Potential SHTF scenarios & tinfoil hat thread (Please read post 1)

Three mushroom pickers lost six nights in the rugged forest of southwest Oregon with no food considered eating their dog, and used the screen on their dead cellphone and the blade of a sheath knife to flash a signal at the helicopter pilot who found them.

Dan Conne said Sunday from his hospital bed in Gold Beach that he and his wife and son spent the nights huddled in a hollow log with nothing to eat, and considered sacrificing their pit bull, Jesse, for food.

"She's that good a dog, she'd have done it, too," Conne said.

A volunteer helicopter pilot looking outside the search area Saturday spotted Dan and Belinda Conne, both 47, along with 25-year-old Michael, on the edge of a deep ravine in tall timber. They were about 10 miles northeast of the town of Gold Beach, roughly 330 miles south-southwest of Portland.

"The wife had the Blackberry and I had the knife," Dan Conne told The Associated Press. "I kept flashing. The wife said, 'You're blinding them.' But I wanted to make sure they seen us. I wasn't taking no chance."

The three had given up hope and thought they were going to die when rescuers came.

"None of us thought we were coming out of there," he said.

While lost, the cold and hungry family could see search helicopters and airplanes flying low and slow overhead, but they couldn't get the pilots' attention through the thick, coastal forest vegetation.

When they were found, the Connes were just five football fields from a road, and a mile from their Jeep.

The three were airlifted to a Gold Beach hospital, where they stayed overnight.

Dan Conne hurt his back, and Belinda Conne had hypothermia, said Curry County Sheriff John Bishop. All three were hungry, and enjoyed potato soup and sandwiches at the hospital.

Belinda and Dan Conne were discharged Sunday. Their son, who suffered frostbite, hypothermia and a sprained ankle, remained in the hospital for more treatment.

The family was spotted by Jackson County Commissioner John Rachor, spending his first day searching for them in his own helicopter with Curry County Sheriff's Lt. John Ward.

Rachor had been up two hours and decided to go outside the search area, heading uphill from where the family parked their Jeep, instead of down.

"We couldn't find anything in the obvious places, so we decide to go to the not-obvious places," he said. "I kind of think outside the box on these things sometimes, and it pays off."

Rachor is the same pilot who found a San Francisco family lost in a snowstorm in 2006 just 35 miles from where he found the Connes. In 2006, Rachor flew Kati Kim and her two young daughters to safety after spotting them near their car. James Kim died of hypothermia trying to hike out for help.

On Saturday, Rachor saw a movement on the edge of a deep ravine in tall timber. A man in tan bib overalls was waving his arms. Ward marked the spot on his GPS and called the Coast Guard for a helicopter to winch the family out. He also called a nearby ground team to give them immediate aid, then flew back to Gold Beach for fuel.

"The searchers were with us within 20 minutes of the first copter that found us," Dan Conne said. "There must have been nine or 10 of them. They just kept coming out of that brush. It was just a real happy feeling, 'cause we knew we wasn't going to die out there."

The Coast Guard lifted Michael and Dan Conne out first, then returned for Belinda. The dog walked out with searchers.

Dan Conne said the three got lost Jan. 29 after going back for a second load of hedgehog and black trumpet mushrooms, which they sell to a local buyer. It was Belinda's day off from her motel maid job.

They left their four Chihuahua dogs at the fifth-wheel trailer at the campground where they live, and drove to first one spot, then returned for peanut-butter sandwiches and went to a new spot they were not familiar with.

In the heat of the afternoon, they left their jackets at the end of a gravel road. Their last meal was a peanut-butter sandwich each on Jan. 29.

When they didn't come home the first night, the camp host alerted authorities. Searchers hit the ground last Monday. Wednesday, searchers found the Connes' Jeep.

The Connes spent the first night in rain, sheltering under a pile of brush. The second day, they built a lean-to, but it fell down. Michael Conne hiked uphill to try to see where they were, but returned cold, wet and with no better idea where they were. Trying to find their way out downhill, they discovered a hollow log they could all squeeze into, and they stayed there, covering the opening with bark and hiking downhill to a creek to fill plastic bags with water. When it rained, they tried to plug the leaks with bits of wood.

"It was pretty tight in there," Dan Conne said.

They were never able to start a fire, having no matches or lighters.

"Every other time we been out there, every one of us had lighters, except this time," Dan Conne said. "Rubbing sticks together? That don't work. Slamming rocks together? Only on TV.

"There was a lot of debating, back and forth, whether to stay or go. Mikey couldn't walk. If we had to leave him, that wasn't an option. Belinda was down. I could barely walk. We just didn't know which way to go."

Italy turns back culinary clock to ride out recession


Italians facing a long, hard winter with less cash to spend in the supermarket owing to the economic crisis are being encouraged to rediscover the cheap, traditional recipes of their ancestors.

Soups made with old bread and even pig's lungs are unlikely to appear on the menu of Michelin-starred Italian restaurants in London, New York or even Rome, but they are being touted as the nation's real cooking, made at a fraction of the price of many modern dishes.

"Old recipes are a richness that Italy boasts, that were perfected during periods of poverty and are a way to come through the crisis eating well," said Carlo Petrini, the head of the slow food movement, which campaigns for traditional, sustainable foods.

Petrini said the secret of Italy's low cost, old-style cuisine was the use of leftovers, from Tuscany's ribollita vegetable soup, made with stale bread, to le virtù – the virtues – a soup made in the town of Teramo with every winter vegetable left in the cupboard.

"Nothing got wasted and the name of the soup is no coincidence. Young women once had to know how to make it before they got married," said Petrini. "Today food is a commodity. It needs its value back and to achieve that you cannot throw it away. Thanks to the crisis the young are rediscovering this and luckily their parents and grandparents are still around to teach them."

In a roundup of nearly forgotten dishes, La Repubblica listed sbira soup, a Genoese speciality made with tripe, mushrooms, lard, bread, pine nuts and meat sauce that was favoured by policemen and prison guards and served as the traditional last meal to prisoners sentenced to death.

Any talk of cutting out waste in Italian cooking inevitably revolves around making better use of the lesser known parts of animals including offal, which was a peasant staple for centuries, notably in Rome where prime cuts were reserved for the rich, leaving tripe as the city's signature dish.

Arneo Nizzoli, 76, who runs a renowned restaurant in northern Italy near Mantua, said busloads of cookery students were now showing up to eat his maialata meals, where he uses as much of the pig as possible, from pig's lung soup to cotechino – a type of sausage – made with tongue, to pig's lard set with garlic, parsley and onion and spread over browned slices of polenta.

"In this cold weather the TV is telling people to eat vegetables and fruit to resist. What is that about? What about lard?" he said.

Pig's noses, cheek and feet, which all find use in Nizzoli's kitchen, cost half a euro a kilo, compared with over €20 for cured pig's ham or prosciutto.

"Sometimes I feel like a culinary archaeologist, but doing it my way means spending less and raising fewer pigs," he said. "These dishes take hours to cook, but if people are out of work they may have that time."

Nizzoli said children raised on plain plates of pasta with parmesan cheese were agog at his meals, particularly his risotto made with salami, although his son Dario admitted that sometimes diners were told they had eaten lung soup only after they had finished.

Horsemeat was once fed to children as a key source of iron by Italian mothers but young customers were now reluctant to try his horse stew, which is slow cooked for hours, said Nizzoli. "Horses were traditionally eaten here when they died but kids today just aren't interested," he said.
Recipes from Il Ristorante Nizzoli

Horse stew

Three kg horse shoulder, two carrots, two onions, two celery stalks, four garlic segments, two spoonfuls of tomato paste, red wine, salt and pepper.

Bind the meat with string or a roasting net, roll it in white flour and seal in oil until it browns. Finely chop and saute the vegetables in a separate pan, then add the meat, red wine, salt and pepper and cook for about three hours, adding water or stock when the liquid reduces. Blend the liquid and the vegetables, serve with the sliced meat and polenta or potato puree.

Lung soup

One pig's lung, a complete celery, one onion, grated Grana cheese, butter, oil, salt, pepper, 'Grattoni' type small pasta.

Saute the onion with oil and butter, add the celery cut in large pieces with water, salt and pepper and some stock if wanted. Cook for half an hour. Separately wash then boil the lung in slightly salted water, mince when cooked and add to the vegetables. Add the pasta, cook and serve with a touch of grated cheese.