I make a traditional stew when the weather gets cold, and nothing lines your tummy and warms you up more. In my stew, I use beef. You can buy the cheapest meat you can find because you’ll be cooking it until very tender. Cube your meat and roll it in seasoned flour. Brown each cube and remove. Then add your onion with flour to the pot. Cook the onion down and add your reserved flour. Then you add water or broth to the browned flour and return your meat to the pot. Boil that for two hours. Then add cubed potato and carrot. Let that cook for another forty-five minutes to an hour. Then add peas. They can be frozen or canned. Cook that for another fifteen minutes or so, and you have a warm meal.

When you are on the trail or evacuating on foot, survival stew is a viable option. Wild-caught meat is often much tougher and gamier. Learn your wild foragables. What can you pick along the way? Certain plants grow across the whole country. Learn those first. While you walk along, select the foragables, and add them to a thermos you are carrying. At the end of the day, you will have a collection of plants and maybe a small animal or two. Boil this over your fire, and you have survival stew. There are no specific ingredients; it’s composed of whatever you can scrounge.

Bullion is another excellent thing to have on hand. It is easy to carry with you and add great flavor to a cup of water, making it much heartier. You may need the sodium in a survival situation, but making your own always tastes better. Bullion is made by boiling a carcass in water and adding seasonings. Most of us use a fridge or a freezer to save it, but if there is no power, this can be a problem. The way to go is dehydrating it. That’s great if you have a dehydrator, but if you don’t, you’re going to have to get creative. You can pour it into a cookie sheet and put it in the back window of a vehicle. The sun will dehydrate the liquid, but your car may have a unique smell afterward.

When you are in need, anything is a welcome treat. Sometimes the foragables aren’t the best flavors, so making them into a stew makes them more palpable. Carrying seasonings is always a viable option. They don’t take much space and add that little bit of comfort to any meal. Think outside the box and keep yourself fed.