The Long Fire In The Winter & Cooking Salmon

I think this will be our campsite right here. What do you think? not just make it, but make sure that it's effective for you in the wintertime. So don't go away. So a longfire is a very effective fire. It's usually used, you know, to warm yourself all night long when you have an open shelter like the lean-to. And the trick is to make the fire as long as your body so that the heat, you know, heats your body completely as you're lying down horizontally. But I want to focus in wintertime. Any fire that you want to last, want it to last all night, you're going to have to do this work. You have to absolutely dig right to the ground or you're gonna, your fire won't be effective or hot as you'd like it to, especially when you're using a longfire. Very important to dig right to the ground as long as your fire is. I'll give you the reason why it's important. If you leave just this much snow, put your pieces of wood on top. Now naturally you're going to start your fire in the middle. Now a longfire is not complicated to do. You start your fire in the middle and you just put longer branches on the top and it's going to naturally spread. But by putting your fire in the middle, obviously you're going to have a lot of heat in the middle of your boards here. And before that starts spreading, the heat is going to melt the snow under here. Okay, so that's going to cause two problems. First of all, because this is happening, it's always going to be hotter a little bit in the sides. So because of the hole, you're going to start having a distance between your ground and your wood. And when the wood is too far away from your main coals, your fire, it won't burn well. Something else, because the heat is naturally there and you have a hole, you have more oxygen intake here. So again, naturally your fire is going to be a little hotter in the middle. Okay, that's if you leave it on top of snow. And what's going to happen, your pieces of wood are going to burn there in the middle and they're going to go like this. Now you're going to have a big problem keeping your longfire going. It's going to be almost impossible and it's going to be a mess. So the main thing is make sure you're right to the ground and you won't have any problems. So Josie, my wife, will be the one starting the fire today with the flint and steel. Now, can you explain to the folks why you love the flint and steel? Well, actually, at the beginning I had a hard time doing it. But then when I got used to it, I just like the sound of the metal and the stone rubbing together. It sounds primitive. My kind of girl. I think it's really fun. This is my favorite. It takes some practice, but once you get it, you always want to use this. All right, so inspire the ladies out there. Show us what you got. I have this one, a little rock, and my char cloth. Okay. Okay. There, you see? Right away. Getting the char cloth is the easiest part. Getting it burnt. Especially this big flaky snow that's on my tender. Yeah, it's snowing. Tender's a little bit damp. Yeah. Take your time. Whoa. There you go. That's faster than me. Well, very well done. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Josie, for your great demonstration. You're welcome. And that's brought to you by flint and steel. So, you see, it doesn't take too long. All you need to do is add, and it's going to spread as you go. See how I got pieces extended there? Slowly, I extend it to the end, and it's going to spread evenly. So, the extra wood that I'm using, what I usually do is I put it real close, standing position, easy to grab, close by, and it's not in the way. Obviously, if I'd be staying all night, I would be putting some, you know, down as well. But just for today, this is what I like to do. So, today we decided to be cooking some fish like I usually do. You know, it's a lot of work when you're digging in the wintertime, but it's rewarding. You see, we can make ourselves some type of a bench. We're surrounded by trees, no wind at all, nice big fire, long fire. And because we dug, we got a natural heat reflector coming back, and the wind so far is going the right way. Something else I like about winter, you don't need to, you don't need to make all kinds of pot hangers and all that stuff. Like the fish, I'm just gonna, you know, stick the piece of wood in the snow, it's gonna hold it. All right, so as you've seen in many of my videos, this is my preferred way of cooking the fish because it's right over the fire, and you don't need to bring anything. You know what I mean? Don't need to cook it in a pan or, and, well, we've all seen Ramirez do it that way. It's, I think he took it from, you know, some native tribe in North America. And I just love doing it that way. All you need to do is split a big stick. Now don't worry about my fingers, I got two big branches that poke me at the same time here. So that's why I didn't show you how to do it, it was awkward. All you need to do is get yourself two little pieces, puncture your fish, and puncture it from this side. This is a salmon because the skin is fairly tough. So when you go on this side, it'll be much easier. Take your little piece of stick here, and go from the inside of the meat out. You want as much flesh as possible there. Do it on both sides. Split one stick here, and come and tie it at the end. And keep it at a safe distance, let it cook slowly. This way it's gonna taste awesome. So now all I'll need to do, yeah, I guess that's about it. Am I forgetting anything? That's cool. Okay, now I'm gonna put it here in the snow, and let it cook slowly in front of the coals. And this is gonna taste super duper. All right, two things that Josie loves to do is shovel and saw some firewood, which I absolutely am not against. What we're trying to do right now is, there's a small creek here, trying to get some water. It's a lot easier to do it this way, and trying to start melting some snow. It's not too far from our campsite. Okay, all right, so we found a perfect little hole. Now Josie is using the back of the axe, because ice will really dull. And the ice was not thick enough to really use. I think that will do. Oh, I think it'll be a little bit bigger than that. There you go. Oh, that's pretty good. Oh yeah, look at that beautiful water right there. And it's deep enough. It's good enough. Let me just, you can hear it. Awesome. There's about six to eight inches. Perfect. Good job, Josie. Thank you. All right, so we need water for a coffee later. Sometimes just doing that, how much work that saves us. Wow. Okay, can you put the cup on that, please? Thank you. And of course, we're going to have with our fish, Josie's going to cook us some rice. So we need water for that as well. Okay. Okay, I'm cooking some rice today. And I'm going to try and wash it a couple of times to get the starch out of the rice a little bit. So it doesn't absorb a lot of water when I cook it. So that makes what, the rice more sticky? No, not really. But because sometimes when you don't wash it, it's starchy. And also, you see, it's becoming... Oh yeah, the water is becoming like dirty or something. Yeah. That water must be a little cold, huh? It is cold. I'm just gonna get rid of that. And I might... Here, you can use this one. Thank you. I'll just put some in. Thank you. That's one. Okay, this way. That's the second one. You see, it's still... How many times do you do that? Some people do it until the water is really clear. But I do it, you know, three times. So that's still... Of course, the minute rice is not the same. Minute rice? No way. That's why it's called minute rice. Maybe I will show you guys what kind of rice do I buy in there. This is the best. Okay, that's the third one. The color is better. Made in Thailand. So, how do you know how much water would you put? It always depends on your rice. So, this was full a while ago. So Micah is gonna give me some water on this. You're gonna fill it up. That's good. Same amount as the water. As the rice. That's the rice. Excuse me. And you're good. Oh, that's easy to... It is easy. The same amount of water as rice. Okay. And also, in the Philippines, you know, you take your finger and you sink it in the rice. So on top of the rice, I have the rice just about there. So you put your water, it's the same. You see? Okay. That's how we do it all the time. How we measure it. Yes. Okay, cool. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, so right now we're... We stopped putting wood on the fire because we need to cook with it. And the fish is slowly getting to where we want it. Usually a fish takes about 20 minutes, 25, about. Josie brought her little rigamajig there, grill. And we got some water and rice. And she will show you or tell you when to know... I mean, when it's cooked, right? When it's cooked and how you could... And I brought some vegetables because I like vegetables. So if you don't have a steamer, you don't have to boil the vegetables. I'm going to show you how to put it in the rice a few minutes before it's cooked. And this is going to steam on its own. Oh, cool. Yeah. It's not quite cooked yet. You can see. And the water has subsided a bit. So now you can throw in your favorite vegetables. What I'm going to do, because it looks like it's going to miss some water a little bit. All you have to do when you think that you're missing some water, get a little bit of that and just put it like that. And it has to cook very, very minimum heat. Not a lot because it's going to burn. Because the rice is a few minutes, it's almost done. So just leave it there with your vegetables and it will be cooked. All right. In no time. By the way, I forgot to tell you there. Now the fire here is behind. But you want to use coals, obviously, to cook this. I don't know if it shows in the camera, but you want a distance at about a foot. If you want, you know, the time frame of 25 minutes. Okay, now we're going to take the vegetables. Wait for about a minute or two. They're nice. There you go. Oh, that looks yummy. How long did that take before? One or two minutes. After you could, you know, the rice is solid enough that you could put your vegetables. So that's one way. Let's say two minutes, maybe. Two minutes is good. All right, so we're ready to eat. All right, so this is cooked. Okay. Josie, can you cut the string, please? Nice. Okay, I'm going to break this part off a bit. Let's make sure. Okay. Yummy. Just lift it off a piece of wood. Okay, just leave it there. Even the middle part where the wood is, it still cooks. So no worries. All right, let's see now. Try and push this string out of there. Can you pull on it again? You don't want to eat some strings. So, just show you guys a bit. That's a nice piece of awesomeness right there, brothers and sisters. You forgot some spices. No. Well, you want to add that? Okay. A little bit of Old Bay. Let's test it. Oh my gosh. My turn. Oh my gosh. Here. No, you have to eat it with the rice. You're eating all my fish. No, it's for you. Let's show the folks again. One last time. Put some Old Bay. All right. You make the real test. Wow. Have our vegetables. This is it. Oh my goodness, Josie. Wow. Go. Man, that smells actually very good. Nothing like steamed vegetables and the rice under. Let's put it there. Lift it a little bit. Oh, this is yummy. Oh, yeah. Vegetables is good. Yeah. The sweetness is there. Nothing like steam. Okay. We're eating. Yep, it's nice and sharp. Well, what a great day we had. Again, I thank you guys for always joining us. We enjoy your company. Everything went super well. Yep. Except busting up my thumb. A little bit of my finger. That's fine. Always remember to bring your first aid. Now, today we're the 11th of March, 2014. You'll probably be seeing this video. I'll be posting it probably on Monday. See, we're Tuesday in about a week. But tomorrow they're announcing a pretty severe storm. Between 12 and 20 inches of snow. So this winter is not giving up that easy. That's why we decided to come, you know, a day earlier. You guys are just out of this world. You know, concerning the website, big thank you. Just the first day, we had around 8,000 views. That's cool. Now, that just encourages us to keep on posting stuff. It just shows that people are interested. And, you know, that's humbling to us. We're really humbled and truly grateful that you take time to visit and all that. And because of it, we're going to try and have maybe two posts a week. New stuff, interesting stuff. You know, we'll do the best that we can. We're not promising, but we'll try. And it's cool to interact with you guys, you know, in a more personal way. That's a lot of fun. So, you know, thank you. Okay, so anyway, we're going to finish our coffee. Enjoy this fire and head home. So for now, thanks for joining us. Remember, go outside. This is Mike and Josie from Bushraft Parts. Thank you.