It’s not a matter of if it will kill you, ...
How to Make Moonshine: A Down-and-Dirty Guide to White Lightning
No matter how hard I try, I can never escape my redneck past. In fact, the older I get, the more I just embrace it. When you say the words “West Virginia,” three things come to mind: Marrying your sister, John Denver, and kick-ass moonshine. Let me ...
Roadkill for Dinner: Why Harvesting Roadkill Is Actually Ethical and Tasty
Roadkill for dinner? In a short time, it could drive you to madness. After a while, your standards related to what you will and will not consume dramatically lower. In normal circumstances, one would not order a freshly trampled raccoon from a ...
Survival Garden 105: How To Plant a Garden
It’s time to plant a garden. Survivalist gardening is all about simplifying the planting process while not compromising crop production. It’s about growing kick-ass veggies while removing all the time-consuming, obsessive crap from gardening. It’s a ...
Wild Turkey Banh Mi: An Outdoorsy, American Spin on a Vietnamese Classic
When the French colonized Vietnam, they brought their food with them. The baguette, pâté, crème caramel (or flan), and other culinary staples found their way into Vietnamese kitchens and melded into the already vibrant food culture. The Vietnamese ...
Local Smoke: 5 of the Best Barbecue Joints in America
Barbecue is personal. It captures the flavor of a region, a community, or a culture. It celebrates struggle as much as it does success. Those who work in wood, fire, smoke, and meat are storytellers. They carry on traditions, which is why we flock to ...
How To Eat Everything: A Guide to Edible Flowers
The landscape is edible. Sure, pick the wrong mushroom and you might take an unexpected trip — or die. Those odds are pretty low but scary for some nevertheless. A better, more risk-averse starting block for new foragers is flowers. They’re generally ...
How to Make A Slow-Cooked Pulled Venison Roast
When speaking of venison recipes, tenderloins and backstraps tend to be the heroes, with some version of sausage or stew meat not far behind. The good-old venison roast simply doesn’t get the love and attention it deserves. In the slow-cooked meat ...
Survival Garden 104: Planting Cold Crops
Survivalist gardening is all about knowing what works ahead of time. Take planting cold crops, for example. Most people have accepted Memorial Day weekend as the start date for the planting season; however, experienced gardeners know late March to ...
Survival Garden 103: How To Prep Your Soil Before the Season Starts
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that a global panic disrupts supply chains and creates scarcity. Many grocery stores issued buying limits on certain food items, prices skyrocketed, and store shelves thinned out. Realizations of just how dependent ...
Survival Garden 102: Starting Seeds Indoors
Assume an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, was to hit. Would you be able to provide food for your loved ones? Do you know how to take one seed and turn it into hundreds to ensure a food supply for years to come? Harvesting seeds and starting seeds ...
How To Make Kombucha at Home
Kombucha, a fermented tea enjoyed by pharaohs, emperors, and kings, is a popular homeopathic cure for sour stomachs, bloating, cultivating a healthy gut biome, and sluggish energy levels. It’s become a go-to drink for adventure athletes like ...
St. Patrick’s Day Moose Meat Shepherd’s Pie
North America is full of large and — if dealt with properly — tasty ungulates. One of which is the grand ole dinosaur of them all, the moose. Moose is a main staple at my table because of the incredible amount of meat from the big Canadian bull I ...
10 Cheap, Classic American Beers Made To Drink Outdoors
Our dads and granddads knew the deal. It didn’t matter the location or season. Beer was cheap, American, ice-cold, and best enjoyed outdoors. Hunting camp, fishing trips, summer league softball games, horseshoe pitching, drive-in movies, barbecues, ...
Survival Garden 101: Why You Need To Plan Before Planting
Free Range American celebrates self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and a survival garden is one essential part of that lifestyle. This growing season, we’re rolling out step-by-step directions taking you through the planting process while removing ...
Superfoods: How to Make Bone Broth
Endurance athletes have long known the power of salty, high-protein, high-fat bone broth for in-event energy and post-exercise recovery. Health food companies have caught on, too, with a litany of frozen broths and powder concentrates available now ...
5 Uncommon Chili Ingredients You Need To Try
You probably think your chili is the shit — and it could very well be. But even the best chili recipes leave room for some interpretation. A little moxie, instinct, risk. Chili is a fine balance of several senses in several dimensions. Yes, it’s a ...
Bison Sliders With Air-Fried Sweet Potatoes
The American buffalo — or yanasi in Cherokee, tatanka in Lakota, and scientifically Bison bison — has provided food for native North Americans for millennia, as well as served as the wildlife icon for the continent itself. In the not-so-distant past, ...
Mountain Lion and Other ‘Bad’ Meat is Actually Delicious
In a recent talk on the Free Range American podcast, hunter, biologist, and filmmaker Donnie Vincent talked about a mountain lion he’d arrowed in British Columbia and how much everyone in camp had loved the meat from the big cat. “We’d cook a ...
A Holiday Wild Game Roast, Brined
My hands are numb. Well, mostly just my fingertips, but I finally find the roast I’m looking for deep in my chest freezer. It’s from an elk I hunted with Garrett Johnson in southern Utah in 2019. It was cold then, too. Five pounds of healthy, ...
How to Prepare a Wild Turkey Thanksgiving
I was patiently sitting, hands nipped with cold, listening to my own breath and the occasional squeak sqwuak eek eek from Chad Mendes as he made turkey calls in the Kansas morning frost. We sat for hours, listening to the echoes of gobbles from ...
Super Meat: Fortify Ground Beef with Game Liver
Nose-to-tail or holistic eating has gained momentum in culinary and hunting communities recently, but we humans have been eating organ meats since we first started walking upright. Organs are the most nutrient-dense part of the body, so it makes ...
Mountain Goat Backstrap Over an Open Fire
In September, Cole Kramer and I guided a mountain goat hunt on the savage landscape of Kodiak Island, Alaska. The best part — or one of the best parts — was backstrap over an open fire. After several long days and cold evenings spent trudging over ...
Wild Game Jerky: The Ultimate Guide to Killer Meat
For as long as there have been hunters, there’s been wild game jerky—at least as best we can tell. Ötzi the Iceman—a 5,300-year-old hunter found frozen solid in the Italian Alps—had a last meal of dried ibex and red deer meat. Archeologists have ...
How to Build a Kitchen Cook Kit
Our ancestors separated from the great apes thanks to cooking with tools over fire. Yet now in our tech-heavy age, thanks to apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats, a whole generation of young adults has never learned how to cook. We’re here to help. ...
Fish Candy: Dry-Brined and Smoked Lake Trout
The best part about fishing with Big Spoon Sportfishing isn’t all the fish you catch but the snacks that Capt. Chris Bomysoad serves up on the water. “Fishermen,” he likes to say, “fish on their stomach,” so this New York guide keeps his clients ...
Rule the Cookout With Granny’s Secret Hot Pepper Homemade Mustard
This is granny’s best-kept secret stored in a jar. One bite, and you’ll be hooked. This hot pepper homemade mustard has a tangy, zesty flavor that explodes on the palette. Bring it to a cookout or barbecue and there will be people asking you how they ...
The Black Rifle Coffee LMTV: The Most Insane Food Truck in America
Sometimes a run-of-the-mill coffee shop is not enough. Sometimes a converted military vehicle working as a mobile coffee shop makes more of a statement. Enter the Black Rifle Coffee Company (BRCC) LMTV. Weighing in at 19,000 pounds, this Light Medium ...
The Only Way to Make Steak and Eggs is the Black Rifle Coffee Way
When you’re talking breakfast, steak and eggs is sure to be mentioned as the best way to start your day. So is Black Rifle Coffee. Combining the two is a no-brainer. To start, toss in a quarter cup of fresh coffee grounds with a vibrant mix of ...
