Kitchen Table Chats #52 – Ideal Kitchens, Are Potatoes Safe & Cheese on Pizza

What we talked about:

• Alison’s risotto
• Simple oat muffins
• Oat Flour Recipe
• Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman
• Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

Questions:

• What is your ideal cooking element? So wood, coal, gas (which type), electric? Not ideal for your current situation but just ideal if you got to build your custom dream kitchen.
• What are 1-2 elements/features/items in ancestral kitchens that are not in modern kitchens you think need to come back?
• My question is this: what kind of cheese do you use when you make pizza? Raw cheese is hard to find and very expensive where I am from, and I’m curious to know what you use? Is it homemade?
• I’m curious about potatoes. I’d love your opinions on eating and preparing potatoes traditionally. The Weston A. Price Foundation and other ancestral food experts like Dr. Bill Schindler talk about the toxicity of potatoes – they are nightshades after all. They recommend always peeling them and avoiding green bits. But in Nourishing Traditions there’s at least a couple recipes that specifically say not to peel them. What are your thoughts and experiences preparing and eating potatoes?

Transcript:

Andrea:
Hello, Alison. How are you doing today?

Alison:
Yeah, I’m good. Thank you, Andrew. And what about you? How’s your morning?

Andrea:
I know we just talked about it, but right when we started recording for one second, I was like, wait a minute, which one of us is going to start talking? I think it was me. Yeah, I’m good. It’s you. You did it nice and early today. So I wanted to get the house powered up, but Gary actually got up even before me and got the house power started. So, yeah, it’s been really nice to be able to, get everything going the fire’s going it’s real cozy in here how are you.

Alison:
Yeah yeah things are good things are good um i have an empty house rob’s taking his mom into town to try and work on improving her hearing aid um oh no so she can do some more things and not feel so isolated, yes so it’s very windy but i think in stroud because we’re on a hill here now and it’s always very windy then you go into stroud you’re like where’s the wind gone because strouds in a valley so there’s no wind and we’re up here like you know the hats are coming off, and down there it’s balmy yeah i know what.

Andrea:
You mean we’re like tucked into all these trees but then if i actually if i drive out into our valley uh where there’s all the trees are down because it’s like you know farming land then.

Alison:
That’s where you get the the wind just kind.

Andrea:
Of comes down the mountain and straight through so.

Alison:
Yeah yeah.

Andrea:
Well did you eat before we got together.

Alison:
Yeah Did you eat by.

Andrea:
Yourself or with everybody.

Alison:
Else? No, with everyone. Yesterday I made meat broth with two chicken carcasses. This is kind of in the vein of the episode that maybe I’ll do later in the year, which is seven things you can do with a chicken carcass. And so yesterday I just shredded one of the carcasses and we had the meat off that with Brussels and bread. But today… The other one I’d shredded yesterday and left in the fridge. Today we had risotto, which is kind of becoming a bit of a favorite because it’s gluten-free. So, and I’m eating gluten-free at the moment, so we can all have it without any problems. And it has cheese in it, which Gabriel absolutely loves. And it’s all creamy and just really satisfying when it’s cold outside. So, I can give you a rundown of it if you want, because I’m just making notes to try and remember what I did. Because I thought, well, maybe if I’m doing this episode, I have to actually write down and remember how I make these things.

Andrea:
Well, I want to know because we made your risotto a couple days ago, the one from our meals at the Ancestral Hearth cookbook. And it’s just so good. And I thought kind of what you thought, and this is such an easy carb. Everybody loves it. It’s gluten-free. It’s a straight win. It is a meal in itself, but you can have it with something.

Alison:
Yeah. And you get the broth in there, which is like a bonus, you know. So, yeah, I did… For all of us, I do grams of, I’m going to do this in English, I’m afraid, arborio rice, which is the risotto rice. You can have that or you can have a can of roli, which is the other one. And usually about a litre and a half of broth. And my tendency with dishes is to put too many vegetables in. And I’ve kind of learned with risotto that if you put too many vegetables in, you just end up with too much risotto and you can’t eat it. It’s supposed to be about the stock and the rice, you know. and it’s nice to have some flavourings and some veggies in there but not too many so I usually do half a small onion, and a small stick of celery and just fry those for a bit in butter. We had four mushrooms left so I chopped those up then put them in and then I poured in the rice, added a bit more butter, stirred the rice around for like five minutes so it gets its toasting thing and then I started spooning in the stock which was already warmed up in another pan on the stove. It has to be warm to help the maximum kind of starch to come up out of the rice so I was doing that spoon by spoon ladle by ladle and stirring when the first you know when it hit the rice I’d stir and then as it gets down to a point where it’s almost all gone then I put some more in.

Alison:
Whilst that was happening, I sliced up a bit of savoy cabbage that was left and we had about five Brussels sprouts in the fridge. So I chopped them up and at some point I threw them in and then got the chicken from the second chicken carcass that was left over and just broke it up a bit more.

Alison:
Put that in, stirred it around. I just keep adding the stock, keep adding the stock, keep adding the stock. Takes about minutes for all that stock to go in. And then I am seasoning at the moment my risottos with the same thing which is just we absolutely love it so Amelia made me some wild garlic salt so it’s like the green of the wild garlic and somehow she’s mixed it up with salt and dehydrated it or something it’s really delicious so I put quite a good a good serving of the garlic salt in and then someone told me at the loose store in town you know where you can just buy your stuff you know and pour it into a bag and you don’t have to have jars and plastic things um the lady there told me that white pepper was really good with risotto because i saw the white pepper on her shelf and i was like what do you use that for so i bought some of this white pepper and boy she is not wrong wow it’s it’s like pepper but such it’s really soft it’s like a soft flavor and so you can put more of it in because you’re not kind of going oh my gosh that’s pepper so white pepper and this garlic salt is the way i’ve been seasoning my risottos and it’s really very yeah and i like to put some cheese on it um rob and gabriel and and me aren’t as good with cow cheese as we are with goat or sheep so i i like to get pecorino romano which is a hard sort of parmesan like um sheep’s cheese.

Alison:
So, we grated some of that up and then just served the risotto up, sprinkled the cheese on the top. Gabe would go, more cheese, more cheese.

Andrea:
Always.

Alison:
And it was absolutely delicious.

Andrea:
That’s the American side of it.

Alison:
More cheese, more cheese. And I think I let him grate it. So, I think he’d eaten a load before we’d even got to it, you know.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah. On my kids’ shred cheese, I have to factor that in.

Alison:
Exactly. There’s some loss.

Andrea:
Some taxes were taken.

Alison:
Exactly.

Andrea:
But.

Alison:
Yeah really delicious how about you.

Andrea:
Oh that sounds so good yeah i actually did as i alluded to we got up we’ve been getting up earlier and earlier beforehand just to try to figure out the power situation so that we don’t shut off during the recording and so i i was like well i’m not going to go this long and not have eaten anything so last night camille baked oat muffins and i posted these in discord i’ll put the link in the show notes here right but they’re really good they they’re just ground oats is the flour and you can we used up we had these little bowls leftover bits and pieces of yogurt that the kids had been eating and so we just kind of combined all that in and we had preserved eggs and we used preserved eggs in it and you can just kind of use whatever. We used butter. You could use lard. You know, it’s one of those muffins where you could just kind of, play around with it quite a bit. And they’re gluten-free if you’re using, you know, non-contaminated oats.

Alison:
So the only flour is oats. There’s no other flour in it.

Andrea:
That’s it. They’re so tender, so soft. I mean, if somebody made them for me, I would definitely say, oh, I’m sorry, I can’t eat these gluten-free. But no, they’re amazing. So I’ll post those in there. We had talked about using them as a breakfast muffin that was when the conversation came up in discord somebody asked what’s a really high protein muffin and i said well this is basically oats and yogurt so it’s kind of like a bowl of oatmeal and you can what i want to try because we’ve tried mixing in all different kinds of things and it it’s that it holds up you know they still puff up okay like it can take the weight of mix ins so i was thinking what if you scrambled and chopped up eggs or hard-boiled and chopped eggs and then cooked some sausage or something. And then you could stir those in and you’d have oats and sausage and egg. Bacon.

Alison:
I’m thinking bacon.

Andrea:
Oh, bacon. Cheese, if you’re Gabriel. You could even like make a little pocket of cheese in the middle or something. I don’t know. It just seems like there’s so many options. And I had gotten Camille, I have wanted this my entire life. And now I have it. But it’s these pans that make jumbo, like giant muffins.

Alison:
Ah, yeah, I know.

Andrea:
And I don’t know why. I’ve always wanted it. I really can’t explain it. I just always have. And so I thought, well, Camille has devoted herself. She’s devoted herself. She said she wants to bake something every day. And I said, well, maybe bake something or you read a recipe. You know, that’s a lot of baking, which not that our family couldn’t eat at all, but I don’t want her to get overwhelmed. But I used that as my excuse to finally buy these pans.

Alison:
Did you buy ones that were steel or are they silicone?

Andrea:
Uh they’re metal i don’t know yeah okay and so you.

Alison:
Just grease them do you in it and that works fine or do you put do you have like those cup things that you put in them.

Andrea:
Yeah i bought these parchment paper yeah cups because i will not make muffins i have learned of myself there was, years of my life where i said i don’t want to use paper inserts i’m just going to grease the muffin pans and so I made muffins I washed the pan and then eight years later I realized that I was so resistant to washing the pan that I hadn’t made muffins in a very long time so I realized I’m not going to make muffins if I don’t have the paper because I absolutely hate standing at the sink for minutes scrubbing out muffin pans so yeah I suppose it’s easier with big ones but I also I don’t know what kind of alloys these things are % of the time, so I guess it’s just as well to use papers. But anyways, yeah, papers. So they all, the pans, you didn’t really have to wash them afterwards.

Alison:
Yeah, I’m kind of, I don’t know, I struggle with pans, I think, because I like silicon and my muffin dishes are silicon. But I’m aware that silicon, you know, hasn’t stood the test of time particularly. So, you know, maybe there’s stuff going on there that we don’t know about. With the metal ones, I don’t have any at the moment, but I’ve, in the past, I’ve kind of stolen some from various parents and used them. And I tend to, after I’ve finished with them, fill them up with water and leave them. But the problem is, you know, you need a big space on the side to leave them.

Andrea:
Put water in.

Alison:
And someone comes along and knocks it and then all the water goes everywhere.

Andrea:
That’s what happens to me. You set it kind of across the sink, you know?

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And then somebody tips it and it like tilts down like a centimeter and then just starts pouring all over the counter. Yeah, exactly. Crummy water.

Alison:
And I’ve been making… Gluten-free bread for me separately the last you know six weeks and experimenting with all manner of different kind of flowers and risers and trying to see if I can do one that’s UK only, and I’ve been using our Pullman tin which is one that’s got that coating thing on it which you know is not ideal and Rob said to me after I’d made about a third one Rob said to me well you know kind of don’t really want you to keep doing it in the Pullman you know you use one of our ceramic ones could you use the we’ve got a ceramic one which is actually called a plum pudding tin it’s came from italy it used to have a lid which is perfect but gable broke the lid by accident when we were tidying up something yeah and it’s um i never knew it’s kind of longer it’s longer and i i’ve got to i’ve got to use that i think you know i’ve got to stop using the um pullman one because you know you just i was using it for once or twice because i’m making something new and it’s smaller because it’s just for me it’s not as big as our normal loaves but you know then you just get used to it and you’re like oh hang on i need to stop myself your like recipe.

Andrea:
Starts to mold to the pan that you have if you know what i mean.

Alison:
Yeah that’s.

Andrea:
How it goes for me anyways you know i’ll make something like camille and i made these muffins and we doubled the recipe because we have two of the jumbo pans it came in.

Alison:
A set of two yeah and.

Andrea:
It filled all but two of the holes.

Alison:
So So.

Andrea:
Then we said, okay, next time we need to make the recipe two and a half times because that will fill it. And so then, yeah, then my recipe starts to all my measurements will change to fit the dish that I have. I know what you mean there. Yeah, that’s a tricky one. Our Pullman pan doesn’t have a coating on it.

Alison:
Yeah, that’s what I need.

Andrea:
I also don’t have the lid because somebody just found the pan in a storage unit. Oh, okay.

Alison:
So it’s not really a Pullman pan then?

Andrea:
No, it’s just a long loaf pan.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. So, sorry, back to your muffins. What did you eat them with? Did you eat them with anything?

Andrea:
Oh, I also, you know, knowing me, I fried two more eggs and had it with those. And then I also had tea with cream and honey. Oh, so good. So, yeah, it was a good morning. Good morning for me.

Alison:
That sounds really good.

Andrea:
I actually felt really cozy because I wanted to go into Canva this morning and finish off one or two things for the podcast. So I had this breakfast and then I came downstairs and the fire’s going and I opened Canva and I was like, wow, is this how people work? Like, nobody’s trying to pull my shirt off.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I’m talking about babies here. Or nobody’s trying to pull my shirt off or like asking me questions. And I thought maybe I should just get up in the middle of the night and work all the time. This is the way it should be.

Alison:
Getting up early makes a big difference. We changed our routine a bit here after Christmas. And I’m doing a short session with Gabriel at .. And so I wake him up at .. So he has time to kind of come to and go get his breakfast and get dressed and washed up.

Andrea:
Yeah. But not enough time to start investing in a project that then you have to unravel.

Alison:
He tries. He tries.

Andrea:
I know. I know because my kids are the same way.

Alison:
It means that I kind of need to be with him from .. And so, you know, if I want to get up and have that slowness in the morning, you know, like that, where I feel like I can eat my breakfast and then actually sit down and let it go down, or I can do some things in the kitchen that I need to do, like mix some bread or prep the lunch beforehand. And, or maybe I want to get up and have a bath, which I’ve taken to the last kind of six months, sometimes in the morning, I’ll, I’ll just go, I need to look after myself. I’m going to have a bath, but it means I need to get up earlier and earlier to give myself that space. So I don’t feel like at ., oh no, I’ve got to go and get Gabriel now. I want to go in and be with him in the room and be kind and gentle and just be with him for those few moments when he wakes up and let him be with me properly, you know? Um and so i’m trying to arrange it so i have mornings like that where i’m up earlier and i get to eat properly and we get to do things and then things can just start with the usual you know monday to friday rotor that we have for yeah for looking for dealing with you know and and trying to school gabriel but it’s going quite well.

Andrea:
That’s going to be such a sweet memory for him. Allison, when he’s older, and he’s just going to remember, I remember my mother would come in and wake me and spend time. That’s going to go with him for the rest of his life. He’s never going to not remember that. That’s going to be so sweet for him. Yeah. And I’m sure it will affect how he wants to, you know, if he ever has children or whatever, how he’ll want to make their lives go. That’s beautiful.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I think I’m getting, I hope I’m moving back towards being able to have that morning time again, because I remember telling Francine, if I don’t get my morning time to read, I’m just, I can’t cope. But also for the past couple months as far as baby schedule goes we’ve been in a you know perpetual sort of state of transition and so he’s kind of, very, like, needs my attention and hands on him kind of from, like, a.m. Almost to, like, or . And so I can get up and leave, but then I have to come back. And he kind of wakes up, you know, within every hour at least once and then needs me with him for a little bit, like, nursing or something. And I think this, like, as Gary’s pointed out, well, if he’s just with me, he’s fine. I’m like, I know. It’s like something he knows if I’m here.

Alison:
Your mom, this is the food.

Andrea:
Yeah. So I’m trying to work on figuring out how over the course of each day, and if you have thoughts on this, I’m listening, over the course of the day, how I can kind of pack more calories into him. Because I told Gary, I feel like he’s kind of putting off eating during the day in some ways. He just wants to get down and play. And I kind of chase him around and poke food in his mouth but then he doesn’t really want to eat it because he just wants to play but then at night he wants to nurse almost constantly gosh and so i’m like i think he’s trying to fill up his calories at night so it doesn’t get in the way during the day what happens.

Alison:
When you sit down to eat is does he sit with you.

Andrea:
So we yeah he has his own chair and he sits in his chair um Um, and if he, he, I sometimes have to tell Jacob, go make your dog sit somewhere because Charlie will just sit there and watch Kenton and Kenton is happy to just throw food on Charlie the whole time. So I have to kind of make sure the dog is in there. Otherwise Kenton is like, oh, I’m just going to feed the dog. But, um. Yeah, he does eat with us. I also have observed when Gary feeds him, he eats so much more versus if I’m feeding him. Why is that? I don’t know. I’ll give Camille the bowl and say, can you go feed him? I’m going to go over here. Because if she’s feeding him, then he’ll eat more too. I think he doesn’t really nurse that much during the day, actually. But if at all, most days he doesn’t at all nurse during the day. But I don’t know exactly what it is.

Alison:
It’s interesting that he’ll eat more with Gary or Camille than he does with you.

Andrea:
Yeah, he definitely does.

Alison:
What happens when you try and feed him and he doesn’t want any more? What does he do?

Andrea:
Just doesn’t open his mouth.

Alison:
Yeah, okay.

Andrea:
Just looks at me and smiles. Doesn’t open his mouth. And you know when a baby doesn’t want to eat any more food? I’ve thought about this sometimes, Allison. And I’ve thought, you know, you and I both had some strange histories with food and eating even after you’re full. And, you know, your body says, I’m done. And you’re like, yeah, but I’m not. And you keep going. And when I, I’ll feed him a bite of food, he’ll eat it. I’ll get the next bite loaded up. I’ll put it in front of him and he just won’t open his mouth. And I’m like, wow, is this what it’s like to just be done?

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
You just know you’re done and you just will not, just will not take another bite.

Alison:
You should watch, you should watch Gary and Camille feed him from some sort of distance that he can’t see you and see if you can notice what’s different.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Study their techniques.

Andrea:
Yeah. Examine. Well, we’ve got a couple of questions, Alison.

Alison:
Yeah, quite a few.

Andrea:
If you want to go through them with me today. and we’ve got um three different people sent in questions and if there’s time i also wanted to bring up something that came up in discord yeah great i brought my phone oh there it is okay i was like i brought my phone down should i read the first one yeah kick us off with the first one yeah.

Alison:
Okay so thank you to um everyone who sends questions in.

Andrea:
Yes this.

Alison:
Is kind of what we always wanted the ktc to be your questions and us answering them so you know do don’t feel shy when the email comes around, which I usually try and remember to send, which asks for questions, no matter how big or small your question is, feel free to send it across. So the first one is from Brianna, who says, what is your ideal cooking element? Wood, coal, gas, which type? Electric? And she means not ideal for your current situation, but just ideal if you’ve got to build your custom dream kitchen. Andrea, do you want to go with that one?

Andrea:
Oh, the questions that say your dream kitchen. I’m like, okay, let me go. Well, off the cuff, I will say I really enjoy having gas. She said which type? I don’t know. Is there more than one kind? I don’t know.

Alison:
It seems like there is, but I don’t know what they are.

Andrea:
Or like which type of gas or which type of gas stove. Because I have a stove with just like burners on top. It’s not like the aga that’s on all the time type gas. So I have one that’s gas. And I really enjoy cooking on that. It’s quick. You can turn it on. You can turn it off. You know, so it’s convenient. It doesn’t take power. So I can run it even though our power is off about half the time over here. And so that I love. If I had a dream kitchen, which I have definitely told Gary, this kitchen is going to have to have a wood stove of some type. There’s different, I feel like the farther I go with ancestral food, the more I’m like, well, but I really want to learn hearth cooking, you know, which wouldn’t even involve a stove. That’s a different type of cooking and a different culture of cooking altogether. Other as you know also from that ruth goodman book that you were reading with the coal stove that just sounded so fascinating to me the.

Alison:
Domestic revolution that was called i think.

Andrea:
Yes thank you i cannot remember the title um, The foods that emerge and the dishes that emerge and then the traditions built around them have shifted continuously as cooking modalities have changed. And so as I think about going to a different type of cooking method, then it’s not just, oh, I heated this on this stove and now I’m going to heat it on that type of stove. If it’s actually your entire life would have to shift and mold around it. Years and years ago, actually, when I first got married, my mom got me these really cute little books, which I still have. And I love. They’re teeny tiny, small cookbooks. And the woman, I remember when I first read them, I thought, is she crazy? But she, does all her cooking on an old wood stove. And I remember her saying just, yeah, my entire life kind of had to slow down to accommodate this.

Alison:
Yes. Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah. You feel that too? Yeah.

Alison:
Absolutely.

Andrea:
Tara, in her book, she talks about her wood stove and how her life had to shift to adjust to that. And I just, the more, the farther into the ancestral food I go, the more appealing that becomes to me. If you, I know, I know you know what I mean, because of your response to what I just said. And so then she talked in this cookbook about, oh, there’s different types of wood and you cut the wood differently. And, you know, you have this box and that box to adjust your temperatures. And the Norwegian wood book that I alluded to on our live call last weekend would also refer into this, too, where they talked about, oh, this wood for this temperature and that wood for that temperature. And this for fast heat and this for slow heat, this for one that you want to come up real quick and go away, and this for one that you want ashes, this for one you want coals. I mean, all of that is a world beyond my knowing, but it is something that I know exists. And then cooking on a hearth, Ruth Goodman has this really cute video that’s going, it’ll be linked in our pantry episode show notes, where she talks about.

Andrea:
Like cooking on a hearth. And she says, these are the types of tools they had. And look, you could pile your kind of wood coals up here. And then when you want to separate them, maybe you separate some coals over here to this side and you have something that just stays warm and then you keep this up. Right. So all this is different. So sorry, Brianna, if this wasn’t what you’re wanting us to talk about, but I’m guessing this is exactly what Brianna is thinking. Yeah. Which is how slow do I want my life to become is directly linked to the method of cooking that I want to use. And on the one hand, I feel like a wood stove would be ideal. Then the other hand, I’m like, well, maybe a hearth. But a wood stove is far more efficient in terms of fuel in a lot of regards. So that might be, I feel like a wood stove might be the way for me.

Alison:
Although i wouldn’t.

Andrea:
Be opposed to a big hearth with a nice iron hook.

Alison:
You know.

Andrea:
Squeak shove it back with all my.

Alison:
I have seen so many pictures of those in books that i’ve looked at for yeah research and and they’re um it’s a completely different life i mean i just yeah that’s probably what it is.

Andrea:
Yeah, I’m not. Everybody spends a lot of time looking at, you know, the beautiful white kitchens on Instagram or whatever it is. And you and I are spending all of our time and our listeners, too, because I don’t think our listeners are the white kitchen type people, I guess, but they’re all using the kitchen. They don’t got time for that. But the time we spend is looking at, yeah, iron hooks or big roasting spits, you know, with a dog on a treadmill or something. Like, our exposure is just different. What would you use? And what do you use? I don’t actually know what you use.

Alison:
Yeah. So, it’s interesting what you just said about big white kitchens. Because my newsletters, I just wrote my newsletter this morning. It’s going on next week. And I talked about this kitchen in this house, which is my th kitchen. Ever oh my gosh I know it’s a bit sad isn’t it I just want there to be I think that’d be it I.

Andrea:
Think if I count them I might be right behind you.

Alison:
I’m gonna have to count it though you should count them because it’s quite sobering when that happens and now you’ve moved around a lot as well so um and I said you know when I have my dream kitchen I don’t want it to be an out-of-the-box kitchen. And when Rob and I lived in Penzance for a year and a bit, we sort of put together a kitchen that was not, it definitely was not out of a box at all. We had a carpenter make one particular unit with a sink in it.

Andrea:
No way.

Alison:
And then we bought a secondhand wooden sort of, I can only think of the Italian word for it. It was like a sort of a dresser, but had a much bigger workspace on it.

Andrea:
What’s the Italian word?

Alison:
It was like a mardio that would go in the kitchen. It had big storage underneath, and then it had a thing that you lifted up and put stuff in, and it had a big workspace. And we had it pushed against a wall under the stairs as the stairs went up. And then we had the carpenter made an extra bit of wood to get fit on the back to make the work surface extra big. And we had a table that we found in a junk shop which we kind of mended, and our oven wasn’t very good because we paid £ for it and we had an old fridge that Rob’s dad had had for like years and.

Alison:
And, um, that kitchen was just so, it brought out a different feeling in me, you know, kind of tied to what you, you’re saying about the slow. So at the moment I cook with gas, um, and the last house that we were in, I cook with gas, but the house that we lived in initially for five years was induction. It was quite a shock going from induction to gas because gas is much, much quicker. And I can’t turn that gas down enough. I mean seriously like it’s got the thing where it goes down low but I have to turn on my hobs the other way as if I’m going to turn them off so I’m pretending to turn them off and then I just just put it just where it hasn’t turned off and then I can put something on low um so I’m a bit frustrated with the two gas stoves that I’ve worked with since I came back from Italy because, everything just burns unless you pay really really close attention to quick fire induction induction it didn’t um but maybe that’s because the transference of heat from the induction to my cast iron pan wasn’t particularly good because cast iron not great necessarily for induction i remember nicole came to visit us in ponticeva in italy the house that we lived in for five years and she was like your your hob is so much slower than mine you know and and i didn’t really realize you know but now i’ve got the gas back i’m like oh yes i can see you know what that actually.

Andrea:
Directly translates to your boza.

Alison:
Workshop i’m.

Andrea:
Just thinking about that because, when we cooked the boza which i did two different times for the first step, I was like, I said to my brother-in-law who was at the house doing it with us, and I was like, how did you do this for minutes? I can’t get away with this without it burning. I see. And I burned it like two times, and we were hovering and adding water. No, no, no, it’s totally fine. And I said that. I said her stove must have been slower than what I’m using here. But I’m also used to the gas being very quick, so I’m used to almost having to cycle back in things and accommodate. so that does make sense.

Alison:
Yeah yeah it.

Andrea:
Does compute so yeah i see that yeah.

Alison:
I don’t i don’t i don’t love gas when i was younger i used to think oh i just want gas to cook with and coming back to it now after a gap of many years i’m not that really in love with gas i don’t like the way that it kind of everything when it spills on the cooker you have to take everything off and you’re trying to clean around it and it’s a blooming mess dismantle the whole thing everything yeah exactly Everything has to be dismantled and you’ve got these racks on it. And I’ve got some very small saucepans and they always fall off the rack on the top. Luckily, not very often when they’ve got things in them. But that annoys me.

Andrea:
What rack on the top are you talking about?

Alison:
Well, just like they’ve got this, you know, like a metal sort of structure. The grill that goes over the top of the gas burners.

Andrea:
Your pan’s fall through.

Alison:
Yeah, well, my pan falls off. it’s because it’s only just got some of the some of the smaller ones have a special extra bit you can put on the center of the x so that it is more stable for smaller pans but this house that we’re in doesn’t and so when i put my small saucepan on which i do very often to make tea because i have teas that i you know i simmer for minutes so i want to do them on the stove the The pan just falls off because it’s small.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Like, oh, the pan’s falling off again. So, yeah, that’s my opinion on gas. I think my ideal, and I say this with gas, some um knowledge that i’ve never for any long stretch of time cooked with this so if you put me in a house with it it could all go wrong and it could not be my ideal but in my head it’s my ideal is to have a wood-fired range like an agar or a rayburn um and it’s it’s for the same reasons that you said really i our life would have to change and my life would have to change always It feels to, it’s felt to me and it’s got so much clearer to me reading the Paul Kingsnorth book, how much emphasis we’ve put on home. I think chapter or is about home in that book and just everything I resonated with. And it made me see how much I’ve just, my focus has just been on home, you know, for so long. You know making the home beautiful making the home useful making the home systems work properly making the home efficient and effective and just the place where we do the things that we do the way our life runs you know is it’s our home and we have always we have always.

Alison:
In the homes that we’ve been in been frustrated that we’re cooking all the time and we’re not able to use that heat really for anything else than cooking and then we’ve got the radiators that we have to switch on yep and we’re just what’s going on here you know we want to be able to have a cooker that’s on that then is in an open space or a more open space than we’ve had with these tiny little box rooms you know you’ve got the kitchen here you’ve got the dining room here we don’t want that i want a a heating utensil that’s yeah central as centrally located as possible to be practical where i can cook and that heat then radiates out into the heat and that’s the heat that we are we are using to to live by to dry things by to to be with you know and and then that heat becomes the center of the home it becomes the kitchen the center of the home the place where you are the place where you want to gather when it’s cold rather than you know i, again i realize reading paul king’s north you know that we have these centrally heated houses and we can heat the individual bedrooms and everyone just goes up into their bedroom and sits there with their device and no one ever does things together because we can because we can heat all our rooms and i don’t want that life i want a life where i’m together with my family you know.

Alison:
Yeah and so I mean ideally I would have an aga cooker that is wood fired I don’t know how we would necessarily get that wood based on where we live but this is ideal and that cooker would be on, all the time and I’d be cooking and I’d have to change the way I cook because of it and I’d have to change my lifestyle because of it yeah because I’d have to be there you know kind of tending to it and you know making broth I’d have changed the way I’m cooking because of it and we would have a house that actually utilised that heat for more than just making the food.

Alison:
When you, There was a period in Italy when we first moved there the second time, so when Gable was four, that for a time we were technically homeless. We had to move out of the house that we were planning to move into, and we had nowhere to live, and it was winter.

Alison:
And for a while, we stayed in an AB&B, then we had to stay in a hotel for a couple of nights. And then um it was horrible horrible and then a friend told us about a place up in the mountains that we could have for a week and someone managed to get us up there and we just stayed in this place this tiny place for a week and it snowed and it was in the mountains you know just around Florence and it had a a stove there which had one ring on the top and was wood fired and then it had a big um you know flue that went up to the ceiling and and out and the space was very big so it was you know there was a mezzanine but it was very very tall the actual living space and and so we.

Alison:
Used the wood and used that stove and every day that we were there the pot that was the biggest pot that was there was on that stove you know I was cooking things in there that and it was warming the house and it was holding our attention and we could see the flames and it was just it was Christmas and so we were all there you know doing Christmas things and we were a bit shell-shocked because we just had to you know move like five times and yeah we kind of needed that central all kind of coming together and slowing down. But it just gave me a little taste of what it was like to cook like that, you know. And so…

Alison:
Yeah, my ideal kitchen would have an aga that was wood-fired. I have several books already. I have to stop myself buying books. I went to a second- Are we supposed to stop doing that?

Andrea:
No.

Alison:
I went to a second-hand bookstore last week, which I’ve been wanting to go to for ages. And in the food section, right down the bottom, they had some really old aga cookbooks. And, you know, the aga, this aga, that. I was just like, oh, I want that one.

Andrea:
Specific books for it? I had no idea.

Alison:
Yeah, people have written whole books. I’ve got one at home, which I’ve read all the way through. But, yeah, I was just like, no, Alison, come on. You haven’t got an Argo. This is a dream. You’re not there yet. Don’t buy all these cookbooks.

Andrea:
So they’re telling you that, hmm. So it’s like a cookbook that’s kind of telling you, here’s how you utilize this.

Alison:
Yeah, to the best effect. Here’s how you can structure your day. Here’s how you can have one oven on this way and use it for this, then this, then this. Here’s how you can use the burners on the top you know with them open with them shut um just it’s really it’s a whole it’s a whole nother world i believe you and when you say that.

Andrea:
You know you said you had that big pot on the stove i and and the everything begins to revolve around that. And then you start to hear and you see differently the way a lot of, you know, old books up to like, you know, we’ll say like, Well, even into the s, but really through the s, there’s a lot of reference where you almost see the entire life revolving around, you know, that central pot of stew, if you will. And then, yeah, you think about, I haven’t got to that chapter in Kings North yet, but something that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I’ve been cooking on the stove, actually, because like you, I’ve been thinking about how this gas stove goes so quickly. And I have different pans that I use for different things pretty much everything we use cast iron but um I didn’t realize how finicky I was about things until Gary said oh I’m gonna heat this up and I said okay you get the big pan you put it you slide it halfway off the thing and then you put the muffin on the end of the pan so it’s yeah indirect heat yeah or I started stacking pans I I got this from Hannah.

Andrea:
So Gary got me this like flat cast iron pan and I put another pan on top of it. And I’m like, this is the way to do it, you know. So I’ve started realizing. And then I thought, oh, yeah, it’s like how you would push coals over here or move to that burner over here. It’s like I’m trying to treat the stove like that.

Alison:
Like with my cast iron pan, my Lodge one that we’ve had, I don’t know, ages since Rob and I first found nourishing traditions. With first thing we were like, right, okay, we’ve got to get cast iron pan. And I used the rim of it. So when I do pancakes, I cook the pancake in there, but then I lift it up and balance it on the handle so it’s still kind of keeping a bit warm. And Rob comes into the kitchen. He’s like, what are you doing? Just stay away. Just stay away. The other thing I’ve got, when I do oat cakes in it, I do the oat cakes in the bottom and so I can fit maybe five in there. But then I get a cooling rack. And when those are finished and I’ve got the next batch to put in, I’ve just balanced the cooling rack on the top of the cast iron pan, put the oat cakes that are cooked on it put the new ones underneath in the pan and then those ones that are cooked are still getting dried out and still getting heat from the from the pan underneath and so they’re getting crispier you know it’s just like you’re saying i’ve got these little things that i do got your little systems to um to kind of replicate what would be keeping them in a warming oven or something you know keeping them yeah just to keep them warm this This is.

Andrea:
The difficulty with being ancestrally minded and moving multiple.

Alison:
Times.

Andrea:
And also, you’re doing all this within a framework of a society that is highly focused on not doing things inefficiently, which we actually are pretty inefficient. Like, I know you said efficient, but I know what you mean by efficient. Efficient within our scope of things. Yeah. I’m going to very efficiently roll all these oat cakes out by hand myself.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
So the but what you mean by efficient is I don’t have excessive tools that I don’t need. I don’t have rolling pins that don’t work. I just have the one I love and the spot that I love in the towel that I love, you know.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And. Thinking about the way you’ve alluded to in Kings North, and I know Aaliyah has too, the way that he talks about just notice how much our world is built towards get the industrial food, reheat the industrial food, eat the industrial food, get on with your day. And you and I are saying, what if we went back to a world where the food consumed even more of your time? And almost like an unraveling of things. Yeah, it’s like the opposite.

Alison:
Isn’t it? It’s like the opposite.

Andrea:
It you’re trying to create that in these spaces that are all trying to be fast and quick and yeah easy and all of that and then you’re trying to rebuild that little system everywhere you go, it’s just different yeah different for sure yeah brianna really set us off with that not.

Alison:
A good question she’s got.

Andrea:
Another one good question do you want to read the second one i’m almost afraid to read this one after how long we took off that. Because this is another good one. What are one to two elements or features or items in ancestral kitchens that are not in modern kitchens that you think need to come back? Say less. I have this one. I know what I want.

Alison:
Yeah, I feel like that. I feel like what I said to answer the last question kind of answers that Because I feel like rangers, you know, rangers should come back. Places that make a kitchen a modern kitchen, you know, space. A big farmhouse table in the middle made of local wood where people can chop and sit and talk and drink tea. That kind of thing. Anything that makes it more social and more like the heart of the home.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Alison:
How about you?

Andrea:
Like a heart instead of a motherboard. Yeah.

Andrea:
I was at a friend’s house last weekend, and I was telling her how much I love she and her husband built their house. And the most expensive thing in their house, I’m not even going to say how much it was. The most expensive thing in their house is the huge stone slab that she has for her, like a center island in her kitchen. And she knew she wanted true living stone, but she also knew it was out of her budget she went and looked at them anyways always a mistake but there was one with a giant flaw down the center okay and so she was able to get it, for a more reasonable portion and she said now she just tries not to think about what they spent on it but it it is so alive like when you’re in the kitchen you you’re like your hands just go onto it You can’t not put your hands on it. It’s so vibrant. And she told me when she went to the stone place, then they said, well, you know, you’ve got kids. She has a bunch of young kids. And they said, you know, it’s going to take a this will show everything that happens to it. You probably want to get something, you know, the the manufactured quartz or something. And she was like, oh, maybe I’m maybe I’m being unreasonable. And so she said she had went away initially and she thought about it. And then she visited a friend’s house. And it was an old house.

Andrea:
And they had a stone counter. And she said it was a true stone counter. And the woman said, yes, look here. This is a depression in the stone where every day the woman would need her bread. And she said, she goes, I want my stone counter to show the life that we’ve had. I want it to be imperfect. And she went back and got it. And she said, it’s the best choice she ever made. And…

Andrea:
I feel that, like the trueness of natural elements and non-plastic, non-veneer, you know, non-linoleum or whatever, imperfect but true items. I think if I could bring something back to a kitchen, like an element or a feature that just doesn’t exist in modern kitchens, it’d be, there’s a couple of things that come to mind and they’re all involving the storage of food. One is the food safe one is a true pantry that’s cold unheated yeah not not in the house but like you know pushed out into the cold um and then this would be oh amen and because then we could get rid of the fridge yeah exactly right and the other thing would be um this is more maybe related to a farmhouse kitchen but a dairy room like cold stone floor yeah with the windows facing whatever south or whatever that south and east or whatever it is that you want for the wind to come through or something um.

Andrea:
Because then you have that place to work with all your dairy and make all your dairy things. But the food safe is like a, like, I mean, you can picture like a wooden box or a basket that’s up on the ceiling and you can pull it down into your space and put food in and out of it, but then put it back up and keep it safe from the rodents. We don’t really have a rodent problem in our house. That’s not really an issue anymore. But that just seems so nice, like being able to set your bread in there. And Ruth Goodman, who is the one who shares about this, also indicated, you know, look, this is where you’re like, things could be drying out, like those oat cakes you’re talking about.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
Back up.

Alison:
Exactly.

Andrea:
If you had a, like a hearth, you might have smoke up there, which would help. But, you know, we don’t have that. But still, you could, you can set, you know, pile your squashes in there or something and just get them up out of the space, out of the way, and then pull it back down when you need it. It just seems really nice.

Alison:
Yeah, so there’s a, And there’s a thing called a flake in Yorkshire for drying softer oat cakes. So like the oat cakes that are in the mills at Ancestral Hearth that actually bend.

Alison:
And they used to, they look, they’re either wooden, totally wooden and sort of like wide ladders or they’re wooden sides with rope kind of being the ladder steps.

Alison:
And they hang on the ceiling. and then when you make your oat cakes you literally hang it up like kind of washing over the wow over the bit of rope or the bit of wood and just let them dry because then there’s the same idea they’re up high you know and then they’re drying and the heat from the hearth is going up there just like you know in scandinavia or other places that made rye bread with the holes in the middle they put them on a big pole that’s sticking out up high and then that rye bread is drying for the whole year potentially you’ve made me think of another thing which probably after this i should not say anything else because we’ve got some other questions um which is a kneading trough when i first read um books about bread in italy um i think five six seven years ago they had these pictures of these amazing kneading troughs that are just you know wood live things and then the bread was just kneaded in them and there’d be tons of bread made so they’re big and then the microbes stay in there and they’re ready for the next bread that’s going to go in there and therefore they kind of you know inoculate the next bread and there’s just a special piece of wood which is set aside for kneading and I when I first saw it I was like oh I want a kneading trough I really want a kneading trough I’m with you on the.

Alison:
Natural elements in the life I feel like you know the the table that we had in Penzance which we kind of brought back to life was very clearly very old and was bashed about quite a lot when we when we moved the lady who moved into our house bought the table off us because she loved it so much you know and the table we’ve got at the moment we bought from a lady in Italy whose husband had made it from chestnut wood and i got it for about euros and when the person when one of our friends initially moved us it’s like this table is amazing you got an absolute bargain here and and when we left italy i was like this table’s coming with us there’s no way in the world oh good for you so now the table’s here and and i hope it will be our table forever because it’s it just it’s alive you know it’s.

Andrea:
Is it the one in your well like in the bosa course the one that you’re sitting.

Alison:
At that’s right yeah and in the kitchen table chat logo on the um podcast app it’s got some flowers in it in a vase that’s the table yeah we just use it for everything so yeah i.

Andrea:
Love that i love that very much so, I almost said a kneading trough because last night I was reading that sauna book I was telling you about, and there was a picture of an old house in Scandinavia, and there was a big kneading trough hanging on the wall. And I thought, oh, come on. I want that. I love that. Like having that, you know, when you need a lot of bread, then you realize the value of something like that.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:
And the same would go for some of the old butter churn type things.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Where you could wash butter or churn butter and, like you said, kind of carry those microbes forward.

Alison:
Yeah. And they had the same for suins. There was a special wooden kind of barrel called a bowie that was used to mix suins in. There were special barrels for oat cakes to be mixed in. Wow. All wood and all not cleaned in between.

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of things we want, and none of them come from Amazon.

Alison:
No, exactly.

Andrea:
Exactly. All right. Hannah asked this question. My question is this. What kind of cheese do you use when you make pizza? Raw cheese is hard to find and very expensive where I am from, and I’m curious to know what you use. Is it homemade?

Alison:
Good question question should i should i go first you go first i’m sure my answer is quite different from yours um so raw cheese is also relatively hard to find and very expensive where we are um and so i use not raw cheese for my pizza i usually use mozzarella i try to buy organic mozzarella it’s one of the things that i have to say okay with this we just buy it from a supermarket or a other producer, you know, not something that, because if I go to the market, I can’t find mozzarella to start with. I can only find other cheeses that really don’t work very well on pizza.

Alison:
And even if I could, I think it would be ridiculously expensive and it’s not raw. And so, like we often say, you know, we pick our battles. We don’t have pizza very often. And quite often I make pizza without cheese. You know, we’ll make a pizza with just tomato and perhaps some garlic infused oil or tomato and fish tomato and other things not cheese so we haven’t always had cheese on pizza when we do it is usually just a mozzarella organic mozzarella from a store um so yeah that’s one of my kind of compromise things um which I would love it if there was some raw mozzarella somewhere that I could buy, then I could put that on my pizza, but I have not yet found it. How about you, Andrea? I bet you make your own cheese, do you, and put it on?

Andrea:
Well, actually, surprisingly similar would be my answer, which is pizza does not need cheese. And there are plenty of…

Andrea:
Um pizzas without cheese actually my the first italian kind of cookbook that i got i don’t even think there was cheese on a single one of the kind of pizzas that they had in there so that’s where i first realized being an american i was like wait a minute yeah you can make food without cheese on top and we it when it comes to using raw cheese that is typically what we have so that’s typically what i use but you are about to put it in the oven you know at degrees so it’s not like you need to be like oh darn my cheese was heated to yeah i’m just gonna fry it in the oven so i wouldn’t feel bad you’re heating it anyways so if you couldn’t use raw, cheese um and raw cheese do remember in the u.s raw cheese as label most of the time um is still heated to anyways and it’s just illegally called raw cheese um so we get blocks of raw cheddar from azure standard which i think i’ve alluded to before and so we’ll sometimes use that because that’s usually what we have and then i make ricotta cheese pretty frequently from, milk that we get from our local dairy and so we’ll use that as well okay.

Andrea:
Yeah. And I have a little companion sitting on my lap now, if anybody hears a little sound from a little buddy. But yeah, so sometimes homemade, sometimes no cheese, sometimes raw cheese.

Alison:
Yeah, of course, your no cheese thing made me remember that I very often used to put lardo on cheese, lardo on pizza, and so tomato and lardo, or just lardo on its own, lardo and sage, you know other.

Andrea:
Things like that.

Alison:
It’s um there is a world um particularly if you go without cheese for some time you know perhaps you have to.

Andrea:
Stop eating.

Alison:
Dairy you realize you can still have pizza um.

Andrea:
Oh yeah i mean there is different you know like lardo’s got the kind of the protein and fat sort of hit that you want on the top of pizza if you’re used to having cheese on pizza so that’s a good can you, can you shred it like if your lardos really no you probably just slice.

Alison:
It really really thinly.

Andrea:
Okay okay which which yeah or crack gets easier the more you do it cracklings cracklings work really well too yeah well this okay this question fits with lard and cheese this one’s from molly yeah i’ll read this one out she said i’m curious about potatoes me too yeah i love your opinions on eating and preparing potatoes traditionally. The Weston A. Price Foundation and other ancestral food experts like Dr. Bill Schindler talk about the toxicity of potatoes. They are nightshades after all. They recommend always peeling them and avoiding green bits. But in nourishing traditions, there’s at least a couple recipes that specifically say not to peel them. What are your thoughts and experiences preparing and eating potatoes?

Alison:
Hmm.

Andrea:
To make a potato pun, that’s a loaded question, Molly. So what are your thoughts, Alison?

Alison:
Yeah. Okay. Potatoes. Well, um, The first thing I would say is that I am the only person who eats potatoes out of the three members of my family. It took us a while to establish that Gable had a potato allergy, but probably about a year and a half into his life, we were like, potatoes, that’s a problem. It was very clear after one particular meal we had. and so gable has not eaten potatoes since that time initially we thought it was a generalized nightshade issue and so we didn’t have peppers and we didn’t have aubergine either um but since that time he’s been able to eat peppers without a problem we haven’t tried him back on potatoes because he had such a violent reaction to potatoes and i don’t want to go back there yet.

Alison:
So i would say first of all that gabriel can’t eat potatoes rob thought he could eat potatoes but generally has come to the conclusion over the last kind of five or so years that he can eat them but he’s not good if he eats them very often so you know if we go out and there’s no other carb that he’s prepared to eat he will eat potatoes sometimes you know um sometimes i’ll do something with potato and he’ll eat it but he rarely eats potatoes at home so i’m the only one that eats potatoes um and i don’t know whether their issues with potatoes have anything to do with the toxicity or the nightshades i don’t really think so because you know rob eats other nightshades without issues um i have always thought that you shouldn’t eat the green bits and potatoes and you shouldn’t eat them if they were sprouting um you should keep them in the dark which stops them sprouting stops them going green so much but if i find a potato with green bit in or sprouting bit in it i will generally cut out that bit that’s just something that my mum has always done and i’ve always done it um aside from that i i don’t.

Alison:
I don’t think, I don’t think that I don’t stop eating potato skins because I believe they’re toxic. That is not something that I’ve spent much time researching, but generally I try to watch how my body reacts to things. And if I believe that I’m having a problem with something, I’m very ready to experiment and try stuff. And I’ve always felt that potatoes are reasonably good for me. Skin or not skin I don’t always eat them with the skin on and I feel like in these issues you know where someone’s saying oh don’t eat this don’t eat this often what I’ve gleaned over you know many years of following advice and then trying things and noticing things is that really often moderation helps and so for example with the oats and the phytic acid I don’t always ferment my oats to try and get rid of phytic acid. There are benefits to phytic acid. It’s an antioxidant. And so sometimes I have my oats non-fermented.

Alison:
I’m not going to be fanatical about it. And I feel like with potatoes, sometimes I peel my potatoes. When I boil them, I always peel them. I like to roast them, you know, peeled. So I boil them and then fry them afterwards or roast them afterwards and in that case I won’t have the skins sometimes when I have a jacket potato I don’t eat the skin sometimes I just want the carb that’s the white bit on the inside and so I’ll put my butter in it and then I’ll just scrape it out and leave the skin sometimes though I’ll eat a potato with skin on um I I that feels natural to me that sometimes I would eat it and sometimes I won’t And I feel like even if I had read that, you know, some people were saying that potentially there was a problem with this, I don’t necessarily…

Alison:
Subscribe totally to that kind of thing until I’ve experimented with it myself so even if I had heard that or read those things I would still defer to my own experience I think with, those items and hold in as I get older the more I hold in front of me just kind of moderation that you know doing something one way all the time is really not ideal you kind of want to mix it up a bit um right having said that I haven’t really read those articles so um I can’t really talk with much um kind of authority on what they say particularly um have you read them Andrew do you know about it.

Andrea:
No I haven’t the thoughts that come to my mind having not read it.

Alison:
Again So.

Andrea:
I can’t contribute to the information they have there. Run along the same or parallel lines to what you said, which is I usually look at the context of a food. Where did potatoes come from? South America. How long have they been in what we call the old world? Not very long. A couple hundred years at the most. And what types of potatoes do we have? Well, we’ve pretty much reduced it down to, you know, one, the brusset. And that’s not even how potatoes started out. And the potatoes that we get… Come from a little farm by us, and we just get small bags of them. And like, they’re small bags, it takes three bags to make dinner for our family. That’s how small they are. But they’re small, they’re different colored, you could not peel them, that’d be far too tedious. And the potato that has grown the longest out here, I think I talked about this, like, maybe in the first year of podcasting, I feel like I remember discussing this, there’s a potato, which I don’t remember the name of. But it’s very, very knobbly. You couldn’t peel it. The skin is very delicate. But this is the oldest potato that we know out here. And there’s a few farms out here that grow it. It is from South America, of course. And I just think about, like, you couldn’t peel that potato.

Andrea:
You’d be there for minutes trying to peel one potato, and you would lose most of the potato and trying to peel it. So, so I don’t know. And now do I know, I also don’t know how South American groups were eating them. So I feel like, well, I guess I would want to know more context. And then also to what degree were they part of the diet? We don’t have tons of potatoes. We get them occasionally or they’ll be in a stew or something. I have one kid that doesn’t eat them. And so, you know, it’s not that I can’t eat them because one kid doesn’t eat them. But you know how it is you just you gravitate towards the things that everybody can eat yeah just as a first first um resort so yeah um and then you and i don’t always necessarily you know sometimes we don’t always necessarily i don’t know if agree is quite the right word but we’re not always in line with everything weston price foundation says um i would say that I don’t have any disagreement with Weston Price, the doctor. The foundation is somewhat different than the person himself. And so, you know, they have their opinions and they’re experts, and that’s totally fine and fair. And it’s just not always quite the same as what you and I have concluded. But, you know, they’re doing their research on the best they can.

Alison:
So, yeah, I would agree with what you’re saying there. And sometimes we agree and sometimes we don’t. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
And that’s just the way it is.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
There’s also, you know, depending on how far down the road you want to go, there’s also, like you said, Rob can’t have the potatoes too well and neither can Gabriel. You’re okay with them. So maybe, you know, something in Rob’s genetic line is less okay with them and with yours is more okay with them. And maybe somebody in South America or of South American heritage would have an easier time with them. And maybe, you know, somebody with, you know, maybe Rob has a very Anglo-Saxon heritage or something. And there’s not a lot of potato in his family history and there’s not a lot of adaptation to it. I don’t know. But he has some Russian heritage.

Alison:
Which is why I think he likes rice so much.

Andrea:
Nah, there we go. the the rye will be had.

Alison:
The genetics demand it yeah yeah so because that’s my thoughts there interesting question oh yeah we could ask that question on discord as well molly you know um because someone everyone’s going to have different opinions on it and someone else might have dug into this a bit more than we have so feel free to pop your question on discord and see what everyone kind of has to say there speaking.

Andrea:
Of discord a question came up the other day that I thought was really interesting and I never would have in a million years known the answer to this.

Alison:
Question.

Andrea:
So, um, uh, a user posted the question and, I don’t know if she wants me to say her name or not, so I’ll just say a person posted a question. She said, I brew black tea daily. I brew it loose leaf in a gravity tea strainer. I have noticed after I strain my tea into my pottery drinking vessel, there appears to be an oil slick on the surface of my tea. Should I be seeing this or is something amiss with my tea? So, Allison, have you ever seen that before?

Alison:
Yes, I have. Yeah. Okay.

Andrea:
So Katie, who is on the live calls quite a lot, answered, and she said, this happens if you make tea with hard water. I was like, what? And then Megan, who I interviewed in the tea episode, she’s learning how to become a tea sommelier and all of that. And she said, yes, the tea scum, as it’s so delightfully called, is caused by a reaction between the minerals in the water and the natural mineral content of the tea. What?

Alison:
I didn’t know that.

Andrea:
Harmless and shouldn’t impact the flavor too much, but still unpleasant. Katie is right. Filtered water typically makes better tea. Though it is possible to go too filtered, there isn’t enough mineral content, then your tea could taste flat. Different kinds of tea also stand up to more or less hard water differently. I never would have thought that. Like that is just so obscure.

Alison:
Thank you, Megan. That’s amazing. I didn’t know that. I’ve always thought when I’ve made tea for people and I’ve seen that, I’ve always thought, oh, is my spoon not so clean? You know, I’ve been staring. What’s going on?

Andrea:
I know. I would have thought like, oh no, this tea, you know, these people are selling me tea with sunflower seed oil in it or something, you know, I just wouldn’t. Minerals reacting and makes an oil slick or a tea scum what.

Alison:
Can i tell you something you you also won’t believe about tea oh yeah um sometime kind of in the early december rob and i went out for um.

Alison:
Went out to a cafe just for a couple of hours. I think we were waiting to pick Gable up from something and Rob had tea and I had a sip and I was like, oh, that’s really nice. I haven’t had like proper, you know, tea for ages. And because I’m so caffeine sensitive and have been sensitive to everything under the sun, I’ve just avoided tea for about a decade. And I said to him, do you think I could have tea again? You know, we thought maybe, maybe. So I started having tea in the first thing in the morning and I absolutely loved it. And then it got to the point where I thought, I wonder if I can have two cups. And so Rob would make me a tea at like half past five or something. And then about o’clock, I would have a second cup. And after about three days, I was getting high, literally. I went down and I said to Rob, I think the tea’s making me drunk because I feel really happy and relaxed. And I think it must be the tea. Nothing else has changed. I’m not changing anything. I don’t know what’s going on. And so I did it for like two or three more days. And I was like, I have to stop this. Literally, this tea is making me drunk. I was feeling like I literally I was feeling like on cloud nine and kind of happy and relaxed and everything. I stopped the tea and it went away. So literally, I can’t drink tea because it makes me drunk. How ridiculous is that?

Andrea:
Well, I mean, if you want to hide, then now you know where to go. You know, your description kind of sounds like when I had that blood draw a while ago and they said you’re basically like below critical on like vitamin B something and D, which now I know now I’m doing a gut test because now I’m like, OK, that’s like it’s clearly I’m getting enough dietary. Yeah something’s happening inside those things something else is going on yeah so anyways but they had me go and get the or they suggested the chiropractor suggested going and getting this like vitamin infusion shot so i said okay i’ll give this a shot literally i went and i tried it and i felt like that i thought i was high i was like is this how everybody feels all the time, You guys always feel like this. Is this how good you feel all the time? So I think I can kind of understand that. You know, Megan said…

Andrea:
Megan said, you can steep the tea the second time and the caffeine is less. So I’ve gotten into this rhythm. I’ve been doing a cup of Earl Grey in the morning. And this is usually when I get up. First thing, I like to have the tea. And this would be ideally for me with reading. Then the kids get up i make breakfast with them and we start their school and i like to have another cup of tea but i re-steep the leaves okay because then it’s a weaker yeah tea still got the flavor and a little bit of that hit but it isn’t yeah if i did two straight cups i would probably be um on the same trip as you so i hesitate to do that but it seems like a really good mix for me to have the tea in the morning and then the weaker cup like more around like o’clock or something so i don’t know if that would i’m.

Alison:
Too scared to go back to it.

Andrea:
Now because my sleep.

Alison:
Was kind of messed up a lot in december right december was not a good.

Andrea:
Month for.

Alison:
Me and so So I’m just like, no, I’m staying away from it now.

Andrea:
Anything that messes with it.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Were you re-steeping your leaves or just using them one time?

Alison:
I was using new leaves.

Andrea:
New each time.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah well that’s interesting yeah um people please tell us have you ever gotten an eye off of tea yeah um and was rob adding mushrooms or something like do we know i don’t know he’s like you come in he’s adding pictures to the cup what i don’t know why you’re high allison it’s so confusing i just thought you could write faster if you had a little bit of this this is this is the way to get your book done now we see how all those victorian authors were cranking out all those novels get a can of snuff you can get anything done oh my goodness oh do you have some.

Alison:
More to share from discord i don’t know how long we’ve been talking for.

Andrea:
Um there’s lots of good questions that come through discord i won’t put any more on today just because we’ve got a lot here but um There’s always good questions popping up, and I do my best. I don’t always get them captured or remember, but I do my best to add them to, I’ve got a thread at the top, or a channel, I should say, where it’s just called Juicy Chats. And so when a good topic pops up, I link the initial question up there. So if somebody just scrolls through there, you can see hundreds of questions that people have asked, and you can jump straight to the one of interest to you and kind of read the replies that would be right after, because otherwise it’s hard to find things. I also made another thread in Discord that’s just recipes. So anytime somebody posts a recipe, and if I miss one, please don’t hesitate to just like tag me or ping me, anybody who sees it. But I just… Link directly to the message with the recipe in there so if you want to just see the recipes people have posted in there like i’m looking right now beef and ale stew from christine a fall pasta salad from kelly classic beef stew from katie molasses tea cinnamon clove tea for blood sugar allison you posted sourdough flaky pie crust gluten-free gingerbread cookies from amanda rosehip soup from megan like you could just scroll up and it’s just recipe inspiration.

Andrea:
Like oh my goodness so good staffordshire oat cakes as cannelloni pie crust from river cottage, two-step lazy two-step sourdough from hannah yeah just lots of good stuff so i’m trying to make it easy to find what you want in there and navigate to to it if you don’t want to you know if you don’t want to spend all day just reading hundreds of comments yeah thank you that’s really useful thing you want yeah but lots of good questions in there and if you have thoughts on these things that we’re discussing here you can add them please do add them in i would be actually very i would really like to hear.

Andrea:
What other people have to say about the cooking element and the elements that are missing from the kitchen. Because I know people are going to be saying things that just never crossed my mind. Like the tea slick, you know, they’re going to be pointing something out that I just didn’t know existed. And I want to hear that because it would also, you know, the method of cooking varies from region to region, just like the food does, because the fuels vary. Like when you’re in the prairie, you’re not going to have like a not ideal to have a wood stove you know because the wood isn’t the most efficient thing out there so then what are you going to do how do people cook so, yeah i want to hear i want to hear what people have to say wonderful it’s such an interesting space i i want to read everything i i feel like i read a lot of it but i can’t read it you do i.

Alison:
Don’t know how you do it you do.

Andrea:
I’m glad you do but it is really fun it’s really fun seeing what goes on in there cool well alison we should i guess we better get about the day yeah yeah, thank you very much dinner i’ve got kids breakfast to do so yeah yeah nice to talk well nice to chat with you as always yeah next time bye all right bye.