#105 – 16 Breakfasts with Traditional Foods (Fast, Prep-Ahead, and On the Go!)

What are some traditional foods we can eat for breakfast, and do we have examples of ancestral breakfasts in history? In this episode Alison and I got together to talk about what we eat to start the day. We included a variety of “types” of breakfasts. First, we start out with fast breakfasts, things you can make very quickly. Whether you’re going to school, you have kids going to school, or you homeschool – there’s not a lot of time in the morning typically to linger over a long breakfast. We then included some longer prep but hands-off breakfasts. Things you could make if you were getting up early; you could start it simmering or baking and then head off to chores and come back to a finished breakfast. Next, we covered some portable breakfasts. These are things you could take in the train, in the car, I guess in your carriage, and get out doing chores or heading into town.

We have a lot of delicious breakfasts here and went way over the number of breakfasts I intended! We got some really delicious ones for you! I am looking forward to hearing your feedback. For supporters of the podcast, I put all my notes including all the breakfasts Alison and I discussed here in the download section for podcast supporters. The resources for everybody listening to this episode are awesome, there are a ton of recipes linked in the show notes, so go down and grab those links so you can make all these delicious meals for your family!

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Resources:

Overnight Porridge (Lacto-Fermented Oats)

Alison’s Fermented Oat Casserole

Alison’s Newsletter

Sign up for Alison’s Newsletter and download her 30-page book on Ancient Grains for FREE!

Alison’s Sourdough Oat Cakes

Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

Dutch Baby

Simple Strata (Breakfast Casserole)

Einkorn Breakfast Muffins

Quiche

Shakshouka

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
[0:00] What are some traditional foods that we can eat for breakfast? And do we have examples of ancestral breakfast in history? In this episode, Allison and I got together to talk about what we eat to start the day. We included a variety of types of breakfast. First, we start out with fast breakfast, things you can make very quickly, whether you’re going to school or you have kids going to school or you’re homeschooling. There’s not a lot of time in the morning, typically, to linger over a long breakfast. So we usually make one of these versions of a fast breakfast for ourselves. We then included some longer prep, but hands-off breakfast. So things you could make if you were getting up early, you could start it simmering or baking and then head off to do some chores and come back to a finished breakfast. And then we included some portable breakfast. These are things you could take on the go, on the train, in the car. If you had to head out, I suppose in your carriage, you could take these and get out about doing chores or maybe heading into town.

Andrea:
[1:02] So we have a lot of delicious breakfast here. I think we went way over the number of breakfast that I intended and we got some really delicious ones for you. So I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback. And for supporters of the podcast, I put all of my notes, including all of the breakfast that Allison and I discussed here in the download section for podcast supporters. So go check that out. And the resources for everybody listening to this episode are awesome. There’s a ton of recipes linked in the show notes. So go down and grab those links so you can make all these delicious meals for your family. I’ll see you in the episode. Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen Podcast.

Alison:
[1:56] I’m Alison, a European town dweller living in England.

Andrea:
[2:00] And I’m Andrea, living on a family farm in Northwest Washington State, USA.

Alison:
[2:06] Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking, and living with ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.

Music:
[2:14] Music

Alison:
[2:24] Hello, Andrea.

Andrea:
[2:26] Hello, hello. How are you?

Alison:
[2:29] I’m really good today. The sun is out and it’s a beautiful day. How about your end?

Andrea:
[2:33] I love it. Oh, well, it’s dark. And I have a, this actually became a conversation with some friends the other day about drinking tea and the proper way to drink tea. And now we know Megan is going to help us with that and actually do an interview and help us with proper tea.

Alison:
[2:56] A whole episode of tea.

Andrea:
[2:57] I’ll find out what I’m doing wrong. But I will say I can’t drink tea out of a thermos, but I like my tea hot. So I have a thermos of tea here, but I have a teacup poured into because I don’t know why. I don’t like the sensation of drinking out of the thermos.

Alison:
[3:12] Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
[3:13] I have problems, Alison.

Alison:
[3:15] No, well, you know, it’s a little problem. You know, it can be easily managed. So we like those. We just have to cope with it. As opposed to the big ones. So have you had some breakfast yet today? Talking about breakfast. This episode is about breakfast. Have you eaten?

Andrea:
[3:29] You know, I didn’t have breakfast yet, but I could tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday.

Alison:
[3:35] Ah, yeah. Okay.

Andrea:
[3:36] If you wanted. It was very simple. I had made eight loaves of bread, which lasted four days.

Alison:
[3:45] Oh my gosh. Do you have eight tins then?

Andrea:
[3:49] To put them… Well, I just got a couple from my grandma when she moved. So I have a few more now because I don’t actually have eight tins. But I also have this Pullman loaf pan that’s as long as two loaves. So if I make like a two loaf batch, I can put two in there. So I counted that for two. But I gave two to our neighbor and one to a friend who is camping out here. So three of them disappeared, but we didn’t actually eat them. But I made them out of just, I had found a bag of farro grains. And if anybody’s, well, first of all, if anybody’s wondering how long grains can last, pretty long time. I think these were literally a bag somebody gave us like around when we got married. So I was like 15 years old.

Andrea:
[4:41] So a bag of farro. I had a jar of einkorn berries that were like almost gone, but the jar is like several years old. And then I had a bucket of wheat berries and those I knew were also like 10 years old. So I just used up those three to ground them up. And I couldn’t tell you the proportions or anything like that and made them into bread. And it was absolutely delicious. And so I had some of that with egg salad for my breakfast yesterday. And I know this is an unintentional segue, but I know you just posted the Ancestral Kitchen Guide to Home Milling. I know because I read it. And that people can find on our download section, correct?

Alison:
[5:34] If they go yeah that’s at ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash milling and it’s at the moment it’s the top post on our downloads page on our site.

Andrea:
[5:44] Um so someone had just asked um i think it was megan actually of the tea she had said i’m going to order 25 pounds of spelt but like is that too much am i you know and so i had been breaking down for her how many pounds makes how many cups, how many cups you might use for a loaf, et cetera. But I also told her, it doesn’t really matter how long it lasts.

Alison:
[6:07] No, exactly.

Andrea:
[6:09] I was like, I just ground up like 15 year old grains.

Alison:
[6:13] Yeah. So do it is the answer to that.

Andrea:
[6:15] So do it. Yeah, exactly. Buy it. Anyways, that was my breakfast. What did you eat?

Alison:
[6:21] So in alignment with our topic today, which is breakfast, I thought that instead of telling you about my lunch, which I just had, which we always talk about because we always record just after lunch my time, no one ever gets to hear what I have for breakfast. Although they might know that generally it very often involves oats, which it actually didn’t today. So I was up really early today, like super early for everyone. And I was really hungry. So I had three scrambled eggs, three eggs scrambled together. I found a new supplier of eggs, but they only come to the market every two weeks. So I kind of have to stock up. They’re the same people who make the double Gloucester cheese that Rob likes. And they have ducks and hens. So their eggs are the nicest eggs that I’ve found so far. And they’re not that big. So I had three of them, scrambled in butter with some cream in it. And then a slice of rice sourdough in the toaster, cut in half with a little bit of butter on the side. Really very tasty. We actually had a very similar breakfast.

Andrea:
[7:31] Didn’t we?

Alison:
[7:32] Yeah, and really quick.

Andrea:
[7:34] Some kind of a bread with some kind of an egg.

Alison:
[7:35] Yeah, exactly. Only three eggs for me. Not approaching your record. But it’s quite a lot. Three eggs is a lot for me. I won’t have eggs tonight. Exactly I’m sweet aren’t I my little egg habit so um yeah that was my that was my breakfast I’ve got a I’ve got a really nice review yeah you’ve got a question I just wanted to.

Andrea:
[7:56] Ask if you drank anything with it

Alison:
[7:58] Or no I don’t I don’t drink at the same time as I eat generally um, because I like to save my digestive fire for what I’m digesting um but about um 45 minutes It’s an hour after I had my breakfast, I had some chamomile tea. I’ve kind of gone back and forth on chamomile in my life. Yeah. But at the moment, it feels like a good thing for me. And I found a particular supplier where it actually feels like it’s got something in it. You know, because so many chamomile teas, particularly if you buy them at the supermarket, they’re just nothingy.

Andrea:
[8:34] Oh. Yeah, I’ll have to have Megan talk about that. Exactly. She’ll wax eloquent.

Alison:
[8:39] She’ll have a lot to say. this one actually feels like it’s floral and nice and got some life to it.

Andrea:
[8:45] Well chamomile it’s good that you are you are paying attention to that because i know i’m i am no herbalist but i do know that with herbs and chamomile is one of them that it is not always recommended at all times for all people sometimes you’re not doing well with it and sometimes it’s stimulating and well

Alison:
[9:05] Exactly a lot of people just think chamomile is a is a kind of a calmative but it’s actually an astringent as well so you have to.

Andrea:
[9:12] Yeah yeah

Alison:
[9:13] Be careful perhaps.

Andrea:
[9:15] Indeed well then you said there’s a review

Alison:
[9:17] Yeah there is a review and i’m going to try and it’s quite long so prepare yourself but it’s also incredibly wonderful um and um i i’ll see if i can read it without getting all teary because it’s really nice at the end um so the person who left it left it on apple with five stars and this person’s name nickname on apple is pagey cutie and she, I’m assuming it’s a she, titled the review Delightful, Warming and Encouraging for Those with Health Anxiety. I’ve been listening to the Ancestral Kitchen podcast since August 2024 on Spotify and it has been the biggest comfort in my life. I have had severe anxiety for over a decade and in the last two years it had become so debilitating that it interrupted my relationship with food and my community. There were days that I was terrified to purchase anything store-bought with fear of chemicals and additives and not really knowing where the food was being produced and so I began producing most of my family’s kitchen staples at home.

Alison:
[10:20] After finding the podcast I’ve never felt better about my decision to take my health for myself and my family into my own hands. As a full-time college student it’s difficult to start a farm or make absolutely everything in my own kitchen, but Andrea and Alison’s ability to make ancestral living obtainable for anyone has strengthened my courage to start somewhere, even if it’s a small start. Not only has the Ancestral Kitchen podcast changed how I feed my loved ones and myself, but it has greatly impacted my ability to communicate with those in my small rural community in upstate New York about the importance of nourishing one another. I am beyond words of gratitude for Alison, Andrea and their families. Thank you for everything that you two do and Rob do. I’m so blessed to have found a warm and loving community of like-minded individuals. Cheers.

Alison:
[11:17] She is indeed, I think. It’s just such an incredible review, Andrew. I shared it with, for listeners, I shared it with Andrew earlier in the week, because I just thought, wow, someone’s taken the time to write something so open and thoughtful and lovely about the impact that what we’re doing has had. You know, it’s amazing to, because, you know, we sit here and we record And at the beginning, we said, is anyone listening? I don’t know. Is anyone out there? Now we know there is because we’ve got a thriving community. But it’s just, it’s incredible still to hear coming in regularly words like that, that just shock me every time the impact that us just deciding to do this has had. I think it’s wonderful.

Andrea:
[12:10] I agree. And the description they gave of the health anxiety, I think, speaks a bit to that phrase, disordered eating is to be expected in a world with disordered food. And you and I both went through our experiences with shades of that.

Alison:
[12:38] Yeah.

Andrea:
[12:38] And I think that is something that has actually been in the forefront of my mind ever since we started, because listening to some podcasts about food would begin to just induce in me this sensation of anxiety. And they felt like nothing you ever do is good enough you aren’t counting this or totaling that or you know and and there was just no point because I was too far behind and um so I think you and I both have a sensitivity to that experience and I’m glad that that we’re able to connect with you pagey cutie on on that experience. Kind of that moment, because I know it’s really near and dear to both our hearts.

Alison:
[13:28] So thank you for saying that. Yeah, for sure. I feel like, you know, both of us have been on our own journeys, and so many of the listeners have as well. And coming out the other side of it slowly, slowly, and realizing that we know more in ourselves and our own bodies and family units about what’s right for us than anything we can read in the thousand books in front of us. And I hope that when we share what we do, you know, everyone kind of says, well, I don’t feel like I have to live up to anything with Alison and Andrea. They’re just, they’re doing it as well. And I feel that comes from our kind of sense of, well, we’re following our internal guides now, really, rather than giving everything over to all of those books and all of those ideas and all those standards that we tried, but didn’t really work.

Andrea:
[14:20] Yeah, and I think the author of this review is doing that too, because they described how they changed how they’re feeding themselves. And I think sometimes just, I know this is a big thing in the birth world, for instance, but just seeing someone else use their intuition and kind of being given permission, allowed to use your intuition, helps us all to tap in to our own sensations. So their journey will be different than ours and they may choose different things or whatever, but they are tuned in. So that’s a good thing.

Alison:
[14:59] Yeah, exactly. So thank you, Pagie Cutie, for that. That was very impactful on both of us. For sure. I just want to mention the newsletter before we dive in. So we do have a newsletter. it’s not running yet so if you’ve signed up for it and you’re like where are my newsletters we haven’t quite got there yet we’re getting there but we’re not quite there yet um so if you would like to be on that and basically hear from us i’m not sure how regularly not that regularly so you’re not going to be bombarded with emails and they will be full of interesting, information you know inspiration just like the podcasts are then you can go to ancestral kitchen podcast.com and at the top there is a sign up where you can pop your details in and then you will be on our newsletter, um i also wanted to um shout out the discord community which is just going so strongly and beautifully the um our supporters up to 120 last time i looked um and we’ve had a um a special kind of thread on there which andrea you’ve been um spearheading to do with nourishing traditions and the read-along can you talk a little bit about that so people who aren’t on there or who you know can’t come and be supporters they can there’s a way that they can join in do you want to explain that yes.

Andrea:
[16:24] So we started as a group reading nourishing traditions together and Rachel a friend of mine made a reading schedule and so she divided the book not just in order but she actually divided the front matter if you’re familiar you know that there’s like a good 60 pages in the beginning before recipes start and so she divided that out with the recipe portions of the book so we’re reading a bit every month and i posted the reading schedule for everybody to see uh the same place allison where you would go to get the milling guide i don’t remember the link to that

Alison:
[17:06] It’s the downloads option on our menu so you go to episodes and then downloads you’ll find it there it’s just under the mailing guide actually it’s the second one there okay.

Andrea:
[17:16] Great and that is ancestral kitchen podcast.com uh so the schedule is there and you can download the schedule with the dates when we’re reading it or you can download a schedule without the dates and just kind of read you know start whenever you want it doesn’t really matter and we made a thread to discuss the read-along and post pictures of what we’re making and ask questions about what we’re making, et cetera, as a group in our Discord. So, if you want to join as a supporter, then you’ll also have access to that. And then I also made another extra, which Allison, you said you saw because you were going to print it. I made an extra for the supporters, which is some bookmarks. So it’s bookmarks that you can print at home.

Andrea:
[18:05] One is the Nourishing Traditions quick reference where I just put a bunch of sort of basic recipes that somebody might use all the time, like basic muffins or yogurt dough or chicken stock. I put those on a bookmark and you can print that. And I also made a bookmark with the schedule kind of in breve. And you could download that and just use that to keep your place in the book because you know it’s easy to lose your place in this giant book yeah so we’re having a lot of fun in there and um enjoying discussing and seeing what everyone is making and i’ve been making It’s making me realize how much I actually make out of this book. I make quite a lot out of this book, but I’m trying a lot of new ones too.

Alison:
[18:51] I’m really glad that you’re doing it, Andrea, because I feel like so many people have come to us through being overwhelmed with nourishing traditions. And it’s just another way to not be overwhelmed by it. Just, you know, you don’t have to stay with us for the whole year if you don’t want to. You could just dip in for a couple of months and then, you know, you don’t have to be there for all of the months. And you can do as little or as much as you’d like to do, you know, be as involved as you want to be.

Andrea:
[19:16] Yeah, or just watch. You can lurk. That’s okay. Exactly. You can see what everyone else is posting. You don’t have to say anything.

Alison:
[19:23] Yeah, completely.

Andrea:
[19:24] It’s just fun to be able to share and discuss and ask questions and, you know, it’s like trying to read the whole dictionary all at once. It’s kind of a lot. So breaking it down is helpful. So there we go.

Alison:
[19:38] Okay, thank you. So I am about ready now. to start talking about our topic today, which is breakfast. So let’s take a quick pause for an ad break and a little sneaky sip of tea and then jump in. Okay.

Andrea:
[19:54] All right, breakfast, here we go. So I didn’t title this episode Ancestral Breakfast for a reason, Alison, which I think I might have ranted to you about, Which is that it’s really hard to define a traditional breakfast because a traditional breakfast is just food. So it is a somewhat more modern convention to have distinct classes of food that go for breakfast. And part of this alludes to our, you know, you know, more, there’s more food available in a more modern era, you know, versus kind of just, well, what we have is parrach, so we’re having the same thing three times a day.

Alison:
[20:47] Yeah.

Andrea:
[20:48] The royal ancient Egyptians had an expression called the perfuming of the mouth, where they would eat their fruit in the morning. In Old English, there’s a word morgan mete, which is the morning meal. We call it breakfast as a compound word of breaking your fast from the overnight fast. And you and I’ve done a bit of reading here and there, Allison, and something that we’ve noticed, and we discussed this actually on our group live call, because sometimes we kind of run our podcast episode that we’re working on through the team, the squad, the research team there. And we were kind of discussing it on there and if you uh didn’t get to hear that then um as a supporter you have access to the private podcast so it should be up there now it was the february conversation but we were talking about how breakfast wasn’t always a thing everywhere

Andrea:
[21:55] And um a lot of times people didn’t really eat first thing out of the gate um yeah the some of The best information I could find on the Middle Ages was some ale and bread might be found in the morning. And part of the reason is if you want to have porridge for breakfast, you have to get a hot fire going and heat and cook something, which takes more time than flicking on the stove. And, you know, in the Middle Ages also, you know, even cast iron stoves weren’t a thing yet. So it was significantly longer process so that’s possibly why we don’t see lots of cooked breakfast in history yeah i mean bread is cooked but um in karima’s book she i noted that a lot of the time she referred to like the farmer type people were eating their coffee made from roasted barley and some milk yeah seemed to be about the breakfast they’d have and then in that lark rise to Candleford book which is about the Victorian era yeah um it seems like y’all in England love your traditions Alison because people were still having bread for breakfast uh with some lard or bacon fat yeah

Alison:
[23:16] And I think that’s super common just lard and bread.

Andrea:
[23:19] Definitely I mean it’s it’s a good breakfast you got some carb you got some fat so it’s a pretty good source of energy Alison Listen, do you, I was looking through Dorothy Hartley’s book, Food in England. Do you remember anything about breakfast specific?

Alison:
[23:35] Yeah. No, I looked through that after you mentioned it and I couldn’t see, you know, she has chapters on various different things. I couldn’t see anything particularly about breakfast. And I think it’s probably related to what you’re saying that, you know, breakfast was breakfast depending on what you were doing, what class you were, how you were living and what you had available to you. So it was different. A traditional… British breakfast, in my mind, you know, coming at this at 20, 25, as we’re recording right now.

Alison:
[24:06] A traditional British breakfast for me or anyone, my contemporary would be bacon.

Alison:
[24:12] Eggs, sausage, toast, butter, jam, maybe tomatoes, maybe mushrooms, maybe black pudding.

Alison:
[24:21] That’s my take on it. I’m sure that if you go to Wales or Scotland or Northern England, they might say something different but um that’s obviously not been around for a very long time because all the working class stuff that i’ve read um in you know going back a hundred years or more and you have to remember that the working class is most of the population it all says porridge you know and it’s not just because i’m reading about oats it really there was a lot of porridge so this idea of bacon egg sausage you know the the four works was something that the victorians invented the very elite started eating it and then that kind of trickled down to the landed class and then later in the 1900s foods like that became more available to people who were more affluent and then other people started eating it but i think really breakfast in in england traditionally was what you had you know so maybe you had bread that you’d made and maybe you had ale that you made and you have those two together maybe you’re looking after cows and you had loads and loads of buttermilk people used to seem to drink buttermilk all the time in all the places where there were cows and it was proper buttermilk you know leftover from making butter um so maybe it was buttermilk with a bit of bread maybe if you again had um animals you were looking after perhaps you had some cheese left you know if it was the right time of year perhaps you had cheese so maybe you’re having cheese with it as well.

Alison:
[25:47] These days, frankly, not many people who live in a quote, normal family eat that bacon sausage egg toast thing that I was talking about. They boxed cereals, Cheerios, that kind of thing, which is a bit sad, really.

Alison:
[26:06] I’m also kind of slightly intrigued by the traditional Italian breakfast, because having lived in Italy now, you know, up until last year for 10 years, Italians eat pastries for breakfast and they have latte. So you said that Karima said, you know, a milky coffee or a milky barley drink. So in Italy it’s kind of a joke that Italians really only eat only drink latte before 11 o’clock it’s a breakfast thing for them and of course all the foreigners come over to the Italian restaurants and they’re out at nine o’clock in the evening after their pizza they ask for a latte and Italians are like no latte is a breakfast food you can’t have latte in the afternoon or the evening so they generally have a milky coffee with a pastry I think a lot of kids have Nutella, on bread or pastries with Nutella.

Alison:
[27:00] But that’s a very recent thing. I kind of looked it up and really it became more common in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Before that, breakfast, Google told me, was an afterthought and only a third of Italians ate breakfast regularly. It was a company, a biscuit company called Molino Bianco, who were very, you go in a supermarket in Italy, you see all the biscuits by Molino Bianco. Who successfully marketed biscuits for breakfast. So they had a, in the 1990s, they had a campaign called the Italian Breakfast that basically converted everyone who wasn’t eating pastries and coffee for breakfast to pastries and coffee. But like you said, Karima’s book talks about bread, butter and jam. But also she has people in there who are eating polenta because that’s what they grew around them. Cabbage, because that’s all they had, you know, cabbage and turnips. It was very much a case of what you could get. And I think reading Ruth Goodman’s book, How to Be a Tudor, I’m in the middle of it at the moment, again, it was most people, well, they had to go out and work. They had to get up. And as soon as it was vaguely light, they’re going out and they’re sorting out the chickens or they’re sorting out the animals. And so they go out and they do that first and then when they’ve done a couple of hours work they come back in and they eat what they’ve got which as we know prior to 150 years ago was what grew around them.

Alison:
[28:26] So you’re right you can’t really say going back to what you said at the beginning you can’t really say ancestral breakfast because there is no ancestral breakfast.

Andrea:
[28:37] Well, I guess that’s the end of the episode. Good to talk, Alison. Bye.

Alison:
[28:41] Okay, I’ve got some extra time. What am I going to go and cook now?

Andrea:
[28:45] An extra breakfast. Well, the porridge is a good one, actually, which there is some mention of that in nourishing traditions a few times, you know, where Sally alludes to how people would pour porridge into a drawer and it would kind of cool and congeal. And I’m not saying that we take nursery rhymes as you know historical text but we do know peas porridge hot peas porridge cold peas porridge in the pot nine days old this isn’t always something you ate hot and fresh but you could be having cold porridge or porridge sliced kind of like a polenta yeah or hot porridge just depends on I guess where your clapping lands you yeah and And your mention of the Molino Bianco is a great example of the food industry in the U.S., for instance, which is that when they run out of customers or when they have as much saturation as they can get in the market, they invent a meal. So, like, we invented snacks so that people would buy for an additional meal. So, Molino Bianco wanted to sell their biscuits. So, what do you mean by biscuits? Is that like literally cookies,

Alison:
[29:59] By the way? Yeah, so cookies, yeah. Cookies and pastries.

Andrea:
[30:03] Okay, so they wanted to sell more cookies. So they invented a breakfast cookie, I guess. And there you go. Yeah. And also, I know, Alison, what you said is very much backed up by Karima’s book, which I think we’ve mentioned six times now. So I’m just going to say we interviewed Karima and she wrote this incredible historical book about Italians in the, you know, 1910s to 1920s kind of era. It’s absolutely fascinating. It’s oral history all from women, which is very hard to find.

Alison:
[30:42] The fats if people want to look it up yeah it’s in our bookstore on um on book yeah bookshop.org it’s in there.

Andrea:
[30:48] I think when leo was here i i handed her the book to look at and she’s like i’m buying it right now and she bought it while she was here um but what you said is backed up in that book in that a lot of the women refer to what they ate changing through the 70s into the 90s and supermarkets becoming more popular, etc. So, it seems like we’re always told, and I’m not saying this is wrong, I’m just saying, I’m just observing, Alice, and we’re always told to have protein first thing in the morning. However, I really can’t find any historical examples of that. Now, historical examples doesn’t always mean that it’s, you know, it’s the best or not the best, but I’m just observing that we don’t really see that in history and that could be related to well I don’t know I’m not even going to speculate but um like we are taller now we tend to have you know better birth statistics you know because of our bones and things like that so you know more carb it can be a good thing or more protein um

Andrea:
[32:02] Our ancestral food examples that we see that we’ve listed here tend to be very lean and carb centric or, you know, just the milk and the coffee or just the bread or the porridge. But protein was, of course, you know, expensive and valuable. And flatbread and porridge seems when we look across the traditional food eating world today, those seem to be more associated with less resourced people. And then i was looking through the book uh what i eat which is like a photo essay by um peter menzel i think and his wife faith and i don’t know how to say her last name we

Alison:
[32:44] Are halfway through that we’re about halfway through that we’re up to the it’s sorted by calories that people eat in a day and we’re up to 2700 section at the moment.

Andrea:
[32:52] Kind of amazing to read isn’t it It’s a brilliant book.

Alison:
[32:55] And the photos are amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Andrea:
[32:59] What I’ve noticed, because I went through from the beginning to the end, and I just looked at what people had for breakfast, and the more resources they got, they slowly began to have more egg, milk, cheese and fruit in the breakfast. The less resources they had you just saw porridge thin porridge grain porridge flatbreads yeah um and i actually made a list of all the breakfast foods that i saw in there and it was really interesting to see um milk tea bread and porridges turned up the most yeah and um then the farther but you never it wasn’t until you were i was looking i was focusing on the traditional diet So there are people in there who eat Western diets, but the traditional diets was what I focused on. But the Western diets, you saw a lot more sweet things. And so that is another interesting thing, Allison, that I’ve learned about the food industry. I know in the US, and I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but…

Andrea:
[34:00] In the U.S., marketers also found, as I said, you know, they invented meals. They also found that people were only buying, you know, so much yogurt because you just need a little yogurt to put on your lentils or you need a little, you know, yogurt for a side dish or something. And if they made it sweet, people would buy more. So breakfast became in the U.S. this is sweet. If I say to somebody that I’m serving soup for breakfast or pancakes with meat on top, they’re kind of like, what? Because they’re thinking syrup, powdered sugar, jam, you know, muffins with fruits in them, which, you know, these things don’t necessarily, they’re not intrinsically bad.

Alison:
[34:45] They’re just i don’t.

Andrea:
[34:47] Know starting the day off with like a high dose of sweets doesn’t seem super ideal

Alison:
[34:53] To me you know um there’s like three things in my head that i want to say now about that the first one is that last night we read the section of what i eat um which looks at the food that a lady who is a street food seller in taipei eats and for her breakfast she eats kind of like fish sauce spicy things in this kind of herbal broth thing and I was just thinking everyone would just most people would think oh you know spicy kind of fishy thing for breakfast um interestingly I’ve on the weekend I made something called olibrod which is a Danish traditional food which is like a porridge where you take old rye bread and you make it into a porridge and the recipe that I tried it from had sweet things in it and so it had a kind of a syrup that went with it which was packed full of cardamom and it had vanilla and lemon zest and cinnamon in the actual porridge and I thought this this sounds amazing this olive oil I’ve got to investigate it more kind of find out more about it and play with it a little bit and I looked it up and of course it It never was sweet.

Alison:
[36:05] It traditionally was a savoury dish. And now, you know, people who are purists of that type of food are like, why are people making this sweet? And the same with oat porridge in Scotland. It was served with salt, not with honey and all the blueberries and things we put over it now. And interestingly, you know, I had a boyfriend like ages ago, maybe 15 years ago, who said he wanted to cook for me for the whole day. And he came over and the first meal he made for me was breakfast. And I had no idea what he was going to cook. And he presented me this breakfast which had tuna in it. And I was less broad-minded then than I am now. Maybe it was 20 years ago. And I was just like, tuna for breakfast?

Alison:
[36:57] What’s this? And of course I didn’t say that. I kind of ate it. But I was just, what? Tuna? You don’t do tuna for breakfast. Where have you come from? And I ate it. And now, you know, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at eating tuna for breakfast. And very often I’ll have leftover soup for breakfast. I did once this week. And I’ll eat my porridge is like hardly ever sweet. People know that I don’t eat sweet things. My porridge is savoury. And I just, it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. But it’s amazing how stuck in our little boxes we can become sometimes.

Andrea:
[37:34] That’s hilarious. Because it’s a great example, Allison, of the cultural impression. You thought nobody, that is weird. That’s a weird thing to have fish for breakfast. But why is it weird? And then when you think about it, it’s like the only reason it’s weird is because you don’t do it. Yeah, exactly. So is it wrong? Is there something wrong with it? It’s not really. So our cultural impressions are very strong. They are kind of hard to fight against. So maybe don’t start by making meatloaf for breakfast and shock your family.

Alison:
[38:07] Yeah, there’s some gawk in it.

Andrea:
[38:08] What is going on? Which does lead me to my next point, which is what will your family eat? There are some things that I really want this to be the thing we eat, and nobody wants it. And nobody’s excited about it. I kind of have to coach them through eating it. And one of my children, oh, so sweetly, they were sitting at the table. I don’t remember what I served. They weren’t really excited about it. Two of the kids were complaining. And the third kid was choking it down and said, Oh, mommy, it’s not that bad. You just have to get used to the taste. I was like, wow, that’s not a backhanded compliment. I don’t know what it is.

Alison:
[38:48] Oh, gosh.

Andrea:
[38:49] So they’re not always excited about it. But sometimes you have to try things and bring them back after a while because they can taste can evolve. Our breakfasts are pretty much always something hot. I did say I had egg salad for breakfast yesterday, which is not hot. But almost always and there are two there are two places where I trust buying some okay it’s not Cheerios Allison I promise okay but um there’s two places Azure and Young Living both sell some brands of like a boxed dehydrated cereal which is pretty similar to something I would make if I were to make the effort well I have actually I made the oat crunchies out of the children’s nourishing traditions which is you know basically you can make like muesli or oats and then dehydrate it crumble it up and then put it in a jar and then you can pour it with milk and have like a really fast cooked breakfast that you didn’t have to do anything for so when I serve that my kids are over the moon because a hot breakfast is just so uh blase in common yeah and uh Leah and I recorded an episode discussing how I routinized our breakfast. So I’m not going to talk about that at all on this podcast, but that will go on the private podcast for podcast supporters in April. And you might get to hear our kids.

Alison:
[40:14] I haven’t heard it yet.

Andrea:
[40:16] Yeah, yeah. You’ll get to hear that. So Allison, let’s talk about breakfast ideas. Because we do actually eat breakfast in this modern culture. So we are going to address this and breakfast you can make with traditional So I have some fast ones here. I have some longer prep, but hands off. Like I sometimes make those types of things on podcast days because I can prep it and then come down here. And also some portable breakfast for days you need to leave early. And I want you to throw some breakfast in there, too, as we go.

Alison:
[40:50] Okay. How about then we start with the fast breakfast? Let’s take a nap break first, and we’ll come back with that.

Andrea:
[41:00] Okay. Fast breakfast sounds perfect. So remember the theme, Alison, what you said earlier of using what you have. So meats and leftover bits, bits of offal. Very often, if we have liver the night before, I intentionally try to have some leftover for breakfast. Meat that you picked off of making broth. You and I both, we don’t cook to the recipe by shopping for ingredients. We have a basic idea and then we shape it around what we have. So when you wanted to make that rye porridge or, well, just go back and listen to any of our episodes where you describe your lunch. because you’ll say, well, I had a little bit of this, a little bit of that, throw it on that. Yeah, lunch is a great example for that. So here’s some fast breakfast ideas. Overnight porridge. Sorry, the word overnight maybe wasn’t appropriate there.

Andrea:
[41:55] But you can mix this the night before and just let it sit on the counter. It can be gluten-free with gluten-free oats or different gluten-free grains. It can be a mixed grain. I’ve done it before with like five grains mixed together. It can be rolled or cracked cereal of any kind. My kids prefer it if we make porridge that they have toast to dip into it. And we talked about this overnight porridge at length in episode 34, which Allison is our favorite nourishing traditions recipes, and also number 70 in your fermenting oats episode, and also 103 nourishing traditions recipes. Okay, so I will not describe it further.

Alison:
[42:37] Can I talk about how I’ve had a kind of recent development in the overnight porridge situation? So yesterday we had an overnight porridge, just an interesting mix of half millet and half oats, both ground freshly in the mock meal. And I decided to put some lemon zest that we had left over in it and also some cinnamon to try those together because having tasted the vanilla and the cinnamon together, the lemon and the cinnamon together in that olibrod porridge, I thought, well, let’s just try them in oats, see what they’re like. Anyway, so we left it to ferment and cooked it up, had it for breakfast yesterday.

Alison:
[43:18] But the way we’re cooking up our overnight porridge now is before it used to be stand at the stove and stir it try and stop it burning the bottom of the pan um and someone has to stand there for like 15 minutes stirring it but we recently if you’ve been listening to episodes since beginning of the year bought an instant pot and so literally we put the um oats with whatever ingredients and a sourdough starter or some kefir or whatever we’re using to sour it with and leave them over overnight and then in the morning we’re just putting them in the insta pot inside a separate bowl with some water underneath them securing it all down and then putting it on pressure cook for five minutes and then when it’s finished it just turns off it keeps warm because the lid’s on and there’s warm water around it like a kind of a band marie thing and then when it’s time for me to come down have some breakfast i just take it out.

Alison:
[44:14] If I’m having it at a different time to the boys, I can then put it back in, put the lid back on, it stays warm. I usually have to give it a stir just before I doff it out from the Instapot because sometimes it settles. But it means that I can then, if I want egg in mine, which I often do, I can put a little saucepan on the stove, put the cooked porridge in and just heat it up until the egg’s just cooked, really. And it means if Rob’s having his breakfast later, he can come later and it’s still warm. and it means none of us have to stand at the stove for 15 minutes cooking it but literally just press the button and it’s done it’s wonderful that’s.

Andrea:
[44:50] That’s even faster yes exactly your involvement goes yeah i don’t know i do not stand at the stove and stir this am i just lazier than i thought like we took we turn it on and we have a lid on it burn well no the second it hits a simmer i shut the heat off and i leave it closed and then it just continues to cook without a heat source but that that i think oh 15 minutes so i guess the same time basically but i think that that came about because i started making this before jacob was born and then once he was born and then other children came along and i just there was there wasn’t a hand to do that so i think i just started doing it out of desperation but now it’s how we do it so yeah

Alison:
[45:38] Okay fair enough I’ve never tried it like that.

Andrea:
[45:40] Yeah okay pre-mixed pancake or waffle batter I don’t know why pre-mixing it is what makes this feasible for me but there are some mornings when I just don’t even have the brain to stir something but if I have a jar of pancake or waffle batter mixed and I like to make mine sourdough and I keep it about a week After that, it starts to get really bubbly, which isn’t bad, but it gets very sour, which you and I both like, but I’m not sure how sour I want my raw eggs to be. So I mix pancake and waffle batter, and I just throw it in the fridge, and I put sourdough starter in it so that it ferments, although slowly. And then in the morning, I can pull it out and make just a few pancakes. I, as we know, don’t like my bread things cooked very far in advance, so I don’t like to reheat pancakes. I only like them fresh. So that’s kind of where this came from, because then I can make a fresh pancake in just a moment, and it’s about as fast as heating up an already made pancake.

Alison:
[46:44] Yeah and and you know when you heat up the pan you can have the pan heating up for a while and do something else in the kitchen and then you just literally tip the batter in turn it once or twice so the attention you’re giving to it is is literally like two or three minutes not even that.

Andrea:
[47:00] And i i often am up earlier than the kids and i if the pancake batter is in the fridge i can just make myself a pancake and eat it yeah before

Alison:
[47:08] They get up that happens to me.

Andrea:
[47:09] Too feeling like i have to do a whole situation thing and I you very much converted me to the savory pancake just just by virtue of always talking about your savory pancakes I started eating them more the way you eat them and now every once in a while I do like a pancake with maple syrup on it but I it doesn’t it’s it’s not I don’t know I would have once thought that was the only way to eat it So when we’re speaking to the cultural thing, and if you can hear the baby, Gary is with him and he does have bottles of milk. But the… The savory pancake with just some butter or some salt is probably my favorite right now. But I like having if there’s a little leftover cooked meat or some scrambled liver and meat is really good on a pancake. Or sauerkraut, sour cream, scrambled egg, fried egg. Another similar breakfast is toad in a hole or egg sandwiches. I kind of put them in the same category because they’re very similar. They’re just different ways of arranging it. so i think you guys call toad in a hole something else where you cook like sausage in a yeah thing yeah over here sausage

Alison:
[48:28] And butter sticking out yeah.

Andrea:
[48:29] Yeah and i think over here some people call it toad in a hole some people call it eggs in a basket i don’t know what is it what it is is a piece of bread and then you use like a a shot glass or something to cut a hole Make

Alison:
[48:46] A hole and put the egg.

Andrea:
[48:47] In the middle. And then I butter the pan generously and I throw the bread in there. I crack an egg in the middle and then I throw the piece of like the middle of

Alison:
[48:56] The bread off to the side.

Andrea:
[48:56] So the egg’s supposed to be a toad in the hole? I guess.

Alison:
[49:00] Whereas actually if you make a batter and put sausages in it poking out, it kind of looks more like a toad in my opinion.

Andrea:
[49:06] Yeah. I mean, egg doesn’t look anything like a toad.

Alison:
[49:09] Interesting.

Andrea:
[49:10] But who knows? Some sort of transatlantic translation problem there. Yeah. I’ll have it with biscuit please but yeah if i said to you biscuits and gravy you’d be like oh that sounds disgusting

Alison:
[49:24] Exactly yeah it’s like cookies and gravy.

Andrea:
[49:27] Yeah but my kids really like that they like it with um you could have jam on it or ketchup or just butter and salt which is the way i like it um or an egg sandwich which is probably jacob’s favorite breakfast to make himself before he goes out to chores so toast two pieces of bread toast two eggs put the eggs or 10 eggs put the eggs between the bread have at it uh allison i wanted to have your overnight sourdough oat cakes on this list because it’s such a nice fast breakfast again you do have to have them sit overnight but yeah you could also do it three days in advance yes

Alison:
[50:06] And just leave in the fridge and take whatever dough off you want.

Andrea:
[50:09] Yeah yeah and i put the link to that i put this podcast episode okay yeah and then another favorite which is your topped staffordshire oat cake i have to say everybody who’s come over here that i’ve served it to has reported that it became part of their regular rotation because it is so good so simple it feels like honest food if i may say

Alison:
[50:34] Such a thing like two three ingredients that’s it very very nice and that one is in the cookbook yeah is that what you’re about to say cookbook yeah so the cookbook is available again on ancestral kitchen podcast.com in the shop area and there are two cookbooks there one’s called meals at the ancestral hearth which is where this staffordshire oat cake is the other The one’s a spelt cookbook, which can be bought at the same time as the one with the tapestry oat cake in.

Andrea:
[51:00] Yes, please go buy them. Help. Help us. Soup is another fast breakfast that I like. And we did this a lot when we were on Gaps. And I do not make soup in the morning unless I’m making soup for dinner and it’s going to sit and simmer all day. But what I would do is I would make a huge pot of soup, so lots of broth, and I would put it on the stove and it would simmer overnight. Night just like making broth and then when i walked out in the morning there was a hot kettle of soup and i would you know 4 30 in the morning i’m ladling you know meatballs and chopped onions and all kinds of delicious stuff into a bowl and it just feels like somebody’s been in here working all night i just yeah it was it actually felt a little bit like when you go to a hotel and they make breakfast you know and you go downstairs and you’re like oh look at this lovely and it felt like that, like a special. What do you want to add to fast breakfast, Alison?

Alison:
[51:56] Fast breakfast. Well, I just, I think the egg thing is just, that’s the epitome of a fast breakfast, isn’t it? You know, we both have eggs for breakfast. So I like eggs soft boiled, which is something that you don’t do over in the States very often, I don’t think, unless you have kind of been brought up with it. So that’s boiled. So the white is solid, but the yolk is runny. I like those with a slice of sourdough. So fried eggs with a slice of sourdough, omelette with a slice of sourdough. I had scrambled eggs this morning, just any of those. And you can, you know, if you’re making scrambled eggs, you could put smoked salmon in it. You could put bits of mushroom in it. You could put leftover meat in it from making some broth. You could put anything you’ve got in it. And if I’m extra hungry, I’ll put perhaps a bit of cheese with it. You can add your fermented veg on there. So you’re getting a bit of probiotic as well. I like often poaching an egg in broth. so if there’s broth around that’s just a case of putting it in a saucepan and perhaps if there are any grains left around that have gone cold and I put in the fridge from the day before I will put some of those in often I do that with millet and then put an egg in there and poach it and like you said you can often you know add like spring onions, green onions, mushrooms whatever to that.

Alison:
[53:10] Often we will tray bake vegetables for our evening meal and so sometimes we have those leftover and i will just put the cast iron pan on and heat them up and um if it’s me i’ll put an egg over them and just mush it all in or i like ground linseed on them as well i mean leftovers, anything that’s leftover we’ll eat for breakfast um gable likes to eat our leftover pizza breakfast often there’s a slice of pizza left when i make pizza and he’s kind of got the dibs on that so if there’s one piece left we know that’s going to be his breakfast the next morning so anything left over I think if it’s left over it’s much more likely to be quick to prepare and you don’t need to think about it you can just pull it out the fridge and have it done in five minutes.

Andrea:
[53:58] Yes, breaking the habit of there being specific types of breakfast foods opens up a world of fast breakfast that doesn’t exist otherwise. And I always think, Allison, if you have a loaf of bread, you can make a meal out of anything.

Alison:
[54:14] Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:
[54:16] That goes for breakfast. Yeah. Well, let’s go to some longer prep time breakfast, but they’re more still pretty hands off. I do sometimes make very hands-on breakfast and Allison you and I were saying maybe someday we’ll do an episode on just holiday and special meals or special breakfasts where there’s a lot more involvement but typically I need to be hands-off because I’m I very much want to read in the morning to be completely honest so I don’t want to be cooking so much so when Kenton was born and Gary was home he was making me steak and eggs and toasted sourdough every single day for breakfast and a glass of orange juice i actually i looked back at some of those pictures allison and i was like how did i eat that like like that much like we’re talking a big steak but i just disappeared that so quickly gary would come in to get the plate and he was like wow i did not think you’re gonna be able to finish that and i was like is there any more But that’s postpartum for you.

Alison:
[55:18] Yeah.

Andrea:
[55:19] However, he’s not always here and he’s not always serving me breakfast in bed. And I don’t always have a little newborn snuggled up to my chest. So we have to have some other breakfast. So, Allison, your fermented oat bake. Yes. This went out in your newsletter a while ago. And by the way, I’m just going to pitch for you. Allison has her own newsletter separate from the podcast newsletter. So I want everybody listening to this, go sign up for Allison’s newsletter. Thank you. Because, Allison, you just put out this awesome new resource for cooking with ancient grains. And there are, well, actually, all of those recipes in there would be really good for breakfast pieces. So you get that when you sign up for Allison’s newsletter. So that’s just ancestralkitchen.com. And I previewed the e-book, and it is very good. So go get it for free.

Alison:
[56:13] Thank you.

Andrea:
[56:13] So your fermented oat bake, which is another nice savoury dish. Do you want to say anything about that?

Alison:
[56:20] The link for that you’re going to put in the resources, are you? Yeah, that. It is savoury, but it could be sweet. Because it’s just basically fermented oats and then you use eggs to help bind them together. And I like to put savoury things in like mushrooms and a bit of cheese, a bit of bacon. But if you wanted to put apple in it and seeds instead, you could. If you wanted cream and spices in, you could. So it could be sweet or savoury.

Andrea:
[56:43] Actually sounds pretty good. Well, and sweet, you know, chopping in apples and putting in currants and cream and stuff and cinnamon doesn’t have to be death by sweet. You know, it could be just a little bit. Fruit is plenty sweet for a morning dish. Yeah, I agree. In my opinion. Another longer prep but hands off dish is Dutch baby, which is a sourdough recipe that I mix with. I mix it up and I just let it sit on the counter usually while I read my first couple books that I’m working on. And then I go and I turn on the stove, or I mean the oven.

Andrea:
[57:23] And then I put it in the oven and it bakes pretty quickly while I just do other things in the kitchen usually. But the Dutch Baby is basically a gigantic oven-baked pancake. And it puffs up really big. And this is another thing that I don’t know why it’s called a Dutch baby. Actually, I have no idea. If anybody knows, please write to us and tell us. And I think it is often served sweet now, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s just a pancake. So it’s just a big sourdough quick bread, basically. And some people serve it with warm applesauce or butter or maple syrup or um you could i like to have scrambled eggs or sausage with it if we have it so that’s an option um breakfast casserole oh and i put the the recipe that i use for that i got it originally from venison for dinner but i’ve changed it so many times to work for us. It’s not quite the same as hers. So you can look up hers and make hers. And I also put the link to the way I make it in our resources here.

Alison:
[58:35] Thank you.

Andrea:
[58:36] Great. Alison, the resources are very good today.

Alison:
[58:39] So yeah, good stuff.

Andrea:
[58:41] They’re very rich. So and I’m also thinking, Alison, I’m going to take these notes and drop them in a document for the podcast supporters, just like I did with our Nourishing Traditions episode.

Alison:
[58:50] Wonderful.

Andrea:
[58:50] So if you guys want all these written down breakfasts, as well as I’ll include the list of the traditional breakfasts from what I eat, then I’ll put that in the notes. And then maybe that could just get linked in the download section for supporters.

Alison:
[59:03] Yes.

Andrea:
[59:04] Okay, great. Breakfast casserole, I put the recipe link in resource and you have to know that this recipe looks different every single time I make it. But this is a great way to use up scrap or stale bread, which can be frozen you know if like Allison you guys don’t get huge amounts of stale bread at a time you probably never get stale bread but if you had you know a heel here and there you could throw it in the freezer and I usually end up grinding those up for breadcrumbs to make a meatloaf or something, but if you had enough, you could make the breakfast casserole with those. I sometimes have veggies in it. I don’t always. We don’t always have veggies available. Sometimes they’re frozen, sometimes they’re fresh, sometimes they’re cooked. I sometimes have potatoes in it, sometimes shredded, sometimes like leftover cottage potatoes from the Nourishing Traditions recipe. I always have eggs in it. And one I usually use milk. So eggs and milk to make kind of the liquid that I pour over it. But one time, Allison, I didn’t have milk, but I had a lot of milk kefir. And I thought, well, it’s do or die time. And we’re going to find out. And I used eggs and milk kefir, poured it over the bread, baked it. It has never disappeared so fast. Everybody kept saying, oh, this is the best one you’ve ever made. So.

Alison:
[1:00:26] Use capability.

Andrea:
[1:00:28] Yep. Baked oats is a great option that my family won’t eat.

Alison:
[1:00:33] Oh, okay.

Andrea:
[1:00:35] As Adelaide says, can I please just have gray oatmeal? She wants it the overnight fermented way. That’s right. Cooked on the stove, served with cream.

Alison:
[1:00:46] Yeah.

Andrea:
[1:00:46] Whatever. But baked oats are a very nice theoretical breakfast that your family might be able to eat. I made a bunch of pans of it before the baby was born and froze them. So I ferment them on the counter overnight and then put them in the freezer. And then I have taken them out from time to time and baked them. And it’s kind of like a big, giant, fat, thick oat cake. Right. And you can crumble it into a bowl with milk or just kind of cut a slice and eat it however you want it. Yeah.

Alison:
[1:01:17] Yeah.

Andrea:
[1:01:19] Shakshuka which I don’t know if that’s the right name or if there’s other names but this is where you have tomato sauce and Allison your meat sauce would actually be really good with this if you added in a bunch of extra tomato sauce so it was more liquidy so you can make a meat sauce or just a tomato sauce I like to have lots of herbs this is definitely a summer food for us I don’t think I’ve ever made it in the winter but tomato sauce fresh herbs simmering in a pan I crack in a bunch of eggs 10 per person typically actually not really but i know i do usually put about 20 eggs in total and i use a giant pan and then i cover it and i just let it simmer until the eggs poach to the condition that i like them and if somebody likes them more or less poached you could take them out sooner or later and i put the recipe for this in the resources but it is really good served with a slice of that cold polenta from your ancestral or your ancient grains download Alison.

Alison:
[1:02:11] Ah, okay. Yeah, I can imagine that.

Andrea:
[1:02:13] It goes really well with this. And it’s great because you can just have it left over from dinner the night before.

Alison:
[1:02:19] Absolutely.

Andrea:
[1:02:20] And muffins, which I shared about in the episode 103, Nourishing Traditions episode. I actually oftentimes make muffin batter because we know I like them fresh. And I put it in the pans in the fridge or just in the bowl in the fridge and then in the morning bake it. But you don’t have to do that. You could also. So sometimes I do just get up and gird my loins and mix it. But I like it overnight just because it has a chance to ferment. And you can stuff your eggs with fruit. You could put jam in the middle. You could put cheese in them. If they’re big muffins, you can stick an entire hard-boiled egg in the middle. You could top your – yeah, apparently that’s like an Ohio thing. The first time I had it was in Seattle, and I was like, hold on.

Alison:
[1:03:11] That’s a surprise. Oh, there’s an egg.

Andrea:
[1:03:12] It’s on my muffin. yeah yeah it’s a thing i’m i think it’s maybe it’s kansas

Alison:
[1:03:18] Okay if.

Andrea:
[1:03:20] You live in the midwest please tell me yeah and you could top your muffin with cheese you could top it with fruit you could top it with streusel i sometimes like to stick a piece of bacon on top um i also like

Alison:
[1:03:32] What’s streusel over that side of the pond uh-oh.

Andrea:
[1:03:35] Uh streusel over here would be flour sugar and butter mixed until it’s crumbly

Alison:
[1:03:42] Yeah okay is.

Andrea:
[1:03:44] That what strudel is

Alison:
[1:03:45] I don’t think so but i don’t know because i’m thinking it sounds like it’s really close etymologically to strudel but um i found a recipe in a book i’ve got called um oh i can’t remember what it’s called it’s a grain book from 1997 i think oh um which won a james beard award and there’s a recipe in there for barley cake with streusel and it is like a paste that you stir into the batter just before you cook it and i thought i wonder if that’s the same as what you put on your muffins but i don’t think it is anyway so yeah hold on.

Andrea:
[1:04:23] Alison what’s a muffin

Alison:
[1:04:25] Yeah well exactly what is a muffin well a muffin these days english muffin is different is an american muffin because most people don’t really know what english muffins are anymore and they just associate the muffins with the muffins they see in starbucks starbucks fame muffins um and so that has almost well and truly kind of smudged out the english muffin which is not sweet a bread thing not like mountainous on the top and is cut in half to put a poached egg in or something like that in i am interestingly, i went to the um there’s a stall here a lady has on mondays which you would absolutely love it like goes it’s about i don’t know take you about five minutes to walk really quickly from one into the other it’s that bigger stall and she sells all manner of um kind of uh, old things antique things and there’s a couple of tables dedicated to kitchen stuff and I was looking in there yesterday and I found two what I think are crumpet molds, which they probably could work for English muffins as well and we won’t go into what a crumpet or a pikelet is that’s for another episode but I was really excited because I’ve been wanting a cruffin a muffin a English muffin or a crumpet mold for quite some time and I found 50p each and I got two so now I’m going to be trying to make English muffins in the cast time pan and English crumb pits as well so don’t.

Andrea:
[1:05:49] Ever take me to that store

Alison:
[1:05:50] No it would be very difficult to get you to leave if I took you I think yeah.

Andrea:
[1:05:55] I’d be moving in

Alison:
[1:05:57] Okay so um are you are you done with that list of breakfast do you think I think so yeah okay so let’s try to address um a situation which I think probably happens quite a lot for us and for listeners what about if you’ve got to leave the house early and you know get a train or do a big long drive and you don’t have time to eat before you go what can we take in that instance for a sort of a takeaway breakfast let’s go to another quick ad break and then we’ll talk about that.

Andrea:
[1:06:30] All right. Quick and takeaway breakfast. So breakfast, one can take out the door. There is your classic slice of bread with cold bacon on it. But with our modern sensibilities, most of the time we expect a little bit more than that. So I will say, Alison, your traditional Scottish oat cakes.

Alison:
[1:06:49] Yeah.

Andrea:
[1:06:51] Not only are they easy to take on the road, but they were to be put in your, what, knapsack? Isn’t that a bag for oats? Isn’t that what that is?

Alison:
[1:07:00] A haversack is a bag for oats.

Andrea:
[1:07:01] A haversack. Yeah, there you go. Put them in your haversack, which is your bag for your oats, and get on your horse and, I guess, storm away over the moors or whatever Scottish people do. Okay. So this is

Alison:
[1:07:15] Very much to be a bit south of the moors, but never mind. day what.

Andrea:
[1:07:18] Is a good this is our section for good meals you can take on your

Alison:
[1:07:22] Way to.

Andrea:
[1:07:23] Fight for what bonnie prince charlie

Alison:
[1:07:26] Or something like that yeah something like maybe we should maybe we should put it we should put it in the yorkshire moors somewhere and talk about wuthering heights instead you know kind of a tryst on the moors with heathcliff let’s talk about that instead isn’t.

Andrea:
[1:07:39] That what all you british people do all the time

Alison:
[1:07:41] Oh yeah exactly every day i’ve got a Heathcliff stored at the bottom of my garden somewhere.

Andrea:
[1:07:47] I knew it.

Alison:
[1:07:48] I don’t think you’d stay there if it was.

Andrea:
[1:07:50] Is that what the cabin’s for in the yard?

Alison:
[1:07:52] Yeah, exactly. What do you take? Well, sometimes we take traditional Scottish oat cakes because I often make them up and we have a container with some in usually most of the time. So literally that could just be a case of I’ve hard-boiled an egg the night before and I’m taking some of those and perhaps if I get time I’ll put butter in between two of them and stick them together and then take it with us.

Alison:
[1:08:20] I have to say we don’t eat breakfast out a lot. We tend to get up earlier and eat the breakfast rather than try and pack things to go. But when it does happen, I often just turn to leftovers again.

Alison:
[1:08:36] Because, you know, who wants to be making a special breakfast when you’ve got other things to do? You’ve got to get out the door. So I’ll purposefully cook more stuff the night before. So perhaps we’ll have some cold rice that we haven’t eaten, some cold root veg. A hardballed egg you know if I’m having egg for supper the night before I’ll cook two eggs and I’ll take one of them with me and I’ll get a Tupperware out and I’ll just put rice in there and the veg that we’ve got in there maybe there’s leftover greens I’ll slice a hardballed egg put it in there put a lot of oil all over the top close it and that’s my breakfast with uh you know a wooden fork to take or the Staffordshire um oat cakes that you were talking about earlier that are flexible oat cakes rather than the scottish oat cakes which are hard more kind of um like a i don’t want to say biscuit because it’s going to confuse matters more like a cracker that’s what you would call it um the staffordshire oat cakes are more rolly so i will sometimes have a cold staffordshire oat pancake um and put some cheese inside it fold it into four and put it in some foil and take it with me um just really simple just try to keep it as simple as possible and use leftovers as much as possible that’s how it works our end I think you’ve got more examples your end because you tend to do you know you do all your chores on one day and you’re like out, out for the day and so you’re more likely to and also you’ve got more mouths to feed as well.

Alison:
[1:10:00] So um I see you’ve got quite a lot more exciting options so I want to hear about those.

Andrea:
[1:10:07] Yeah, well, very similar. And the humble hard boiled egg, if one can eat eggs is not to be underestimated. That’s a very good quick food. And it’s also a nice snack. You know, the kids had friends over the other night. And before everybody was kind of getting towards bedtime, I said, does anybody need anything else to eat? And some of the boys said, Yeah, we’re still kind of hungry. So I said, Okay, go peel an egg. And they just stood at the sink and ate eggs. And it was a nice quick snack that they could have. Breakfast burritos we like these for road trips or being out because they’re so self-contained i have to make these for gary when he has to leave and go for a day i also kind of make what i in my head call a fold over where i just take the the tortillas on the pan and i fry two eggs and i put them in the tortilla and i shred some cheese and i fold it over and sometimes i put in chopped meat if i have any and then i just let it cook so it’s kind of like a burrito but it’s just folded in half and breakfast burrito is great because you can have your homemade tortillas made ahead even by a couple days and we like to put in and you can make the whole breakfast burrito can be made ahead if you need to

Andrea:
[1:11:25] We like to put in scrambled eggs or crumbled sausage or diced bacon or ham, ground beef, chopped liver, chopped heart, any kind of protein you have. We put in kraut always, some shredded cheese. If we have greens, we cook them and put those in. And I avoid really wet sloppy things for the portable burritos just because then it’s making more of a mess. So I don’t put in usually tomatoes or salsa.

Alison:
[1:11:47] So how are you wrapping those burritos before you take them?

Andrea:
[1:11:52] Oh you just treaded into some dangerous territory that’s

Alison:
[1:11:57] My curiosity for you it takes me to very bad places sometimes.

Andrea:
[1:12:01] Gary’s going to have to make a video because if i wrap a burrito he goes oh what are you doing and then comes over and unwraps it and he’ll wrap up pressy and away you’re wrapping it this is gonna happen and that’s gonna fall oh gosh so maybe gary can make a video of wrapping a burrito that’s

Alison:
[1:12:20] Really interesting i think there needs to be a competition for a burrito yes when perhaps when i come and visit i can award points you don’t tell me who’s done each one don’t so i don’t know which one’s gary’s and which one’s yours and then i can award um points to the winner.

Andrea:
[1:12:34] You have to take a bite see and see which one like if the bottom explodes or if it’s sturdy yeah i understand well and if there’s too much fold in one place so you get too much tortilla there’s a lot that goes into wrapping a burrito oh

Alison:
[1:12:47] I can imagine there is and i would be i would be very strict tester so we’re definitely.

Andrea:
[1:12:51] Well we know you would be um probably there’s videos on youtube i don’t know but that’s why sometimes i make him the breakfast i just fold it in half because i don’t want to hear about it yeah yeah um another thing i like and i put the recipe in the links for this would be um einkorn breakfast muffins so This has cornmeal and einkorn flour, but you could use spelt just as easily or emmer or any kind of low-gluten flour would work. And I actually have hard-boiled eggs that I chop and mix into the batter. So it’s chopped boiled eggs mixed throughout it. And then I put a wedge of bacon on top, like I was describing. And you can do easy variations based on whatever you have. But it tends to be – it’s a very dense and protein-rich muffin. And I like that one for Sunday, just because it’s something you could take in the car and it can even sit in the car during service. And the kids are always hungry long before we get home. So, yeah, they could eat something. I have a tradition now of having something in the car in a container so that when we get in the car after church, there’s something they can eat right away so that they don’t melt down on the drive home. Yeah. Quiche, I also put a recipe for this in the resources. But that’s a nice, easy thing that you could just have in the refrigerator and take a slice. It doesn’t have to be hot. It’s perfectly delicious cold.

Alison:
[1:14:18] And quiche for you is pastry with an egg and vegetable meat filling, correct?

Andrea:
[1:14:25] Is that not what it is for you?

Alison:
[1:14:29] Yeah, that’s what it is here. I was just checking. I was just double checking that it’s not some lost in translation thing.

Andrea:
[1:14:35] Yeah, no, that’s what it is. And you don’t have to have the crust necessarily, but…

Alison:
[1:14:39] I used to make a quiche a long time ago, which I haven’t done recently, and perhaps I should bring it back, with… Whole millet, whole oats, soaked, and then blend with water to a paste and then fermented for one day. So it’s almost like a thick oat and millet porridge. And then I used to put that on the bottom of a pan. It has to be a solid pan, not a springform one because otherwise it will leak. And then put the egg and, you know, bacon, cheese, vegetables, onions, whatever mixture on the top. So it wasn’t like a pastry. it was a sort of a battery thing in the bottom but it cooked really nicely in the oven and it was fermented and it was you know it doesn’t have to be wheat etc i haven’t made that for ages because.

Andrea:
[1:15:26] Did you bake the bottom first

Alison:
[1:15:29] No no literally put the bacon in and then and put the put the thing in so it’s like a thick batter and so you have to be careful when you’re pouring the egg.

Andrea:
[1:15:37] Right you don’t want to squash

Alison:
[1:15:38] It down too much you know yeah um but the egg stays on top of it fine and as long as you don’t make the oven too hot so you you know you’ve burnt the top before the bottom’s cooked um it was really really very nice and it felt like a nice alternative to pastry it’s a bit thicker than pastry i used to make it so it was you know pastry’s very thin i used to make it so it was like maybe a third of an inch thick on the bottom of this um millet and oat stuff together and i haven’t made it recently because gabe will not eat eggs you know so i don’t really make quiche very often um we used to eat it a lot before he was born and i keep thinking you know I’ve got to try that again try doing that again but I haven’t got to it yet.

Andrea:
[1:16:15] It’d be hard to make it small enough that you know you could kind of use it up I guess if it was not huge and you and Rob had it for

Alison:
[1:16:23] Yeah for a few breakfasts yeah and Gabriel.

Andrea:
[1:16:28] Could have the leftover pizza

Alison:
[1:16:30] Yeah exactly make an extra pizza he’ll be happy with that.

Andrea:
[1:16:33] Yeah yeah that’s so funny because that’s Jacob too if we have a leftover pizza I’m like I already know Jacob’s gonna eat

Alison:
[1:16:38] That for breakfast yeah yeah.

Andrea:
[1:16:40] Um, there’s also, I’ll just end on, um, the last three, um, two of them are Russian and one of them is, I don’t know what it is. It’s Russian and French and everything else, but broschkis, which is a bread dough or, or also you could say ronces, which I don’t know if that’s a Polish word for a similar thing or, but it’s a dough that you stuff with a filling of cabbage, meat, potatoes, you know, whatever, there’s different traditional fillings. That is a great travel food which i distinctly remember from that long 24-hour train ride we took from volgograd to kislovodsk and the babushkas made the night before a whole kitchen i mean when we walked in the little tiny kitchen you know how tiny those kitchens are and every surface every surface was piled with them because basically we just brought sacks of those and that’s what we all ate for the entire trip and they were not refrigerated fyi if anyone’s wondering

Andrea:
[1:17:42] Um but we just lived on those for the whole trip and they were delicious and they had all different fillings and you can put cheese in them etc another russian food that actually is uh i don’t tend to think of this as a travel food but we sometimes make it and line like fill a glass dish with it and bring it in the car is blini where you can stuff it with cheese or meat fillings and this can be buckwheat blini is the traditional way to make it and or you could just make pancakes this is kind of going back to your oat cakes allison yeah or the soft foldable oat cakes and roll it with any filling and my kids particularly like peanut butter and jam except one of my kids that doesn’t like jam just likes peanut butter and we use homemade fruit jams so i try to pick the ones that are thicker not the really runny ones yeah and it’s also a good place to put in mixed meat like your dirty rice with liver would be good in a rolled oat cake or pancake so and then out the door you go i

Alison:
[1:18:50] Was just thinking.

Andrea:
[1:18:50] On You’re talking about

Alison:
[1:18:52] Bellinis and buckwheat and that. There’s a recipe for buckwheat pancakes in my Ancient Grain download that you’ve already talked about.

Andrea:
[1:18:58] Oh, yeah, there is. Oh, yeah, those would be perfect for this.

Alison:
[1:19:00] Which people can go get on my site.

Andrea:
[1:19:03] Yes, so 100% you guys need this. It’s an e-book that Alison, like it’s a full book. It’s 30 pages, but it’s free. You don’t have to pay for it. So go sign up for Alison’s newsletter and she will also send you the ancient grains.

Alison:
[1:19:17] Yeah, and then make the buckwheat pancakes and take them. Yep, make the buckwheat pancakes.

Andrea:
[1:19:21] Make the jannic, make the polenta, make the spelt bread to have with your egg. Yeah, that book works very well for breakfast. Okay, Alison, anything you want to throw on the table before we wrap this up?

Alison:
[1:19:37] No, just, yeah, thank you. It’s just lots and lots of ideas. I’m sure that people listening are going to be looking at their breakfast and thinking, oh, what am I going to do next? So, no, just a thank you, really.

Andrea:
[1:19:48] Yeah, all right. Well, I guess I better go eat my breakfast of today then.

Alison:
[1:19:53] Exactly. Yeah. Lovely. Thanks very much, Andrew. All right.

Andrea:
[1:19:56] Bye.

Alison:
[1:19:57] Bye.

Andrea:
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