A air B ash C earthD grass

Good morning everyone, and welcome to our outdoor survival programme. As you know, this week you’ll be learning some of the basic information and skills you need to look after yourself independently in the outdoors. These first two days we’ll be based here in the classroom, and then we’ll be taking a camping trip to put into practice some of the things you’ve learned.
I’m going to start off with the topic of food. And to start with I’ll describe just two methods which we’ll be putting into practice at our camp, and which make use of natural resources: the steam pit and the bamboo pot. I’ve got two posters here to make things clearer... And I’ll start with the steam pit here...
To make this you’ll need some dry sticks, some grass, some loose earth, and some stones. And for this week only, some matches!
The first thing you do is to dig a shallow pit in the place you’ve chosen to do your cooking. Let’s say about twenty-five centimetres deep, and thirty centimetres wide. Your sticks have to be a bit wider than the pit because you have to put a line of them along the top from one end of the pit to the other. Before setting light to these you take some large stones and arrange them on top. Then you start the fire and wait till the wooden platform burns through and the stones fall into the pit. At this point, brush away any pieces of hot ash from the stones — you can use a handful of grass — and then take another stick and push it down into the centre of the pit, between the stones. After that you cover the whole pit with a thick layer of grass. And then you can put your food on it, wrapped in more pieces of grass, like parcels. Finally, cover the whole thing with earth. You have to pat it firmly to seal the pit. Then all you have to do is take the stick out and pour a bit of water into the opening that it leaves. It should take about four hours for your food to cook, as it cooks slowly in the steam that’s created inside the pit.