#103 – 10 Nourishing Traditions Dishes – Cheaper Than Supermarkets!

The cost of eating an ancestral, nourishing diet, vs the cost of eating a conventional, supermarket diet: people are already stretched to the limit on their grocery budgets, so how can we ask them to spend even more on buying more nutritious or local food? Even if it’s important to them, what if the dollars literally do not exist? How are we to eat? These were the questions burning in my mind when I sat down with the Nourishing Traditions cookbook to make a list of ten easy, favorite recipes. I wanted to see how much more expensive they were to make at home with organic ingredients vs buying the cheapest factory version available, to help people figure out how they could accommodate them into their budget, but what I found astonished me. I was not prepared for the fact that almost every single recipe I calculated was actually cheaper to make with local or small-farm, grass-fed, ancestral, organic ingredients. I couldn’t put this episode together fast enough, I was so excited to share it with you!

I got rather overambitious and included a total of 20 recipes, five of which are great examples of the local version costing slightly more, and they did not all fit in this episode, so Alison and I recorded an aftershow which is available on our private podcast, Kitchen Table Chats, which is included in the Companionship level of support. Thank you for supporting the podcast and our work! I also dropped all my notes, including my tedious calculations of ingredients, into a document and uploaded it for supporters to download. This document has the titles and page numbers and price breakdown for almost every recipe. Without further ado, let’s get into the episode now.

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Transcript:

Andrea (00:21.812)
Hello, Allison. Good morning.

Alison Kay (00:24.108)
Hello Andrea, good afternoon, morning. How are you doing?

Andrea (00:27.752)
Haha, I’m good. Are you ready for a marathon recording session?

Alison Kay (00:31.684)
I am. We seem to have quite a lot of those recently. I got some feedback from one of the supporters who said, your episodes since you’ve come back from your break have been really good. I’m thinking, they’ve been quite marathon-ly as well.

Andrea (00:35.622)
I know!

Andrea (00:43.516)
Hey, look at that. I’m glad they noticed. Well, you know, we rested, we discussed a lot. We sorted out some of the way we structure and lay out and record things and how we bounce between us. you know, we’ve been talking to each other enough that we can read each other’s cues even without cameras really well. Yes, we have no cameras on guys when we record. We have no cameras. So, so we have to read each other’s minds without actually talking.

Alison Kay (00:50.933)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (01:05.353)
Yeah. No.

Alison Kay (01:11.335)
Yeah, reading between the lines. And it works usually, doesn’t it?

Andrea (01:12.618)
Yeah, such a nice observation. Let’s talk about what we ate.

Alison Kay (01:21.449)
Yeah. Exactly. And what did you eat? Have you eaten this morning or was it last night?

Andrea (01:27.666)
Okay, so I didn’t actually eat this morning, but I was going to tell you what my breakfast was yesterday because today will be the same thing. So I have a jar of pork riet in the fridge, which you can hear us talk about on episode 93. If you want to know what that is, it’s like an ancestral trash food. So it’s food that would have gone in the garbage otherwise. And it is so good. And then my brother-in-law made us a loaf of sourdough bread with a grain, a wheat called golden wheat, which I’ve never had before.

Alison Kay (01:32.563)
Okay. okay. Yep.

Alison Kay (01:43.9)
So good.

Alison Kay (01:53.617)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Andrea (01:55.234)
and he used rye sourdough starter that I gave him. And I told him that you recommended the rye and he came and told me, my gosh, the rye makes such a difference. That’s he’s like, this has got to be the most active sourdough starter I’ve ever had. And so that was good affirmation. And he’s taking your Bozo course, by the way. And yeah, he likes doing ferments. Then I had some there was a jar with just a little homemade applesauce left in it.

Alison Kay (01:58.079)
Yeah. Good boy.

Alison Kay (02:13.163)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (02:17.01)
wonderful.

Andrea (02:24.766)
And there was a tiny bit of leftover homemade tapioca. And then of course I had sauerkraut on the side to go with the pork riet. And I made a latte. So I steamed milk and had coffee that I got. There’s a guy in town here who grinds coffee and he sells it at my chiropractor’s office. And yeah, so I thought I’ll give that a try and it was pretty good. So that was.

Alison Kay (02:25.029)
Perfect.

Alison Kay (02:29.519)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (02:33.145)
Mm-hmm.

Lovely.

Alison Kay (02:42.244)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (02:48.678)
wow.

Alison Kay (02:52.77)
Lovely.

Andrea (02:53.438)
breakfast yesterday and it is what I have to look forward to when I’m done here. So.

Alison Kay (02:57.001)
It’s a bit of an indulgence having pork rouillette for breakfast, wow.

Andrea (03:00.598)
I know, but you can do it because it’s, you know, frozen in a jar and there’s no work to it. And you could eat it cold. I’ve done it cold in sandwiches before, but I’m heating it on the stove for breakfast. So, yeah, how about you?

Alison Kay (03:04.068)
It’s there. Yeah, it’s there.

Alison Kay (03:11.692)
nice.

Yeah, we had pork heart for lunch, which I got from the farmer at the market. It wasn’t on display. said, have you got any offal? And he sort of went round the back into the boxes he had and came up with these two pork hearts, charged me £2 for them, which is next to nothing. And I am working harder to get Gable to eat offal. So last night I…

Andrea (03:18.077)
theme of pork today.

Andrea (03:28.293)
ha ha!

Andrea (03:33.514)
Wow.

look at that.

Alison Kay (03:43.027)
got the pork hearts out and I trimmed off all of the bits of white fat on them and then I opened them up and I make sure I got all the blood out and I trimmed off all the kind of strong cartilage bits you on the inside of the heart because those are hard to chew and they were just put Gable off and then I chopped it up really quite small like in a dice and then I covered it in a bit of milk heath here. I know that you do that for liver I don’t know whether you do it for heart but I just thought I’d do it and see what happened because anything I can do

Andrea (03:57.087)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Alison Kay (04:13.244)
to have Gable eat it the better. So left it in Keefer overnight. And then today we did it in the Instapot. I left really detailed instructions for Rob. He is bonding, I said this to him, he’s bonding with the Instapot more than I am, because he’s using it more than I am. I tend to leave him instructions and he kind of gets on with it. But now he’s just trying things and changing things up. And I was like, you’ve got an interesting relationship with this piece of kitchen equipment.

So we had what vegetables were left in the cupboard. was onions, mushrooms, bit of cabbage, peas and a little bit of green curly kale and a paste with water and tomato kind of concentrate stirred in and coriander, salt and pepper. And we put it in the Instapot for 35 minutes and it was delicious. The boys had it with some sourdough bread.

But I fancied a potato, so I have mine with potato. And Gabriel ate nearly all of it. I was expecting him to say, what’s this? But he didn’t. He did look at it just momentarily on the end of his fork as if to say, what’s going on here? But he ate it, which was nice. And I loved it too. So it’s a win-win. And for two pound, for two pick hearts, I’ll be asking him again if he’s got any offal, I think. So yeah, it was lovely.

Andrea (05:17.246)
What kind of potato?

Andrea (05:31.585)
That’s a win.

Andrea (05:37.076)
Come on, so good. Yeah. And what kind of potato did you have?

Alison Kay (05:43.577)
I just had a, I don’t know what type it was, it comes from the lady who we get our veg from at the market. We go to the same stall every week. She grows potatoes with red skin. That’s all I know. They’ve got red skin on them. And I put them in the oven. No, I put them here, I was a bit of a luxury. I put a load of them in the oven. So then the rest of them are going in the fridge and I’ll chop them up and fry them in lard later in the week.

Andrea (05:53.923)
yeah, I like that kind. Okay. And you steamed it or you baked it. Okay.

Andrea (06:07.37)
That is a really good idea. I, I’m always thinking of ways to sort of batch my oven work because I don’t like to run the power forever and ever. And so now you’re kind of making me think I have a box full of red, red skin potatoes actually from one of the farms out here. And I could just bake a whole bunch of them and

Alison Kay (06:09.325)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (06:14.293)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Alison Kay (06:24.086)
For all of you there who will eat potatoes, Gable doesn’t eat potatoes nor does Rob very much, but you could do a big oven load. I felt quite guilty putting the oven on. Usually we’re like, right, we’ve got bread, we’re to put roasted vegetables in at the same time and this thing with oats. But this morning I was like, I really want a potato, I don’t want bread today. So I just thought I’d put all the potatoes in. Yeah.

Andrea (06:28.03)
Yeah

Andrea (06:34.43)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (06:40.296)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea (06:45.424)
It’s good to listen to those cues though when you’re able, you know, if you have access to potatoes and you need, feel like you need a potato, then it’s good if you can do that.

Alison Kay (06:52.041)
Exactly. I need a potato. I have a nice review to read now. Shall we move on to that? Because I know we’ve got a lot to cover today. Yeah, no, I don’t. I write them out on a piece of paper and set light to them and ceremonially burn them. So.

Andrea (06:55.326)
Hahaha!

Ooh, yeah, don’t read any bad ones, please.

Andrea (07:11.082)
Well, if you want us to burn your review, leave a bad one. If you want us to read your review, leave a good one. OK, no bad reviews.

Alison Kay (07:14.867)
No, don’t, don’t, just don’t leave a bad one, please. Don’t leave a bad one, especially not about one episode when we’ve done a hundred, you know, that are actually all right and you don’t like one of them. Please don’t leave a bad one. Or you can obviously. It’s a free world, but this one isn’t bad. Actually, that’s true. It’s not a free world, is it? This one is a really good review, five stars. And it’s from someone who’s titled a podcast addict.

Andrea (07:24.778)
Andrea (07:29.32)
No it’s not. Only leave good ones.

Ha

Andrea (07:38.651)
thank you.

Alison Kay (07:43.537)
And she called the review, Grandma Still Has Lots To Learn. And she said, I may be a grandma, but I grew up when processed food was new and seen by many as a blessing. I’ve learned so much to the contrary in the past 10 to 15 years. And this podcast has truly blessed me with much good food for thought. I especially love the podcast about ancestral cooking from various countries and would love to hear more of that. Maybe Sweden. Keep up the great work that you have begun.

Andrea (07:47.708)
I love that attitude.

Andrea (08:08.062)
Mmm.

Andrea (08:14.31)
thank you.

Alison Kay (08:14.361)
Thank you, podcast addict. I mean, I remember doing the ancestral cooking episode from Wales and I absolutely loved that. But I read a lot of stuff to do that one. And so I would love to dive into another country’s ancestral traditions and have kind of thought about it with Italy a little bit. But Sweden, we do sometimes talk about Sweden on Discord and Scandinavia because several people on there have roots in Scandinavia.

Andrea (08:21.628)
Yes, that one is really good.

Hmm.

Andrea (08:32.607)
Yeah.

Andrea (08:40.36)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (08:43.116)
So that’s maybe something we can do. Talking of Discord, Andrea, do you want to tell the listeners what’s going on there at the moment? Lots.

Andrea (08:51.036)
Yes. Yes. Just to give everybody a little window into what’s happening. Alison, you did an interview all about medieval ale on the British food history podcast, which is such a fun podcast. And I know all the Americans we really enjoy reading about the British food history because our food history is like 300 years long. It’s not very long. So it’s interesting for us to find some of our roots there.

Alison Kay (09:14.316)
Mmm.

Andrea (09:20.382)
And so that was a really great interview. So if you want to hear Alison talk more about ale, because we can never get you talking about ale enough on this podcast, you do have a really good episode. I think one of our top five episodes of all time is the interview where you said, what have we done to beer? That’s a really great episode if anybody wants to hear more about it. And then the interview with. Wow.

Alison Kay (09:38.303)
Yeah.

Andrea (09:48.906)
drawing a blank on his name. Neil Buttery, that’s right. So with Dr. Neil Buttery. And then I was also going to shout out Melissa in the discord. She made chocolate croissants. Like she made them, made them. She said it took two days and she said she, she had it mapped out the timing. And I think she said they baked them at like midnight or something. So I thought that was really impressive and dedicated.

Alison Kay (09:50.792)
to Neil Buttery. Yeah.

Alison Kay (10:11.484)
Yeah, they were up till midnight.

Alison Kay (10:16.721)
I agree.

Andrea (10:19.242)
And she said the main thing was that they would need more chocolate

Alison Kay (10:24.771)
And why not? Exactly. The other thing that I would just want to make a quick mention for before we dive into our content today is our newsletter. If you go to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com on the top of every page, you’ll see a little bar where you can give us details of where we can contact you. And we are putting together a newsletter that will come out regularly with lots of more kind of just more from us. So if you like us and you want more, then that newsletter will come to your inbox and you can.

consume us in your inbox as well as in your ears. So do go to our website and pop your details in if you’d like that. Okay, let’s go to a break now.

Andrea (11:06.474)
All right, so Alice and I have been doing some reading and a health food company in the US put together a research committee to get some data on Americans and their food consumption. This was in August of last year. This is not a scientific study. They provided the details about how they got all of their respondents and it wasn’t, you know, a statistical survey type thing. It was just, you know, people who came to their website or people that they

Alison Kay (11:11.012)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (11:36.614)
sent something to. But it was 2000 people and if we take the results to be roughly representative of Americans, it does represent the conversations I have with people. And I was interested to know if after I read this to you, if you could tell me if it’s similar in the UK or even even in Italy, if you remember from there, if the discussions came up there. So the top barrier to eating what people consider a healthier diet, which they did not define.

Alison Kay (11:55.179)
Okay, yeah.

Andrea (12:06.634)
is includes it being too expensive. 41 % of people complained of that not having enough time to make the meals. 26 % brought this up as an issue and finding it difficult to locate the healthy ingredients. This was 19 % and then respondents also mentioned that when they didn’t have time they would eat sandwiches, fast food and microwavable dinners which

sandwiches can be a good thing, but the other ones are problems. And.

Alison Kay (12:43.335)
Yeah, sandwiches can be a bad thing too.

Andrea (12:46.635)
Yeah, it can be kind of like you’re making me think of Sally Fallon saying salads are killing America. Sandwiches could do the same thing now. Sandwiches could be really great, but they could also be scary. Convenience was a huge problem for Americans. 74 % said they would be interested in eating better food if it were more convenient. And almost everybody reported that eating healthy was important to them.

Alison Kay (12:52.028)
Yeah.

Andrea (13:16.574)
But 19 % of people said they were still going to fast food at least once a day.

Alison Kay (13:25.5)
Gosh, once a day!

Andrea (13:27.538)
Yeah. So that, that tells me not that people don’t care or whatever, but that they’re hungry. They’re desperate. They don’t have the skills and the tools. don’t, they’re being told they can’t afford it, all sorts of things. And they feel that they have no choice. That literally breaks my heart, Alison. And I want to, I,

designed this episode today to speak to this specifically. So first I want you to tell me, is this just an American problem or are you seeing it overseas?

Alison Kay (14:03.512)
No, absolutely not. It’s not just an American problem. In the UK, think all of the things that I hear and see, people say to me, I can’t afford it. How do you eat like this on this budget? How can I afford it? just, it’s so difficult. I think time is also a problem, particularly for people with children, know, mums who are perhaps working and they’ve got kids at home and they’re trying to look after a household.

time is definitely an issue too, but the biggest issue by far is budget for people. And I think that’s been reflected in our journey, Rob and I, the biggest things we’ve had to work with and had to work around have been financial and time resources for sure. So yeah, it’s exactly the same here.

Andrea (14:53.086)
Yeah. Okay. Well, I am depressed now. So thanks for telling me this is a global problem. Okay. So that’s encouraging. Well, Allison, guess our podcast is in the right place at the right time because I feel like these things, I could almost even divide our podcast episodes up and say,

Alison Kay (14:59.487)
I’m sorry.

Alison Kay (15:11.434)
Yeah.

Andrea (15:17.45)
If your barrier is too expensive, 41 % of respondents, then here, listen to these 10 episodes. If you don’t have enough time, 26 % of respondents listen to these episodes. So we have some episodes that speak specifically to this, but this is not something that we can discuss too much because it is a very real problem. And I know here in the U S we have this inflation thing going on and everybody is, um, you know, food costs.

are taking without changing what people are eating, the food costs are consuming a larger and larger portion of people’s budget. That’s a problem because then they’re also feeling the weight of I should be eating something else, but I already can’t even afford what we’ve been eating. So that’s a big problem. I feel that our lifestyle, the way our lifestyle is kind of expected to be nowadays with doing lots of things, going lots of places, being online.

Etc watching shows and things like that is I think it’s contributing to not having time and you actually Speaking of there’s an episode called why I gave away my iPhone and you talked about how it was consuming so much of your time that you got rid of it and One of that was one of the things that helped you to Have more time to cook and Before everybody

Alison Kay (16:12.434)
Absolutely.

Andrea (16:36.66)
turns us off on their iPhone that they’re listening to us on, then maybe you don’t have to get rid of your iPhone. Maybe you do, but maybe you don’t and you just need to set timers and spend less time on it. I don’t know.

Alison Kay (16:49.678)
think that the word that you used a few minutes ago the most often in that survey was the word convenience and I think what you’ve just spoken to with expectations and pace and the way we live these days we kind of expect convenience we need convenience because we’re we’re living in this kind of world where we are doing so many things and we are bringing stuff in and we want to have stuff delivered to us you know

Andrea (16:56.798)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Andrea (17:03.53)
You’re right, Allison.

Alison Kay (17:17.335)
Amazon is an example of it. That’s what I just thought of, you know, that we want something, we get it, it’s delivered to us. Convenience. And we kind of expect, and I’m sure you’re going to talk in a minute about how really for most of our history, convenience, convenience and food didn’t really go together. So yeah, I wanted to just, that word convenience was just sticking in my head there where you were talking. was thinking, yes, yes, yes.

Andrea (17:23.946)
You’re right.

Andrea (17:41.886)
Yeah. I think that’s a great point for you to make, Allison. And it was going to be a thread that will run throughout this entire episode, which is that convenience is, as you said, an expectation that we have, but it’s not necessarily a realistic one, which there are ways we can make things be convenient. Like I described that breakfast I had, which took under five minutes to prepare. had to slice bread. I had to heat the riettes.

everything else just scooped in onto a plate. But that was of course the result of, you know, having done the work before. So it’s convenient now, but I put the time in earlier and that that I think is an aspect that is great to unravel as you as people immerse themselves into the ancestor food lifestyle for longer and longer, you start to get those compounding benefits that don’t exist if you just try to eat ancestral for one day or for a week or something, which is what

Alison Kay (18:15.353)
Yeah, previous work, yeah.

Alison Kay (18:36.963)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea (18:39.324)
most journalists do when they try to write those terrible articles about how unrealistic it is. All right. So so we don’t have a lot of skills nowadays, and that is something we need to learn. And it is something that adults in a fully functioning, absolutely illiterate society once all knew it was just culturally expected. And the supermarkets episode that we just put out, Allison, speaks directly into the struggle that many people have to find.

Alison Kay (18:42.926)
Yeah.

Andrea (19:08.498)
ethical and good ingredients. So if we’re talking about finding ingredients, that is a place to go.

Alison Kay (19:15.047)
Yeah, go listen to that one.

Andrea (19:17.204)
Today I want to focus on the 41 % complaint, which is too expensive. So here we go. So we’ve got the rising cost of food all over the place. We’re being told it’s too expensive for you to eat healthy. And then we see these really glamorous health food stores that have really high priced foods. And we think that’s not for me. I have to stay at this other store.

Alison Kay (19:24.162)
Okay, good.

Andrea (19:47.54)
already falling into the lineup fallacy that you have to stay at a store. And then we just try not to think about it because it’s stressful and we have too many other stressful things to think about and we have bills coming due and mortgages to pay and children that need their diapers changed. And it’s a lot. So I wanted to bring in a three pronged answer to this problem first. And then Alison, I want to

literally talk about actual food recipes, dishes, meals, prices, comparisons. So the first response I have to the food being too expensive is that one is that food has always been a huge and expensive portion of human energy expenditure. it is probably the expenditure in the US by most stats that I could find second to housing.

Alison Kay (20:20.312)
Yeah, I’m excited about this.

Alison Kay (20:47.05)
Yes.

Andrea (20:47.07)
So it’s pretty high. Except it might actually be third after healthcare expenses. It depends on how you slice the numbers. But those three are certainly up there. And it has always been in history, you and I have spent, are not historians, but we have spent a fair amount of time reading about people in your oat research.

Alison Kay (20:54.757)
okay. Okay.

Alison Kay (21:12.416)
Hmm.

Andrea (21:13.79)
Whenever you wax eloquent on that is a great example of this, that people in many cultures up until about a hundred years ago, AKA the advent of the supermarket, spent the majority of their time getting food or getting food for their domestic animals. So this includes farming labor, shepherding, herding, hunting, foraging, gardening, things like that. And then people in exclusive occupations like a priest,

or traveling bard or a shope, they were often given food as part of their tribal inheritance. Like a great example in the Bible is the Levites in the tribes of Israel who were told you don’t get a bunch of stuff, but people are going to have to basically take care of you. That’s part of their job. That freed them up from getting food all day so that they could spend time, you know, spiritually tending to their people.

Alison Kay (22:04.701)
you

Andrea (22:14.14)
So we have, I think with the first hundred years of supermarkets, we got very accustomed to food being a smaller percentage of our budget. And then with supermarkets, a bunch of other luxuries and requirements that you’re supposed to spend your money on blossomed to take the place of the expenses that you would have once had on your time. So we have things like TV subscriptions, entertainment. That’s like a huge.

expenditure in the US anyways. Lots of really expensive insurances that you have to buy, clothes that you have to buy constantly, new, they’re not repaired. But I will reassure everyone that everyone has pretty much always had to pay taxes. So that’s always been a problem. Allison, I wanted to ask you, for you, is food, I know for us it is, is food a significant portion of your budget?

Alison Kay (22:58.926)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (23:07.8)
Mm.

Alison Kay (23:12.62)
Big, yes. I mean, we spend so much of the income that we have on food. know, listeners who’ve been with us for a while know that, Rob and I don’t have a car. We don’t have a TV. We don’t have any subscriptions to any kind of entertainment. We have the cheapest phone packages you could possibly have. Both of us have old, old phones. We don’t

Andrea (23:14.538)
Mmm. Okay.

Alison Kay (23:40.947)
eat out, maybe we eat out twice a year perhaps. We don’t really go on holidays. We don’t spend the weekend traveling to different places and doing stuff. That’s not what we do with our money. Our money goes into buying good food, feeding ourselves well and bringing that energy to the farmers who we care about, to the soil and to our plates and the kitchen which…

bring so much kind of wholeness and joy into our lives. yes, I mean, an absolutely significant portion of our budget. We still do pay a bit more for housing, like you said, but by far the next biggest expense in our life is food. The rest of our expenses pale into insignificance with it. And it’s not like we’ve got a big budget. We’ve always been a family who, you know, focus on being

Andrea (24:21.82)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (24:39.634)
happy and healthy and creative, not in going out and earning. You neither of us have worked for a corporate company or for anyone other than ourselves for 15 years, maybe even more. So it’s not like we’ve got a lot of money coming in and we’re just, you know, portioning out a part of it to food. The bit that we do spend on food is always tight. It’s always…

conscious choice, which is not easy. And the more that I do it and the more I feel like I’m getting benefits from it and the more I realise it’s in alignment with what I believe in, the more it’s a no brainer. But still it’s every month, right? This is the situation we’re in. It’s not an easy choice, but it is very definitely a significant portion of our budget. Yeah.

Andrea (25:26.75)
Yeah.

Andrea (25:32.328)
So what I’m also hearing you say, Allison, is that if you wanted the things like expensive phone packages or more TV stuff or something, you’d have to, if you wanted to keep eating the way you’re, well, you either have to, I don’t think you could actually eat cheaper, to be honest, which I think I’ll get to when we get in here, when we discuss this, but you would have to decide we’re gonna work a lot more so that we can.

Alison Kay (25:42.545)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (25:52.433)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (25:59.862)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Andrea (26:01.332)
watch Netflix or something. don’t know, just stabbing an idea out there. So, so that, yeah. So you’ve set your expectations of how you’ll spend your time and you and Rob have decided instead of buying a subscription, I will read out loud and Alison and Gabe will listen. And that’s your entertainment, which is awesome. Subscribe to Rob, Rob plus.

Alison Kay (26:05.739)
And that’s back to lifestyle, what you were saying earlier on, you know?

Alison Kay (26:20.097)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s my subscription. I feed him. He reads.

Andrea (26:30.886)
Okay, thank you, Allison. The second point I wanted to make about the food and expensive-ness is that we will spend the money on our health somewhere. It will either be preventative medicine in the form of food or a remedial care or a chronic sick care. And what I mean by that is

Alison Kay (26:36.737)
Mmm.

Andrea (26:54.57)
Joel Salatin pulled these statistics. I’m not sure what year he pulled them, but I went and did some research and I found that the stats from last year were almost identical. he’s whatever, whenever he pulled this from, it’s pretty close. He said 40 years ago, Americans spent 18 % of their income on food and 8 % of their income on healthcare. 40 years later, Americans now spend 18 % of their income on healthcare and 8 % of their income on food.

The statistics I found only varied in that they said it’s 9 % of the income on foods. It was really close. So…

Alison Kay (27:33.373)
I can’t understand that 8 % if I think that in my head roughly and my budget, I mean we spend way more than 8 % of our income on food, way more. I don’t know how, I’d have to eat the most rubbish food possible to spend 8 % of my income on food.

Andrea (27:43.902)
Yes.

Andrea (27:50.248)
Well, so you aren’t, you aren’t though. So you don’t know what it, what you would feel like if you were eating food that, you know, you, you aren’t saying I’m going to eat this onion because I have a headache. That’s not what we mean by food as medicine. What we mean is you’re eating the food that’s keeping you above the line of wellness so that your body for the most part has the tools that needs to keep ticking away and to feel good.

Alison Kay (28:04.996)
Hmm.

Andrea (28:16.106)
If you ate bad foods, you’d start sliding so far below that line of wellness, you would need somebody to help you. Like you’d say, oh, I’m so depressed. You know, you’re not getting any serotonin. Your gut isn’t functioning, but you don’t know that. So you say, I’m really depressed and unhappy. Please help me. And there’s therapies for that, you know, or you might say, my skin is just like dry and breaking out constantly. I don’t know what to do. So there’s therapies you can take for that.

Alison Kay (28:23.043)
Yeah

Andrea (28:43.1)
you know, there’s any variety of things that could happen, but we don’t always know. It’s not like you. I ate a cookie and then I had depression. Like, that’s not really how it works. It’s just an organism. That’s your body being consistently kind of slid off the edge of being harmonized. And the more it gets pushed, the more it starts to tilt. And then the more uncomfortable you are. And then it’s really hard to point to exactly where it began. But.

Alison Kay (28:51.619)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (29:09.215)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea (29:10.8)
I am very sympathetic to this situation and I do not think somebody, if you’re spending 18 % of your income on healthcare, you cannot today also start spending 18 % of your income on food because there’s an obvious problem there and that you’ll run out of percents. So I think the shift, if we can accept that the shift can be gradual, perhaps this year you will just say,

for the sake of numbers, you spent 18 % of your income on healthcare and 8 % of your income on food. And then next year, maybe it was 17 % of your income on healthcare, 9 % on food. You you could, as you eat better, a lot of problems do start to resolve, if you will, but you can hopefully slowly shift the ratio. Alison, could you mention a time that I have specifically in mind when you used food to actually address

Alison Kay (30:00.938)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (30:07.349)
Mm.

Andrea (30:09.748)
a healthcare need you had.

Alison Kay (30:11.985)
Yeah, I guess the biggest one we’ve already talked about on the podcast back in an episode on fertility. And that was the fact that I was not menstruating at all and I wanted to have a child. And I went to the doctor and the doctor said, you won’t get pregnant unless you take medicine. And I decided that I didn’t agree with that. And so I changed what I was eating. I did lots of research.

And I brought my menstrual cycle back and I had Gabriel. And I mean, all of that, I’m using food to address that desire and that need in my life to heal me rather than going and saying to someone, okay, give me your drugs and we’ll see whether that works and deal with the consequences of that as well. So that’s, that’s a big example, but there have been so many other examples in

Andrea (31:08.745)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (31:08.922)
my life of that happening to me or with Rob or with Gabriel. You we always turn to food first and medicine last, frankly.

Andrea (31:19.614)
Right. Okay. That is helpful to hear. My third response to the approach of the food being expensive is to eat simpler, more common food. And we, thanks to supermarkets and the internet, have all been cultivating the taste of French nobles when we’re actually peasants. So we have been raised and trained to like fussy detailed dishes.

Alison Kay (31:36.377)
Yeah

Andrea (31:47.285)
expensive ingredients that were once reserved for holidays, which are now commonplace everyday foods, know, sweets that turn up all the time when they would have only been on a feast day or something. And we have what I call Pinterest appetites, where we want different, unique, exciting, colorful, splashy dishes for every meal. And then instead of just beating the same bread recipe over and over and over until you know it backwards and forwards and it works for you, we keep jumping.

Alison Kay (32:03.724)
Yeah.

Andrea (32:13.502)
for the Instagram trick, which is this is the only bread recipe you’ll ever need. Then the next day a new pop-up with a better picture, the best sandwich bread. Then the next day, a better picture and a new pop-up. This bread will save your soul. So what we really, I know, I know just writing that down made me, stressing me out. But that is where I think we need to learn the diligent repetition on the simple and the boring and the commonplace. And

Alison Kay (32:25.931)
I’m panicking already.

Alison Kay (32:40.21)
I wanted to just bring up something that you’ve said, two things actually. It’s really interesting that you talked about French nobles because when the Norman French invaded the UK, I’ve done this research in my own book recently, there was something called the oat bread line where they were looking around where to build their castles and they didn’t want to go further north than this oat bread line, which is the line where wheat couldn’t be grown and oats had to be grown instead due to the weather and geography.

Andrea (32:49.797)
Mmm. Yes. Great regret.

Alison Kay (33:09.457)
And so they would only build their castles where they could harvest, where they could grow and harvest wheat. They wouldn’t build their castles up North because, they ate oats there. The peasants ate oats there. And it’s quite funny that you said French nobles because that actually happens. know, everyone else there was eating oats, like it’s pre-meal today, virtually. But the French nobles didn’t want to know. The other thing that I was going to say was about Italy. Because you’re talking about

Andrea (33:16.106)
That’s hilarious.

peasants.

Alison Kay (33:36.145)
we have these feast foods all the time these days and feast foods don’t really have a meaning anymore. I did a lot of research when I was in Italy into their carnival and how the carnival was a time where they ate the good things. They actually had meat, they actually had treats, they had good things because most of the time they were eating the same simple dishes like you said.

Andrea (33:48.404)
Mmm.

Alison Kay (34:05.741)
It’s interesting, know, watching Gable go to the Steiner School that he did in Italy when we were there, because they’re celebrating Carnival, you so they’re getting dressed up and they’re doing nice things for it. But they’re just, they were eating foods that were available to eat every day, you know, so they’re celebrating Carnival and Italy celebrates Carnival with sweet treats and things in packets. But…

Those things are eaten every day in Italy too. There are still a few foods that, you know, well, we only make this bun on carnival really. But really the idea of it was, wow, we can actually feast now. But the kids are eating sweet things all the time, all year. So there’s no different. They’re just eating more of them in carnival. And that’s just so not the point. The point of that was there was that short period of time where the fat of the land was…

able to be celebrated and then the rest of the year it was what you’re talking about, simple food, repeated and growing close to home. I just had those two kind of thoughts in my head when you were talking.

Andrea (35:00.19)
Yeah.

Andrea (35:11.546)
I think those are great connections. Yeah, those are really great relations to make there, Allison. Science of relations. If you want to hear more about Allison and I talking about how simple food, which has good ingredients, is quite delicious, you could jump to episode 100. We talked about what is ancestral food and we talked about the simplicity of things.

Alison Kay (35:19.757)
Mm.

Andrea (35:41.104)
So, Alison, if we still have time left today, then I want to talk about some food. So when it comes to recipe book, I will throw out there that the one I want to talk about today is nourishing traditions. It is the answer to the rising cost of food. Peasant food is pleasant food, I like to say.

Alison Kay (35:43.592)
Yeah. We are taking quite a while. I’m a bit nervous.

Andrea (36:06.888)
And there is a quote from G.K. Chesterton in Nourishing Traditions and she quotes him as saying, there is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape nuts on principle. Which kind of like, like that.

Alison Kay (36:20.742)
I don’t remember that one. There’s so many beautiful things in Naurishing Traditions. I have it on my lap right now. And I think what we want to get across in this episode is that Naurishing Traditions can be so overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be overwhelming. You know, don’t have to make everything in the book. I have not made everything in the book. I have not even made half of the things in this book, but this book inspires me all the time. Each recipe is like a

sort of a capsule, an idea that you can take and go, okay, well, I could use this method. I could add this ingredient in here, or I haven’t got liver, I’ve got heart, or I’ve got kidney instead. And there are things you can just sub in and sub out and use it as a guide to help you construct your own recipes for what you have in your cupboards, in your fridge.

Andrea (37:15.454)
Yes.

I agree.

Alison Kay (37:18.455)
or what you have in the market around you depending on what season it is and where you live.

Andrea (37:22.804)
She’ll say that often. She’ll say, commute or spelt or wheat or rye or, know, so you kind of get the, she can’t say that in every ingredient, but you get the idea. And I agree with that, Alison. And I’d say, you know, buy things bulk if you can, because I’m going to talk about that when we get to the recipes, that’ll drive your cost down quite a lot. My best tip for getting started with nourishing traditions is if you don’t know where to begin with the book, just go to the index on page 651.

and just start reading the titles of the recipes. And as soon as you see something that sounds good, go to that page and see if it has ingredients you have access to. And if it’s a process you’d like to learn, I can spend just one minute in the index and get a list of 40 titles of things I’d like to make.

Andrea (38:10.568)
So eating cheaply is not necessarily always the goal of the way you and I eat, Allison, as I think we’ve discussed, but it is actually possible at times. And that is one way, you know, being more, getting beans in bulk and driving the cost down there is one way that you can then allocate more of your grocery dollar into a more expensive thing like meat. And then when you’re choosing meat,

Alison Kay (38:17.575)
Mm, yeah.

Andrea (38:38.91)
choosing something that either you have access to at a great sort of like, like raising meat if you can, or choosing the organ meats. Cause like you said, the heart in earlier is cheaper. so then you can keep driving your costs down to make it reasonable. the main ingredient is your creative and interesting brain. So I have a document Alison that I made after I made all these notes, I just kind of copied out.

Alison Kay (39:04.127)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (39:06.526)
the recipe name and page number and the price comparisons if I had it for each of these recipes and I’m going to drop that in the download section for the patrons. So if you want all these recipes in one list, jump on to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com, become a supporter, the companionship level or above and this and a bunch of other stuff will be there for you. So first, I’ll send I’m going to yeah.

Alison Kay (39:14.025)
Okay.

Alison Kay (39:27.012)
There’s so much info, I just want to say there’s so much information here that it’s worth getting that because you’ve done tons of research on, you know, recipes that you love in our ancient traditions, how much it costs, how much it costs to buy it in the store. And you have so many ideas of how you can drive that cost down and what you could use instead. So having a kind of a cheat sheet that can help you is really beneficial. Okay, sorry.

Andrea (39:36.233)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (39:47.774)
Yeah. And I cannot read everything that like I, I showed my work, if you will, like how much every ounce of everything cost, but I’m not going to read all that on air because it be like a five hour episode. So I am going to tell, I’m going to share for each of these that I have the calculations. I’m going to share the cost, the total cost. but I’m not going to read each item. So Alison, have, I, I,

Alison Kay (39:57.505)
Mm. Yeah.

Alison Kay (40:10.328)
Okay.

Andrea (40:16.23)
Originally just wanted to write an episode where we had 10 recipes from nursing traditions that were really easy, straightforward ones people could get started with right away. Then I thought it would be nice if I could show how much more expensive they were than buying it from the store. But that is not what the math was showing me. Every single recipe I pulled out, I was finding that it was cheaper to make an organic ancestral version than to buy the cheapest version at the grocery store here, which is called Walmart, which is about the cheapest grocery store you can find.

I for one or two things, I started comparing Whole Foods and then I was like, yeah, forget about that. That’s like just so unreasonable. But but I I kept finding recipe after recipe and and Leah was here when I was writing these notes and I kept trying to find one that would be more expensive and I was starting to get frustrated. So I got 10 recipes here that are cheaper to make. And then I.

Alison Kay (40:50.517)
Hehehehe

Andrea (41:12.074)
I found I have five recipes that you and I both really like that I don’t know what you’d compare them to. So I can’t say if they’re cheaper or not. Um, and then there’s six recipes that are more expensive to make, but some of them are barely more expensive, but I’m still not putting them in the list of the 10 cheaper ones. But it’s, I was shocked Alison by what I found because I was. Yeah. So basic muffins is a recipe on page 482 of nourishing traditions. It makes, um,

Alison Kay (41:17.95)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (41:32.452)
I’m shocked reading your notes.

Andrea (41:42.346)
16 muffins and an organic ancestral homemade batch of these 16 muffins with organic wheat berries and raw milk and I put expensive eggs and grass-fed butter all of these things that recipe would cost you four dollars and 66 cents to make Assuming this is where allison I want to talk about bringing price down which i’ll mention multiple times

that you bought your organic wheat berries in bulk. I, I know that our eggs are, they’re cheaper than some places in the nation and they’re more expensive than some places. But I can bring my overall cost down by not buying expensive flour at Whole Foods, but I buy a huge bag of organic wheat berries. I know you do the same with your rye.

Alison Kay (42:15.869)
Okay, yeah.

Alison Kay (42:38.12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea (42:41.074)
I buy the huge bag and that drives the per ounce cost down so significantly that it helps me to, like have a little more to allocate towards the eggs, but then the overall cost is still lower. If you were to buy 16, like pre-made, not from the bakery, but plastic packaged, conventional industrial muffins from Walmart. and the

Alison Kay (42:55.128)
Yeah.

Andrea (43:10.338)
Star rating that these got was two stars and the review said very dry and crumbly with no taste of blueberry flavor It would cost you four dollars and ninety five cents. So Four dollars and sixty six cents So the organic and ancestor ones they’re soaked they’re fermented. They’re very high in protein They’ve got grass-fed butter maple syrup full of minerals. They’ve got the choline from the egg protein from the egg

Alison Kay (43:15.726)
You

Alison Kay (43:21.602)
And how much were the original ones again, the ones that we make?

Andrea (43:40.294)
saturated fat, they’ve got Redmond real salt. So you’re getting your mineral dose and then the ones from the, so they’re actually a medicinal food. And then the ones from the grocery store, which cost marginally more, but still more, will point out, actually could send you into like a arthritis flare, like a spiral, you know, not, not good for your health. So

Alison Kay (44:04.334)
those ones made at home are gonna make your house smell amazing and your kids love you.

Andrea (44:08.69)
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Whatever makes our kids love us we got to do All right, so that’s a breakfast option. Breakfast porridge is another one page 455 and When you look at the notes for this you’ll see that I put in parentheses after each item the a couple ingredients that were the dominant ingredients from each recipe because from there you can kind of at a glance know yeah, I have access to oats that’s an option or no

Alison Kay (44:13.408)
Yeah.

Andrea (44:37.564)
Oats aren’t even in my, you know, wheelhouse. So the this one kind of shocked me because I thought that the grocery store, it’s Quaker Oats as the competition, Alison, I thought it would be cheaper. So when you’re buying your oats in bulk, which is what I listed here, then the price per ounce goes down insanely. And if you just make the recipe as Sally Fallon has written it,

Alison Kay (44:39.77)
Yeah, yeah.

Alison Kay (44:51.548)
No.

Andrea (45:06.738)
Organic ancestral fermented homemade oats porridge breakfast thing costs you a dollar and 10 cents. And that’s including if you put in half a stick of butter and the conventional commercial packaged store cost Quaker oats, instant oats, maple and brown sugar flavor.

which by the way has no maple or brown sugar in it. It just has the flavor of it. Isn’t that tricky? So there’s no minerals. the entire it’s $2 and 87 cents. So it’s over double, but it’s the cheap version, right? And you’re being told, the organic fermented oats, that’s too much for you. You just have to eat the Quaker oats. No, no, we don’t want to know what happened to those oats.

Alison Kay (45:34.376)
I’m not surprised.

Alison Kay (45:44.825)
Wow, that’s a big difference.

Alison Kay (45:54.066)
And those oats aren’t fermented from Quaker. I mean, there have been extra process, they’re not fermented.

I do, sadly.

Andrea (46:03.109)
yeah, you do, but, yeah. So you can make that breakfast for a dollar and it would feed that serving that I put there feeds me and all four of my kids for breakfast.

Alison Kay (46:17.887)
You know, if you liked rye and you wanted to flake your own rye or use rye, cracked rye, rye is substantially cheaper than oats, even though oats aren’t that expensive. So if you bought rye berries in bulk, you could make that for even cheaper than that.

Andrea (46:23.902)
Yes.

Andrea (46:28.158)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-mm.

Andrea (46:34.302)
Yep. You could use whatever grain you have access to at the best price. Some people live close to a mill that raises a certain type of grain. So you could roll, commute or spelt. if you had a roller like Alison, like you have, that’s an option, or you could just use a coarsely cracked rye. You can use whole Teff. you could make this with ground corn. There’s a lot of ways you can do it. So now if you hadn’t made that and you didn’t finish it, then the next day,

you can make fried mush page 457. This is leftover porridge, whatever your porridge may be, and eggs. I couldn’t figure out anything to compare this to. And the cost is leftover oats plus whatever the cost of eggs is. So the theme of ancestral food is no waste. And that is one way that you’ll save money is you, a friend of mine, Naomi made a great point the other day. She said,

Alison Kay (47:17.131)
Yeah.

Andrea (47:31.93)
She just didn’t know what to have for dinner. She was kind of desperate. She had made bone broth, a couple of days prior and it was about to go bad. She felt. And so she thought, I could just ask my husband to get a pizza. But then she thought then the next day, you know, everybody’s like upset because they eat something that upset their tummies. And she thought, what would a peasant do?

Alison Kay (47:37.707)
Mm.

Alison Kay (47:50.736)
Yeah.

Andrea (47:55.434)
which I love that line of thinking. And she thought, a peasant would not waste this broth. And she made a delicious dinner with her broth. So that has to go on the bottom line of food because we know Alison, and you talked about this with Sir Patrick Holden in an earlier interview, that 50 % of food, human edible food is thrown away in the U S and similar in the UK. And

Alison Kay (47:56.667)
You

Alison Kay (48:00.815)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (48:19.45)
Yeah.

Andrea (48:22.95)
If we can stop throwing away food, that makes a big difference on your budget.

Alison Kay (48:28.321)
And that is linked directly to cooking it yourself, you know, because those muffins you were talking about, if you’d made 16 muffins, you wouldn’t be throwing any of them away. But if you bought those store ones that are a bit dry, before they’ve even been opened, and you left them a while, you’d feel less bothered about throwing one away than you would throwing away something you’ve made.

Andrea (48:35.666)
Mm-hmm. No.

Andrea (48:45.544)
Yeah. And you would think you would be thinking in your head, these were cheap, but they actually were more expensive, which is what’s wild. Alison, could you talk about cash?

Alison Kay (48:52.665)
weren’t. Yeah.

Alison Kay (48:57.849)
Yeah, of course. And we have talked about this briefly on a previous episode, which is number 34, where we shared our favourite nourishing traditions recipes. So you can go back and listen to that one as well. And this is a wonderful dish and I absolutely love it. It’s on page 464 in nourishing traditions. And it’s basically really simple ingredients, buckwheat, the groats, so you don’t have to be

You are grinding anything. Egg, broth, butter and seasoning. So it’s a great way to use up broth that you’ve got in the fridge like you were just talking about. And it’s really rich because of the butter and you’ve got the egg in there, which is an economical protein and you can season it with whatever you want. In the recipe and narration tradition, she talks about sprouting your buckwheat first and then ovening it.

Andrea (49:29.002)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (49:53.013)
But you could also make it with buckwheat that you just put in the cast iron pan and roast and don’t sprout. I’ve done it with both. They both taste really good. So yeah, that’s one of my go-to’s in nourishing traditions. And I think it’s good value for money, particularly if you buy the buckwheat in bulk, like you’ve been saying.

Andrea (49:59.882)
Really?

I did not realize that.

Andrea (50:17.086)
Well, let’s find out Alison, because I did the math. So if you wanted to make this organic bone broth, like every ingredient counted bone, counted organic bone broth that you had to make. I, I was brutal in my calculations, Alison, and that I had our little character here buying bones for broth, but you and I both know that we use leftover bones that, you know, after you had the meal off the meat.

Alison Kay (50:18.409)
Thank you. Open the box.

Alison Kay (50:25.909)
Mm.

Alison Kay (50:41.139)
Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Andrea (50:47.294)
the bones that normally people are throwing away. So I actually calculated if you were buying organic bones and making broth. So for this, protein and saturated fat rich meal, three cups volume recipe, would cost you $3 and 94 cents. I went to Walmart and if you bought their buckwheat boil in bag, which apparently is a thing,

it would cost for the pack of two, $13.98. So it’s a big difference. That is the convenience factor because you’re boiling it in the bag, which I know is triggering us. doesn’t, no, that’s without broth. You don’t have broth in that. You don’t have egg in that. You don’t have butter in that. If we added those things in, the cost would go up even more. But I was assuming in this instance that you were just going for the convenience and you don’t care about the nutrition. So.

Alison Kay (51:20.172)
my gosh. Wow.

Alison Kay (51:27.683)
And that doesn’t even include the other ingredients. That doesn’t even…

Alison Kay (51:45.252)
Yeah.

Andrea (51:46.376)
And you’re boiling it in the bag, so how are you supposed to add the egg anyways? If it’s in a bag, I don’t

Alison Kay (51:49.647)
Yeah, I used to boil in the bag very very very very long time ago and now I think gosh really boil in the bag? Yeah exactly.

Andrea (51:55.978)
What was I doing? So that’s some breakfast ideas. Here’s some lunch ideas that I’ll throw down real quick. Dilled potato salad. This is one that I pulled up when I was trying to find something that would definitely cost more than making at home. It does cost more than making it or than buying from the store, but it barely costs more. And I was shocked. I thought it was going to be double the cost at least.

Alison Kay (52:03.747)
Okay.

Andrea (52:24.638)
So if you made the dill potato salad as written in Sally Fallon’s book with an expensive, no seed oil, pre-made mayonnaise and all organic ingredients, and I priced the local potatoes that we can buy from our farm here for a two pound bowl of organic seed oil free, ancestrally prepared, herbed dill salad, it would cost six dollars and ninety five cents. For the Walmart.

Alison Kay (52:34.094)
Yeah.

Andrea (52:52.712)
conventional potato salad with one bazillion ingredients and mostly canola oil. $5.14.

Alison Kay (52:56.52)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (53:00.828)
And your 6.95 was based on buying a bottle of organic mayonnaise, correct? Or did you…

Andrea (53:10.192)
Right, but I only calculated the percentage that you would use from the mayonnaise.

Alison Kay (53:13.552)
That’s interesting though, because if you made the mayonnaise yourself, maybe it would be cheaper.

Andrea (53:17.546)
Yeah, well, okay. So of the 6.95, $3.75 of that was the mayo. So the mayonnaise was the most expensive part. So yes, like you say, I save fat and make like with fat that people pour into cans and throw in the trash can. I make that into mayo. Now you still have to buy the eggs to go with that so that you still have a cost, but it would certainly drive the price down quite a bit. How about hummus? This is another one, Alison, that I pulled up. was like,

Alison Kay (53:21.064)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (53:31.355)
Yeah, exactly.

Alison Kay (53:42.972)
Yeah.

Andrea (53:47.358)
Definitely making homemade hummus. It’s going to be cheaper from the store. False hummus page 174. Did I say the dill potato salad was page 190? Hummus on page 174. Okay, good. So with this hummus, if you wanted to make a 16 ounce batch of organic soaked ancestral hummus with

Alison Kay (53:52.039)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (53:59.376)
Yeah, you did because I looked for it.

Andrea (54:12.904)
Local garlic that I assume you had to buy, but if you listen to Megan’s interview, you’ll be growing garlic and with tahini, which we make in our Vitamix, we buy the big bag of sesame seeds from Azure and make tahini. Your most expensive ingredient is the lemon juice. So we’re buying organic, not from concentrate lemon juice, because of course, you lemon juice has great medicinal benefits for your body, but not if it’s a nasty one.

Alison Kay (54:15.368)
You could grow it

Alison Kay (54:27.08)
Okay.

Alison Kay (54:42.049)
Yeah.

Andrea (54:42.462)
The cost for the 16 ounce batch is $2.98. The very cheapest conventional hummus I could find at Walmart for 16 ounce cost $4.59. Then if you know you don’t, if you want to dip carrots, organic carrots from our local farm, a $1.46 for a pound and the conventional bagged baby carrots came in a little bit lower at a $1.30.

Alison Kay (54:47.106)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (54:55.65)
I don’t want to know what’s in it either.

Andrea (55:11.754)
to a pound, but they barely were lower than the organic local carrots, which are delicious and the baby carrots are disgusting. Allison, could you talk about Indian style pancakes or dosas, which can be found on page 510.

Alison Kay (55:29.622)
Yeah, this is a recipe that I turn to a lot in nourishing traditions. It’s really simple to make because it’s just lentils and brown rice. You leave it to ferment overnight and then you fry up the resulting fermented batter in ideally the cast iron pan, which I often like to do with ghee because that’s kind of authentic. But sometimes I’ve done it in lard or tallow and they are really simple to make. know, you can just have

cast iron pan on and be frying them while you’re doing other things in the kitchen. You don’t have to pay any attention to the batter while it’s fermenting and then you can either jazz them up with kind of a you know Indian style salad perhaps with fresh coriander leaves and onion and nigella seeds or with some sort of chutney. One of your ferments you can use them as wraps you can put some lentils or cooked food in them fold them over and that’s your carbohydrate kind of portion for the meal.

Andrea (56:15.05)
Cool.

Alison Kay (56:25.902)
You can send them to friends, you can put them in the fridge and keep them, can freeze them and reheat them. They’re just really wonderful. You can use them to wrap things like a meat, a ground meat dish, wrap it up in a dosa, freeze it, and then you’ve got kind of like a burrito sort of thing you could take out and heat up again. They’re really simple and really, really lovely.

Andrea (56:50.598)
The cost for 20 of those Ancestrally Prepared with buying the bulk cheapest organic brown rice Azure offers is $5.45 and over half of that was the ghee that I calculated in. So you could use it. Yeah, you could use a cheaper fat like you said. Salmon spread page 164 another recipe I picked because I thought definitely it’s going to be more expensive to make this

Alison Kay (57:02.726)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I’m not surprised. Yeah.

Andrea (57:20.382)
with line caught ethical salmon and organic dairy. I was wrong. Total cost for two cups of organic, sustainable, preservative free spread, totally packed with nutrition, omegas, saturated fats, all the things we love, $6 and 54 cents. If you were to buy the cheapest priced

Alison Kay (57:23.772)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (57:38.662)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Kay (57:44.134)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (57:49.04)
Salmon spread that I could find which was Philadelphia brand 16 ounces would cost nine dollars and 53 cents so it’s significantly more and I can tell you I haven’t had their salmon spread, but I’ve had another spread from them and it was leaving much to be desired so

Alison Kay (57:57.674)
Wow.

Alison Kay (58:08.854)
And that surprises me because I always kind of look at canned salmon, particularly one that’s sustainable, and I think, oh, it’s too expensive. But yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Andrea (58:14.345)
I

I know. That’s why I did the math. I was like, this will break the budget.

but you couldn’t go to Walmart and get it cheaper. So look at that. That just blows my mind. Okay. Um, the last thing I want to say here, and then we’re, we’re going to cut to a break is a sourdough bread page 490. Uh, you’re going to be buying bulk wheat berries and grinding them because this is what we have learned on the podcast, the most nutritious way to have your grains and also the cheapest.

Alison Kay (58:25.59)
Mm.

Andrea (58:49.854)
The cost of organic ancestral fresh sourdough bread recipe that makes five to six loaves. So we will say five loaves. The total cost for this big batch is two dollars and eighty six cents, which comes out to fifty seven cents a loaf. The cheapest conventional loaf I could find at Walmart, which doesn’t look like something most people would want to eat. It looked very fluffy and white was a dollar forty eight a loaf.

So almost three times as much. And if you, no, it’s not. if, Alison, that’s if you used wheat, which is the cheapest grain I could find. Cause I’m assuming we’re going for full budget buster here. But if you were even using a slightly more expensive grain, it would still beat the cheapest conventional loaf. And sourdough bread, as we know, has the post-paraprobiotics. It has protein. has…

Alison Kay (59:22.838)
This Aldo is not expensive.

Alison Kay (59:29.428)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (59:36.877)
Yeah, still be cheaper.

Alison Kay (59:44.015)
Mm.

Andrea (59:46.196)
comfort. has a great aroma. It’s, it’s a great vehicle for lard or butter. And if you have sourdough bread, then you can have varieties of sandwiches, spreads, cheese sauce, broth, dip, crown dips, open dip, cooked meat and gravy over bread, egg on bread, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have still scraps for meatballs and meatloaf and breakfast casserole. So Alison, let’s talk about some dinner ideas in the next section.

Alison Kay (59:47.47)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:00:05.071)
through tones, yeah.

Andrea (01:00:18.122)
So here’s some dinner ideas that use the idea of cooking from scratch. So the idea is to eat a higher quality meal that still costs less overall. It is possible with strategy and planning, but the planning and effort is the part that makes you the money. What we pay grocery stores to do is value add our foods.

Alison Kay (01:00:38.415)
you

Andrea (01:00:43.464)
We actually do eat processed foods. You and I, Allison, we just process it ourselves. And that is ancestral principle. So you don’t have to change everything in your house to being from scratch right away. Look at what you buy a lot of at the grocery store and start by switching that. So a friend told me that she uses 10 cans of beans a week. So I’m going to use that as my example for the next item.

Alison Kay (01:00:48.216)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:01:08.206)
Okay.

Andrea (01:01:10.334)
Basic Beans Recipe, page 496.

The thought process I had here was if you could buy dried beans, how would that compare to buying canned beans? If you can get these organic, ethically raised beans, and I’m using Azure as an example again, because it’s the easiest one for me to calculate, but you could also calculate beans at any place around you. And Azure does actually very much encourage people to buy whatever they can locally and then use Azure to source what they cannot get locally.

because they understand that without the small farms, there’s no food. your organic ancestral homemade cost of the equivalent of 10 cans of beans a week, which you could make in candies beans, but in truth, Allison, if you know you’re going to use 10 cans of beans a week, you could cook a batch of beans and then just use it from the fridge over the week. You don’t really have to can it. it would cost you $6 and 10 cents for your beans.

Alison Kay (01:02:04.158)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:02:13.564)
If you were buying conventional, canned, non-organic, the cheapest beans that I could find at Walmart, the same cost would be $9.10.

Alison Kay (01:02:25.496)
And the thing about the beans is it’s like the doses. You don’t have to do much on time. You just got to soak them and leave them and then you’re getting better nutrition from them because they’ve been kind of soaked and probably slightly fermented depending on how long you leave it for. And then you just cook them and you don’t have to be doing anything while you’re cooking them. It’s just that forethought, you know, that planning, right? I’m going to want beans tomorrow. So you can just put it in your diary like once a week until you get into the habit. Soak all the beans Sunday night.

Andrea (01:02:30.544)
Mm-mm. Mm-mm. Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:02:53.646)
cook them up Monday and then you’ve got a stash in the fridge that you can eat separately or fry, put in things, mix in with ground meat to make it go further, loads of different things.

Andrea (01:02:55.336)
Monday. Yeah.

Andrea (01:03:03.434)
And if you started to get to the end of the week and you realized you weren’t going to finish them, you actually can freeze them. You could just drop them in a container in the freezer and then pull them out and throw them in burritos one day. Um, there’s other benefits, Alison, that come that I are not enumerated here in this price that I showed for the beans. So for instance, when we buy beans in a 25 pound sack from Azure, and then we pour it into a five gallon bucket that I’ve been using for almost 16 years.

So it’s one container and then the brown bag is great for filling with paper scraps. And then we bring it down here and it is used to start fires. So if I was buying and you could also, we’ve used them, you know, to lay in our garden, the paper sacks from beans or wheat, you know, to cover for weeds and things like that. You can use the paper sacks for a lot of things. But if I was buying these beans in cans, or even if I was buying the little plastic bags at the grocery store, which

Alison Kay (01:03:38.931)
Yeah. Clever.

Andrea (01:04:02.228)
cost an insane price now that I’m used to the bulk prices of things, you would have a lot more trash to deal with.

Alison Kay (01:04:08.152)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:04:10.864)
I also want to note that when you’re buying these organically raised beans and soaking them and preparing them into the sway, you not only are avoiding any possible BPA exposure from cans, which is a potential problem, you’re also making them more digestible so your family doesn’t have issues with their tummies and you’re not contributing to the bottom line of glyphosate exposure in your family. So not only are you saving

money by buying a cheaper bean, but you’re also contributing to your wellness and not to the bottom line of chronic illness. And by the way, Alison, if she was going to buy the beans at Whole Foods and try to get a similar, like an organic bean, do you want me to tell you how much it would cost? This is why, this is why people say they can’t eat ancestral food because they think they have to go here. The

Alison Kay (01:04:50.514)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:04:55.227)
Hmm. Hmm. Yep. I don’t dread to think.

Alison Kay (01:05:05.499)
Yeah, you’re right.

Andrea (01:05:10.013)
And they’re not wrong about the beans would cost $35.70 if she bought the cheapest ones. I know I that’s why I did that. And I was like, I am not doing this for every recipe. I’m just going to get mad. So I guess so. And you have to ship everything in from out of country. bean forward menu that

Alison Kay (01:05:14.941)
God, you’re joking.

Alison Kay (01:05:25.245)
Gosh, being a healthy vegan is expensive, isn’t it?

Andrea (01:05:38.058)
That I is a frugal type of menu that I often shared with my Kenyan neighbors. They would make a homemade chapati or you could do a tortilla, but chapati basically being, you know, your organic wheat berries. And then some people just use water and yeast. Some people use milk. Some people, know, different ingredients, cooked beans or mashed beans that we just talked about. And then a side of kraut or cortito and some sauteed and salted greens. It’s a very simple menu.

and very, very inexpensive. And if you budgeted for that one night a week, then it’s delicious and wouldn’t get too boring. And then as I’ll make the point later, then you have a few dollars saved towards a nice piece of meat for another menu. Allison, could you talk about your dirty rice recipe?

Alison Kay (01:06:29.353)
Yeah. Okay. So this is on page 466 on in our String Traditions. And it’s one of those wonderful things in our traditions where there’s just a couple of lines after one of the recipes and it is a whole nother dish. And you’re like, wow. Okay. it’s just basically brown rice cooked and very often I do it in stock. Sometimes I do it with white rice as well. And she’s got some flavorings in there, which, sometimes we put in, sometimes we don’t switch them up. And then just, just before the end, you get your liver.

Andrea (01:06:40.402)
Hmm?

Alison Kay (01:06:58.657)
whichever flavor liver you want, know, if you chicken, if you’re just starting on liver and want something milder or beef, if you love the flavor of beef liver. And she says in the book, you can grate it. I very rarely have it frozen. So I just chopping it up beforehand, usually using a pair of scissors because it’s easier than trying to fight with a knife and liver squealing around the chopping board. And I just literally cut my liver into my rice a few minutes before I want to eat.

and then stir it around. Sometimes I’ll put peas in there and then serve it up. So simple.

Andrea (01:07:39.097)
Well, this recipe, I feel like I cheated this because the organic version you just described is actually more expensive. But it’s hard to compare it to the grocery store one because the grocery store one I had you make from a box has no broth. And broth is the most expensive part of this recipe at a whopping $2.42 for a quart.

Alison Kay (01:07:43.351)
Mm-mm.

Andrea (01:08:04.874)
And that if you were to say that you weren’t gonna you know expense your broth your price would drop quite a bit the organic and local six to eight serves of the liver that you just described the liver and rice is seven dollars and three cents and if you bought the box mix of dirty rice called Zatarain’s I don’t know how to say it You need to buy the box plus

Alison Kay (01:08:12.683)
thing.

Alison Kay (01:08:19.287)
Mm.

Alison Kay (01:08:29.345)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (01:08:33.182)
They have you use a pound and a half of meat, but to be fair, I only accommodated for three ounces of meat because there’s three ounces of liver in the dirty rice. and then use canola oil to cook it, but no broth. that is $4 and 28 cents and everything there would have to come from a factory. The beef would have to come from a factory. know, the canola oil is going to kill you and the stuff out of box won’t taste very good. So,

Alison Kay (01:08:41.303)
Okay.

Alison Kay (01:08:52.833)
Yeah, yuck.

Alison Kay (01:08:59.605)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea (01:09:03.558)
The basic lentils recipe I wanted to mention too, because I priced it out as actually being slightly more expensive than buying canned lentils and a package of broth, but it was barely more. So these lentils have been soaked with whey or lemon and then cooked with garlic, herbs and spices. These are really good with like a flat bread or shredded meat.

Alison Kay (01:09:15.543)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (01:09:29.918)
some of your sourdough bread that we mentioned before. Just keep it simple. you can do sourdough bread once a week, don’t try to do seven kinds of bread. Just stick to that. So this is a truly medicinal, healing food. It’s an organic, ancestral and filled with broth. It would cost $4.44 for the six to eight serving recipe. If you bought two 15 ounce cans of conventional canned lentils and a container of broth that is made

Alison Kay (01:09:37.067)
Nom nom

Andrea (01:09:59.922)
in a factory with lots of ingredients, it would cost you $4.07.

Alison Kay (01:10:01.067)
you

Alison Kay (01:10:05.279)
That’s on page 507 in our Christian traditions.

Andrea (01:10:08.074)
Yep. Yeah. Also throughout there, if you’re making lentils that you could make the Indian style dumplings on page five or nine. So don’t miss that. I’m cottage potatoes on page three 97. This is one of Jacob’s absolute favorites. Um, find the most economical fat for you. I priced it as Sally wrote it, but I use fat that I have access to. So I use cheaper fats.

Alison Kay (01:10:15.072)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:10:24.149)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:10:35.956)
but I priced it based on the way the recipe was written and it would cost for a full sheet pan of organic saturated fat rich potatoes using local potatoes, $3.98. And if you bought the cheapest frozen Southern hash brown diced potatoes, and I did not calculate in the cost of fat, which would have brought the price up, that would cost $3.58 at the grocery store. So cheaper, but you would have to calculate in the fat.

Alison Kay (01:11:01.519)
Okay.

Alison Kay (01:11:05.871)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea (01:11:07.458)
this is another recipe that I found, Alison, when I was trying to find something more expensive. So the spaghetti sauce recipe is a meat sauce on page 357. I was thinking what’s familiar to people and what would be expensive because I was trying to find something really high priced. This is full of meat, so it’s going to cost more. But I was surprised by was that the difference wasn’t as big as I thought.

If you bought organic, regenerative, everything, you know, from Azure or like like the most organic versions of noodles you could buy and a local meat, two pounds, your rough cost would be twenty five dollars and fifty five cents. It’s quite an expensive meal and it is focused, like I said, on meat.

If you did a Walmart version of all the cheapest conventional chemically raised non-organic factory meat and pasta and everything, it would cost $16.67. So the price difference is about $10 and the ancestral one is more expensive. So that’s why I want to do things like drop the price of bread and make the

Alison Kay (01:12:04.934)
Hmm.

Alison Kay (01:12:12.24)
Okay.

Alison Kay (01:12:15.969)
Hmm.

Andrea (01:12:26.812)
you know, the beans at home, because then you have those, if you’re like, I only have $100 to spend, then you’ve got $7 to contribute towards this or whatever. And the spaghetti.

Alison Kay (01:12:26.964)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:12:35.688)
Yeah, and also though, if you’re buying a side of a cow and you’re getting your meat that way and if you’re, like the Italians do, growing tons of tomatoes and bottling them or canning them, then that price is going to come down quite substantially.

Andrea (01:12:48.329)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:12:52.892)
Yes, I did not factor in if you were raising anything at all yourself. And also if you were to buy your beef as, like you said, a side, then the price per pound drops down significantly. But I put about the highest price beef you’ll find out here. Allison, could you I just wanted to say also on the spaghetti that with all the herbs and everything that’s in there, which are all priced out, that is literally medicinal food. The one from Wal-Mart.

Alison Kay (01:12:56.362)
Mm.

Andrea (01:13:22.428)
You just have to hope you don’t get sick. Like it’s not going to contribute to your benefit bottom line. Unfortunately, Alison, could you talk about mackerel spread? This recipe is found on page 163.

Alison Kay (01:13:24.906)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:13:37.081)
Yeah, I’ve got my nourishing traditions on my lap here. I’m guessing that most people listening have gone and got their nourishing traditions if they haven’t got it in front of them already, because it’s just so awesome to follow along with everything. So thank you. Yeah, the mackerel spread is something that I’ve made a lot. And it was one thing that I actually made for one of Gables First Foods. I have made it with tinned mackerel and I have also made it with frozen mackerel fillets, which then I’ve just defrosted and grilled.

Andrea (01:13:40.029)
Haha.

Andrea (01:13:48.628)
Ha ha.

Alison Kay (01:14:06.094)
waited to cool and blended it up. She talks of using Pima cream or creme fraiche in the recipe, but I’ve used like everything in it. I’ve used sour cream. I’ve used thick cream as well, like super Jersey, super thick cream and yeah, heavy cream. Exactly. That’s what you would call it. And that’s the one, it’s a wonderful thing to freeze. used to freeze it when Gable was very

Andrea (01:14:18.25)
Mm.

Andrea (01:14:24.02)
So like a heavy cream, we would call it here. Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:14:32.29)
young little ice cubes or little tiny containers. So I would have one meal for him, but you couldn’t freeze it in enough for two days sandwiches, three days sandwiches. Just take it out, put it in your freezer and put it in your fridge, sorry. And then spread it on your sandwiches. If you know you’ve got three or four days where you’re going out and you’re going to need sandwiches. It’s a lovely, lovely spread.

Andrea (01:14:50.762)
Bye.

Andrea (01:14:54.826)
I don’t know why I didn’t put the price on here because I did price it out. But what I found when I was pricing this out is that if we used double cream or sour cream or heavy cream, so heavy cream or sour cream, it would be cheaper than using a crème fraîche. Or if you were making your Pima at home, which you can do, then that would be cheaper. And I found between mackerel and herring, the herring is slightly cheaper to buy by a dollar a tin. so

Alison Kay (01:15:10.785)
Okay.

Alison Kay (01:15:22.308)
Wow.

Andrea (01:15:24.252)
This is definitely something I’m going to make because this sounds delicious and I love any any fish in a can. love it. Allison, I put sauerkraut on here, page 92. As you probably can imagine, it is a little bit cheaper to make it at home. So I will share those prices here. This is assuming you’re buying organic cabbage at a

Alison Kay (01:15:29.63)
it is.

Alison Kay (01:15:36.692)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea (01:15:53.642)
kind of high price because I priced the Azure one. I buy cabbage locally in big cases and make a bunch of kraut at once. So it actually drops the price down, but I’m assuming you are just going to make one jar here. Sally’s recipe is for a three pound jar of kraut and that’s three pounds before you add water for brine. So of course water is eight pounds a gallon. So water does add a significant amount of weight.

Alison Kay (01:16:01.842)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:16:15.431)
Okay.

Andrea (01:16:22.964)
But before you add the water for Brian, is three pounds and it is $6 to make this extremely healthy, nutritious, delicious, probiotic, living active food. If you bought at Walmart, the equivalent of a three pound jar, and this includes the water in the poundage. So they’ve already added water here and you’re buying an

Alison Kay (01:16:47.602)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:16:51.626)
Active and refrigerated one which is also organic. There was no other options at Walmart. It would cost you The homemade one like I said is six dollars. This one is a little more it’s forty seven dollars and eighty five cents

Alison Kay (01:16:55.156)
Mm.

Alison Kay (01:17:06.604)
This is why we included saagraa in that very early episode that we did, the cheapest yet the most expensive foods, because it is just bonkers, the price comparison.

Andrea (01:17:12.06)
Yeah. Yes. Good point.

I’m glad you said that Allison, because I’m going to jump down to the very bottom of my document and read one more thing. think do you do you have time to stay on today with me, Allison, and record an after show? Because I’m not going to get the desserts in here. There’s just not enough time. OK, OK, so I’m going to read one more recipe and then you and I can cut to an after show and record some more stuff and talk about what we want to make next out of Nourishing Traditions. But the because this is taking forever. The kombucha.

Alison Kay (01:17:28.937)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we could for sure.

Alison Kay (01:17:36.746)
Okay, yeah.

Andrea (01:17:46.778)
recipe on page 596. This is another one where, as you can guess, it’s going to be a little cheaper to make it at home. So for a half gallon of organic kombucha, it costs you a dollar twenty seven to make. And this is organic. And I bought loose tea in one pound bags. You don’t want to buy the bagged tea if you can help it. And of course, you

really want to have organic tea and organic sugar, which is quite expensive. But as you can see, when you make the bottle of kombucha, it’s not too bad. So a half gallon jar costs you a buck 27. And then if we added three ounces of organic tart cherry juice, which I don’t know about you, Alison, but when I’m flavoring my kombuchas, I just use what I have. Like we strained a jar of pineapples and so I use the leftover juice or

Alison Kay (01:18:40.225)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea (01:18:43.626)
We just took a bag of frozen blueberries from the summer out. I’m going to take some of the blueberries. So I don’t really even know how to quantify my expenses there because I try to use something that’s like would be scraps anyways, like tops from strawberries or something. But if you were going to flavor it with juice you bought expressly for that purpose, it would drive your cost up to $2.26 for a half gallon.

Alison Kay (01:19:08.071)
Okay.

Andrea (01:19:08.426)
The cheapest kombucha you could find at Walmart, which bear in mind a lot of these, if not all of them have sugar added after fermenting, which is why people want to know how do I make mine so sweet? Um, this will cost you $11 and 16 cents for a half gallon.

Alison Kay (01:19:17.98)
Yeah.

Alison Kay (01:19:24.581)
And that’s why trendy health foods are apparently impossibly out of our budget.

Andrea (01:19:31.978)
I don’t even, I don’t even want to know what it would have cost at Whole Foods or another expensive store because I think I’ve seen one container for like $7 there. So it would be really, and a half gallon of kombucha is a lot. I know that in our modern culture where we like chug giant bottles of soda and stuff, it’s kind of assumed you’re going to drink a huge amount of kombucha, but you really need about a shot.

Alison Kay (01:19:37.467)
Whole Foods, no, don’t.

Alison Kay (01:19:45.392)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:20:01.554)
or a half a shot in a day. So you don’t need that much. You don’t even have to make a half gallon batch at a time, although you want it to last at least two weeks while your next batch is fermenting.

Andrea (01:20:16.234)
But also Alison, I can’t hear you. don’t know if you’re talking or not, but, okay. You’re really, well, as you get back on the chair and fix your microphone, I was going to say that if you’re really looking at driving the costs down, don’t do kombucha, do water kefir because then you don’t even have the cost of the tea.

Alison Kay (01:20:20.876)
Yeah, no, I’m not talking. I’m reeling from the $11.16 for the Conbush, frankly. I’ve fallen off my chair.

Andrea (01:20:43.146)
which isn’t that big of a cost. The tea was 78 cents though. So it’s at least half, if not more of the expense here. Well, it is more than half the expense. So if you want to just do a water kefir, then all you need is the sugar. Okay, Alison, let’s, let’s say farewell on this. Oh, well, we, we still have dessert. I don’t have a lot of desserts, but I have a couple.

Alison Kay (01:21:01.547)
So what have we got left? What have we got left for the after show?

Andrea (01:21:10.83)
And I wanted to share what I’m making next because as you and I both know every time you pick up nourishing traditions you see, I never thought about that. And I wanted you to also tell us, I know you got a hold of some oxtail and things. I want you to tell us what you’re making out of nourishing traditions next. So let’s do that in the after show and pop that on the feed for the podcast supporters. And for the main feed, we will say, what do you want to say, Allison, to wrap this up? What would you say?

Alison Kay (01:21:10.987)
Okay.

Alison Kay (01:21:17.525)
Yes.

Alison Kay (01:21:37.589)
I want to say thank you for doing all that research. You surprised me. yeah, even within the budget that you have at the moment for food, you see that there’s wiggle room from all the suggestions that we’ve come up with. And if you are able to then look at your priorities as well and maybe cut a couple of things that you’ve needed in the past, but realise you don’t need any more, then you can make the spaghetti sauce as well.

Andrea (01:22:05.534)
Yeah, that’s kind of my takeaway too, is look at your total budget and then start with what is simple and right in front of you. For instance, if you say, I know we use 10 cans of beans a week. Well, that’s a pretty obvious place to start. Or if you say, I know we use two loaves of bread a week. You know, you can cut the recipe down obviously. and then see how you can work that into your routine. Like you said, put it on your schedule or in your diary.

And for me, it’s a repeating task that comes up every week to do some of these things. Yeah. And it and you don’t want to start with 500 repeating tasks. You want to start with one and find that thing that’s going to be a big bang for your buck. For me, it is sometimes buying like produce in bulk when it’s in season and putting it up. Or it might just be buying your whole wheat berries in bulk and budgeting for a food mill.

Alison Kay (01:22:37.625)
That’s the thing, it repeats. exactly.

Alison Kay (01:22:44.515)
No, just one.

Alison Kay (01:22:55.611)
Mm.

Alison Kay (01:23:04.089)
Yeah. A flour mill.

Andrea (01:23:04.658)
I mean, not a food mill. Sorry. A grain mill. Yeah. Flour mill. Mill thing. Or I suppose you could sit in the backyard with two rocks for a long time. You could do it. Probably not the most realistic option, Allison. All right. Well, let’s let everybody go and I’ll see you in the after show.

Alison Kay (01:23:13.357)
Yes, you could. You could go and find an archaeologist and get a quern and try that.

Alison Kay (01:23:21.763)
No, no. Okay, right, let’s hop over.

Yeah, we’ll do.

Andrea (01:23:29.567)
Bye.

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