Kitchen Table Chats #59 – Easy, Cold Meals; Is Rice a Good Option & What About Ugly Food?

What We Talked About:

• Easy food that doesn’t need to be heated
• Thanksgiving and Christmas Foods and traditions
• Food Styling and our brainwashing and expectations around it – what about delicious, “ugly” food?
• Thanksgiving Make-Aheads?
• Apple cider and apple juice
• Favorite books? Amanda shares the title of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression by Jane Ziegelman & Andrew Coe (US Bookshop Link)
• Packed lunch inspiration?
• Making rice more nutrient dense as a side, or just as a fast food?

Resources:

• Denby Pottery
• Alison’s Fermented Oat Bake
• Andrea’s Baked Blueberry Oat Squares
• Blini Recipe
• Lazy Varenecki (Easy cold or hot food!)
• Check email for your Christmas Hamper! (Time-sensitive link, so download as soon as you get it!)
• Kitchen Table Podcast Episode # 77 – Andrea’s Thanksgiving Special
• Christmas Episodes on Ancestral Kitchen:
• Episode # 20 – Christmas Traditions & What Inspires Us at the Holidays;
• Episode # 47 – The Christmas Survival Guide;
• Episode # 73 – Slow Christmas;
• Episode # 95 – Let’s Make a Christmas Pudding;
• PLUS Ancestral Christmas Pudding Cookbook;
• Episode # 98 – How to Have a Green & Peaceful Christmas
• Christmas Episode on Kitchen Table Podcast – Episode # 49 ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas
• Deliciously Ugly
• KTC Live from October (Andrea said September in this recording, but it’s the October 2026 Live!): All about Kim and Paul’s beautiful orchard! (And some discussion of cider apples)
• A Dark History of Sugar by Dr Neil Buttery (US Bookshop)
• The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World by Lizzie Collingham (UK Edition and Bookshop)
• The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World by Lizzie Collingham (US Edition and Bookshop)

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Transcript:

Andrea:
[0:02] Hello andrea hello allison.

Alison:
[0:04] How’s it going over there.

Andrea:
[0:06] Merry old.

Alison:
[0:06] We’re doing we’re doing okay in merry old england it doesn’t seem very merry today a bit rainy but um we’re merry in the house possibly and you.

Andrea:
[0:16] It’s going pretty well over here we have a stretch of a couple days of sun with rain at night and so things are quite soggy but you know you get the brightness during the day so That’s nice. That’s a good combo when you’re trying to put grass seed down before winter and everything.

Alison:
[0:31] And what was the last thing you ate today?

Andrea:
[0:34] Oh my goodness. Yesterday even. Last night I made myself, we’re in a slaughter and butcher season right now. So we have a stretch of very long work days. So I had anticipated and had some, you know, very easy to put together foods. Like I had pre-made corn tortillas and then a huge pot of beans. So we’ve been having a lot of tacos. And then I also, I bought everybody bagels and I bought myself a gluten-free bagel. And so last night I had the gluten-free bagel toasted and I mixed together. I had a slice of cheddar and then I mixed together a can of tuna, which is amazing. I always thought it was like a cheap food, but now given the kind of tuna we buy, it’s like a luxury.

Alison:
[1:22] Yeah, expensive, yeah.

Andrea:
[1:23] But I really love it. So the tuna and then some yogurt mixed with the tuna. And then I diced in fermented pickles from our, actually from our dairy farm, not ones that I made. And then I diced in shredded cabbage with lime because I had made a big container of that for.

Alison:
[1:44] Tuna and lime is always really nice, I think.

Andrea:
[1:47] Yeah, I do too. Kind of like echo of ceviche or something like that.

Alison:
[1:53] Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
[1:53] And I just kind of toasted it and got a little bit melty. It was just like a very simple fast food kind of speed it to the… Table type thing. And then I went back to weighing chickens and putting them in the freezer.

Alison:
[2:12] It sounds like a nice break.

Andrea:
[2:14] Yes, planning for winter.

Alison:
[2:15] We had something that I kind of figured out in one this morning before I did a bit of work afterwards. I actually went for a walk this morning in the pouring rain. And then it was nice. I haven’t been able to go for walks for a long, long time because my arm’s been just too painful, you know and walking kind of makes it worse and i’ve been missing it so much, and i’m feeling like i’m slowly getting there and i felt good enough to say yeah you know what i’m gonna go for a walk this morning and i did i’m pleased i did, um so yeah i got it all ready we had um some minced lamb in the freezer that i got out last night from our farmer albert, and then i’ve got this blue ceramic um dish that rob bought for me from the charity shop for christmas, and i saw it in charity shop and it’s denby it was 25 pounds and i was like oh that’s too expensive does the name mean something, yeah it’s a famous pottery brand in the uk that’s been around for like hundreds of years um very kind of um posh um.

Alison:
[3:22] So secondhand it was 25 pounds so you can imagine it probably cost a lot more than that anyway unbeknownst to me rob bought it for me it’s a beautiful blue, ceramic rectangular dish with a ceramic lid on the top and i use it for so many things, um so this morning i had a savoy cabbage from the market i took some leaves off that maybe eight or ten big leaves washed them chopped them up into kind of strips, put that in the dish with um half a large onion that I chopped up and half a tin of canned tomatoes and some whole cumin, some whole coriander, some salt and some pepper and laid that at the bottom layer and then a little muffin, um sized um pork stock that came from the pig’s head that i um did a couple of weeks ago so i made the pig’s head into brawn and we had loads of stock and it was very salty because i brined the head, so um i just did it in small in a i put it in muffin containers and then froze it so we have a little bit so i put one of those in there um.

Alison:
[4:28] And then i shaped the i sort of peppered the lamb mince, shaped it into burgers, put it on the top of all the cabbage, put the lid on, put it in the oven. I put a potato on the other side of the rack for me. So I had mine with potato and Gabriel had some black einkorn bread because I’m developing a recipe for, you will see soon probably, someone who grows black einkorn in a beautiful regenerative way. So he had a slice of that. And he had butter on his bread. I had butter on my potato and Rob had a slice and half of rye sourdough with it. So we all had the same kind of main, but we had different carbs. It was very good. The cumin and the coriander, but the savoy cabbage with a little bit of acidity from the tomato, it was just delicious. The lamb juice kind of went, you know, the lamb fat went over the top of it in the oven. And it was all moist because it had the lid on from the Denby dish. So, yeah, it was lovely.

Andrea:
[5:31] Golly, that’s pretty cool. A historical dish and the lamb, so good. I like all the different carbs, you know, the way you guys are varying it up.

Alison:
[5:43] We tend to have different carbs a lot now because I’m gluten-free and Rob likes his rye. Gable’s not that keen on rye. He prefers the spelt or the iron corn. And Rob and Gable really like rice. I don’t have rice as much as they do. They don’t eat potatoes. I eat potatoes. So it tends to be a mix and match. Usually the same, similar protein at the main meal anyway, similar protein and the same veg, but mix and match carbohydrate often.

Andrea:
[6:13] Yeah. Well, it works. Everybody gets what they need.

Alison:
[6:16] Mm, exactly.

Andrea:
[6:17] Well… Look at this, Alison. We have an awesome list of questions today.

Alison:
[6:23] We could be here till next Wednesday, possibly.

Andrea:
[6:25] Oh, I know. I think each one of these could be its own. I actually know each one of these could be its own or multiple episodes.

Alison:
[6:32] Thank you for sending all the questions in. We appreciate them.

Andrea:
[6:35] Yeah. I love the questions we got. And then before we go to the questions, you and I had questions for each other.

Alison:
[6:41] Yeah, we did. Do you want to start or should I start? Do you want to start with one for me?

Andrea:
[6:45] I want to ask you. I want to start by asking you. you’ve been on doing all this histamine work.

Alison:
[6:50] And it comes.

Andrea:
[6:51] Up you know you mentioned it off the cuff here and there like on.

Alison:
[6:54] The live call on saturday you said.

Andrea:
[6:56] Oh i have to put the meat in the freezer but anyways you know then then we had that whole discussion about doctors and.

Alison:
[7:04] I just wonder.

Andrea:
[7:05] If you could talk about that a little.

Alison:
[7:06] Bit yeah i i think we were talking about kind of a recent episode i histamine affects my sleep that’s the most obvious and yet delayed I don’t necessarily get it straight away it build seems to build up in my system, and then several weeks later I just can’t sleep every night I’m waking up in the middle of the night wide awake, and it goes on and it takes me a long time to figure out kind of what what’s the issue so I’d had a period um, late last year coming into this year where I was sleeping very very badly and then I figured out a load of stuff what was wrong I was taking some um.

Alison:
[7:44] Evening primrose or to try to help with my pre-menopause symptoms. And even in primrose oil increases estrogen. And I always know when I have more estrogen in my body, my histamine goes up and I can’t sleep. So I sorted that out and I slept really well for me for about four or five months. Then I started the last kind of six weeks, I started sleeping badly again. And I was like, what’s going on? What have I changed? Something has changed, and I’ve got to figure out why. And one of the reasons I kind of knew it was histamine, not just because I was waking in the night, but because when I lie down on the pillow… My heartbeat was incredibly strong in my ear and you know I put my sleep on the side, I’m trying to train myself to be a back sleeper it’s not particularly going very well so I sleep on my side and um I just had the heartbeat in my really strong and it’s really off-putting when I’m trying to get to sleep, and you know I have I’ve had that symptom on and off in my life for 30 years, and what I kind of linked it to this time so I thought oh this is a histamine symptom it’s going along with the sleep and so I figured out there were two things that I changed in my diet one was I was having double strength um fish oil.

Alison:
[8:58] And the second one was I was having some game sausages from a stall at the market that sells game, and I thought well the game probably has been hung so there’s some histamine issues there and I know from playing around with oils that often that can cause me problems so i did a ton of research on fish oil.

Alison:
[9:14] And found a study um which showed that um, it gave the fish oil to a range of women some who were pre-menopausal some who were post-menopausal and some who were neither and it had no negative estrogen effects in the.

Alison:
[9:34] First and the last group but in the pre-menopausal women in some of them it significantly raised their estrogen, and I thought if there if there’s a likelihood of me being affected by something I’m usually that you know the you’re the one I’m the one so I just thought okay I have to stop these sausages because maybe it’s a game I have to stop, the double-strength cod liver oil. So it wasn’t cod liver, sorry, it was some other cod fish oil. And so I stopped them both. And within 10 days, the heartbeat in my ear had gone, and my sleeping was much better. And the reason I wanted to say it was because I had that heartbeat in my ear, for many, many times in the past. And when I was younger, I remember still living with my parents, having headaches and having that heartbeat in my ear. And I went to the doctor who sent me to another doctor who sent me to another doctor who was trying to find out what the problem was. You know, I had an MRI scan on my head, all these other things. And in the end, they just said, it’s some kind of migraine thing. So to prevent the migraine, we’re going to give you beta blockers. And so I took beta blockers to try to get rid of the headaches and the thing going on in my ear. And never at any point in any of those discussions with any of those professionals did anyone ask me what I ate.

Alison:
[10:50] And it just seems, you know, now it’s easy for me to say like 25 years later, oh okay there’s something going on here is probably histamine related so have a look at what you’re eating and then wham it stops, because I’ve changed what I’m eating and all these people who have issues you know with headaches and migraines and and they’re all going to doctors and the doctor’s never asking them what they eat and I find it, really infuriating um, that we can’t reach more people to tell people that you know well if you have symptoms like this maybe have a look at your food i just wanted to talk about that.

Andrea:
[11:31] Close look too because a lot of times i get really frustrated when you know you listen to any sort of advice on health and they say you know get rid of processed.

Alison:
[11:43] Or rancid oils or something and you’re like okay Okay.

Andrea:
[11:45] Yeah. That was 15 years ago. Moving on. What next? You know, because if you, if somebody did look at your food, they might say something like, have less carbs or something just really broad that. Or, you know, more protein. And you’re like, oh, I’m eating these sausages as hard as I can. How come I’m not eating many, you know? Like, I’ve got the protein going on.

Alison:
[12:06] Like, it doesn’t… So that’s really frustrating. It takes probably, you know, like, the more you go along the path, the more highly tuned you get to what you’ve started, what you’ve stopped, and what the deal is.

Andrea:
[12:19] Yes, that is true. Like, if you’ve ever listened to somebody tuning a piano, especially if the piano starts out in pretty bad, bad shape like it’s been a long time yeah yeah there’s big broad movements you might have to shift a lot and then and then you start getting down to the fine tuning where you you’re really just all and and the average listener is like i don’t hear anything it sounds good to me you know but he’s sitting there with this fork i’m like yeah no it’s a little flat it’s a little flat.

Alison:
[12:46] Yeah yeah amazing hey so the question i had for you was i can’t remember we were talking we We were talking with Megan Greenway, I remember, who does some admin for us. And you were talking about recovering after something that happened and your Whoop watch. And I had no idea what a Whoop watch was. So I looked it up and I thought, that’s interesting. And I wanted you to share with our community how you read something on that watch and you would have kind of just ignored the state you were in. But the watch told you something. Can you talk about that?

Andrea:
[13:19] Yeah, the experience was very interesting. I got the watch, I think, according to what it tells me is like over 500 days ago. So I’ve had it for over a year on now. And I got it because I kept having just this strange health experiences, which at some point we should probably do an episode about. And you know and I know, you know, we’ve talked about things and like I had I was like focusing on food. I was dropping things out of food and like tracking food and making sure that I, you know, doing what I could from that perspective. But what the gary got me this watch and and we chose it because it doesn’t have a screen and for a variety of other reasons didn’t need something lighting up on my wrist every 20 minutes but um, we had an incident in may where, kenton had to go into the hospital i feel like maybe we talked about this but uh well you and i certainly did but yeah um, Because we were actually recording when I had to get up and walk away and go into the hospital. But everything turned out quite well. Best case scenario, everybody’s ship shape again. And however, the day we left.

Andrea:
[14:32] He and I ended up staying overnight at the children’s hospital. And, you know, Gary took very good care of me. He was, you know, bringing me food, trying to get me to eat. I didn’t want to eat anything because I was under stress, you know, but I did end up eating that night, and then I ate the next day. And then I got a decent amount of sleep that night, although I had gotten no sleep prior two nights. And the next day when I woke up, I thought, you know what, I actually feel pretty good. Like, it’s not too bad. Like, I don’t feel fantastic, but let me go about my normal life. And the whoop has this like an app that you can look at to see what it’s kind of, you know reading of your like heart rate and stuff like that and it said your recovery is at one percent and i was like, and it it comes up with these percents from all the different things it’s measuring like your temperature and all this stuff and it had a fairly well established baseline because i’d already been wearing it for almost a year.

Alison:
[15:38] A long time.

Andrea:
[15:39] Yeah yeah and it uses you know the longer baseline you have the better data you can get yeah and so i just remember being kind of shocked. And I thought, I actually need to take care of myself like somebody who’s been through something. And that was kind of a revelation for me. And I was a little nervous going into getting this. I had some resistance that Gary had to face with me because I thought, oh, if I have it, I won’t listen to my body anymore. I’ll just look at an app and it will tell me if I feel good or not you know what I mean, what I I think there’s a way to judiciously use some of these programs I think that could happen if you you could get some kind of a monitoring device and then just say kind of ignore yourself I think that is possible, but I was already trying to be more conscious and pay attention and then when I got this.

Andrea:
[16:34] App I started making the connection between things that I hadn’t really picked up before. So we’re talking about, you know, detailed logging of food. Well, what if you had a detailed log of, you know, like you could look back and see actually how many times you were waking up or something like that. I was getting things that I wasn’t necessarily tracking physically. And so I think I’m, I actually felt now, when I feel things, I say, oh my goodness, I am feeling that way. I felt, you know, I do realize now it’s not just.

Andrea:
[17:11] You know, I have a night where I only have four hours of sleep and the next day I feel really badly, I no longer just say, oh, I guess I’m a lazy person. I say, ah, it looks like this animal was not well taken care of and probably needs extra hydration and not to overextend themselves today. So it’s been interesting. It’s been a very interesting journey.

Alison:
[17:33] Yeah. Just a really, I feel like that revelation of, you know, you kind of thought, actually i’m okay i think i can do this and then you look to that you’re like oh apparently my vital signs are showing that i’m not that okay.

Andrea:
[17:46] Yeah i think there is an aspect of me trying to ignore signals for myself for a long time and this is helping me to break that habit in some ways.

Alison:
[17:58] Yeah yeah okay should we go to some questions.

Andrea:
[18:02] Yeah should we start at just start at the top Yeah.

Alison:
[18:05] Yeah. Do you want to read or shall I? Do you read the first one?

Andrea:
[18:08] I’ll take the first one. This is from Brianna. She’s taking care. She’s doing in-home caregiving. And she has a lady she’s caring for who needs help getting meals that are easy to grab from the fridge and don’t require even the step of heating. So she was thinking about things like sandwiches and tortilla rolls and she said the lady likes yogurt and she the woman used to live in russia and is fond of russian food so that.

Alison:
[18:37] Opens up okay.

Andrea:
[18:39] A lot of options there.

Alison:
[18:41] So you had a couple of suggestions we well we talked about this before and your your suggestions sound more more interesting than mine so do you want to lead with yours.

Andrea:
[18:49] Well she said Russian food and I thought of paroushkis because those are they’re literally built for making a whole bunch at once and then just living off of them and I will.

Alison:
[19:02] Explain to us what those are if we don’t understand that word.

Andrea:
[19:06] Okay, Poroski might be, I’m assuming that it changes from place to place. Like there’s a Polish version with a different name, I think Brunzes, which you also find in the Midwest in the U.S. And there’s German versions of this, but it’s a bun that’s stuffed. So it’s stuffed with meat, cabbage, potatoes, sausages, like anything.

Alison:
[19:27] So now I’m knowing that I had those when I was in Russia, but I didn’t know that’s what they were called.

Andrea:
[19:31] Yeah. And my primary exposure to them in Russia, which is the first place I had them, was when we were going to take the train from Volgograd down to Kislovodsk on the Georgian border. And it’s a 24-hour train ride. And there’s a whole family of us. And the babushkas were not coming, but they spent two days beforehand making broschkis. And I remember going into the kitchen on every surface, the wide windowsill, the countertops.

Alison:
[19:59] The top of the refrigerator.

Andrea:
[20:00] Just piled in paroushkis. I don’t even know how many. And they just piled them all into, you know, kind of the cloth bags or packets, as they call it. And then we just carried those bags on the train. They were not refrigerated. Sorry, America. They were not heated. Nothing. We just kind of lived off of those for the next couple of days. So it was, it’s a travel food. And so she, I mean, she could keep them in the fridge if she wants to.

Andrea:
[20:27] But they don’t have to be heated and she can put whatever she wants in them. And she could heat it if she wanted to, you know, I don’t know what, it sounds like the mobility is fairly low. So the other thought that I had was if you make blini, this is, I don’t know if this is feasible for Brianna because she is doing a lot of work. But maybe if she can do it while she’s here at the woman’s house, maybe that’s what she’s thinking of doing. You can make a huge stack of blini and then you can make a huge, pot of you know ground meat of any variety you can shred in cabbage you can shred in kraut whatever, and then you can um you know lay the meat on the blini and roll it up you could put yogurt in there you could make dvorak to put in there like whatever and make a whole bunch of rolled up blinis and have a whole container this is kind of something i give gary when he like needs like food he can eat in the car um, at work so you know you can roll those up and if you make them if you do really firm ones you can slice them kind of like the tortilla rolls that she’s talking about, so then she has smaller pieces you know sometimes uh if somebody’s wheelchair bound they probably don’t have a huge appetite so they probably need smaller pieces.

Alison:
[21:34] Of food so.

Andrea:
[21:35] Those are just some thoughts that came to mind they cover the carb the veg the meat kind of all in one so.

Alison:
[21:39] So my thoughts aren’t russian but they’re still quite easy things to put in the fridge you drink the heater, well no i was thinking quiche to start with because you know you got the carb in the pastry eggy whatever you want to put in the side meat veggies whatever’s left over she’s got bung it in a quiche um coleslaw with the quiche, coleslaw you know you can make it with onion if you don’t like it make without onion lots of different cabbage carrot whatever just shred it all up mix it in with some mayo or not mayo just you know vinegar and, olive oil or some sort of other dressing and then that can go just stay in the fridge for like a week you know, and she can just take however much or how little she wants the other thing along the lines of the quiche is my fermented oat bake, it’s got the eggs in it it’s got the carb in it from the oats you don’t have to ferment the oats but you could, and then you can put bacon or mushrooms and cheese on the top you can make a sweet one you can whatever vegetables you’ve got in it and you make a great big slab of it cut it you could even cut it into portions for her, and separate them out and that will last in the fridge again for nigh on a week i would have thought and it’s you can eat it cold from the fridge it’s absolutely delicious so that was my two cents on that we’ll put um, the fermented oat bake recipe in the show notes yeah.

Andrea:
[22:59] Perfect i’m just actually was.

Alison:
[23:00] Already writing that down you read my mind thank you i’m.

Andrea:
[23:02] Also writing down i have a oat bake that we make for like postpartum meals morning meals because.

Alison:
[23:11] It’s like.

Andrea:
[23:11] You said it it’s got a lot of eggs in it it’s got you know kefir yogurt milk buttermilk whatever you want to put in it it’s kind of a complete meal so i’ll put that down too i love.

Alison:
[23:22] I love that fermented oak bake from the fridge i just i think it’s so delicious and so easy yeah so yeah.

Andrea:
[23:27] If anybody has if anybody’s listening and they’re like hello i’m from russia and you have a porosky recipe or.

Alison:
[23:34] Send it in.

Andrea:
[23:35] I’ve made a whole bunch of versions with a whole bunch of different grains and flours and wheats and einkorns and spouts and things like that but i don’t really have my one go-to staple. So if you want to send us one to me, I mean, I’m all about it. But for the most part, I would say look online, Brianna, if she was looking for one. Yeah, okay. That’s a good one.

Alison:
[23:58] So, the next question was from Hannah, and we’ve actually got a kind of a similar question that came in from Amanda.

Alison:
[24:05] So, perhaps we can answer kind of, they’re both the same question, really. So, Hannah says, I’d love to hear about Thanksgiving and Christmas meal ideas, desserts, drinks, and special family activities. And then Amanda, who’s got some other questions, did also say within her questions, Thanksgiving ferments or make-aheads for Thanksgiving. So this is going out on November the 10th. And the first thing that we wanted to point people to is the Christmas hamper, for 2026, which will be even bigger than the 2025 Christmas hamper, which has tons of.

Alison:
[24:45] Festive, sweet, savoury, make-ahead ideas, things that members from the community love to make at Christmas and have been traditions in their family or new recipes. That they brought you know to the table and, we’re hoping that’s going to go out around the same time as this episode goes out so either it’s in your inbox now it’s um available for all supporters as a gift to say thank you for keeping us going throughout this year um so it’s either in your inbox now or it will be in your inbox so i would point both of you to that um also hannah you are specifically about special family activities and Christmas, you know, ideas. We have in the treasure chest of previous episodes, I think two or three Christmas episodes. How many? Oh, thank you.

Andrea:
[25:36] Do you want to know? Go on then. Episode 20, which is Christmas traditions and what inspires us at the holidays.

Alison:
[25:44] Yeah, I remember that one.

Andrea:
[25:45] Episode 47, the Christmas survival guide.

Alison:
[25:48] Okay, yeah.

Andrea:
[25:49] Episode 73, Slow Christmas.

Alison:
[25:52] Yep.

Andrea:
[25:53] Episode 95, Let’s Make a Christmas Pudding. Okay, yeah. And episode 98, How to Have a Green and Peaceful Christmas. We got you covered, Amanda.

Alison:
[26:03] Five episodes about Christmas. So, I don’t know if you can make a playlist. Make a playlist of those five episodes and spend a day listening to us. Because there are lots of meal ideas, you know, how we make the holidays special for our families in that. Is there anything you want to add to that specifically, Andrea, about Thanksgiving or Christmas? Yeah.

Andrea:
[26:25] Well, kind of fun for Thanksgiving. This isn’t exactly going to answer your question, but episode 77 on the KTC is where I read, a blog post article, whatever you want to say, that I had written in 2011 of, my memories of Thanksgiving. It’s just kind of a fun family memory. So maybe it will inspire you, Hannah, to go and write. You know, I wrote just a memory of Thanksgiving at home. This was my first Thanksgiving away from home, and we were in California with the Navy. And I just sat down, and when I closed my eyes, like, the holidays are so impressed on my mind that, like, I could just walk right into them in my mind and, you know, live that experience. And so I thought, oh, write it down. And then I read it for this podcast episode. So maybe you’ll be inspired to write your family Thanksgiving.

Alison:
[27:18] That would be lovely. Yeah. Wonderful.

Andrea:
[27:21] Good one.

Alison:
[27:22] Okay. Do you want to read Lizzie’s question next?

Andrea:
[27:25] Yeah, Lizzie’s is a juicy one. This could easily be an episode, Allison. This could easily be an episode. All right, this is Lizzie, and a topic I’d be interested to touch on in both of your thoughts is how in our society with Instagram and even years ago with magazines and food stylists, we’ve been conditioned to visually expect how food is to look. In ancestral eating and in home milling, I can see at times the food does not match the food that at least I’ve had in my head, like visual food image brainwashing. I know this kind of food can look different, but for some things, I need to be reprogrammed. I made a pie crust that in no way looks like the pictures. Color especially, but it’s healthy and delicious. I made a pasta with a soft white flour that dried gray. Still delicious. I just find it interesting and had not realized how it had formed some of my thinking. Have you dealt with this at times? Warm regards, Liz.

Alison:
[28:28] Okay. So I want to start this by saying something which is kind of similar to this, but even more fundamental, I think. I was talking to a normal person last week who is a dad with kids, and he’s an optician. And he was telling me, we were talking about gardening and his experience of growing a few things in his garden. And he was talking about the carrots. And he said at the first time he did it, his son was four. And he’d grown these carrots in the garden and he brought them in to show his son.

Alison:
[29:05] And of course, they’d been grown at home. So they were all like gnarly, a bit bent, you know, a little mini carrot coming off the side. And because his son had been so used to carrots at the supermarket, which were bright orange, didn’t have any mud on and straight down, you know, just a tube. He looked at this carrot and he was like oh what’s that I’m not eating that that’s horrible that’s not a carrot what is it and he was really disturbed by the fact that this carrot did not look like a carrot because he’d thought carrots were just these uniform things, and I feel like that’s an even more fundamental kind of how do we expect even food to look you know a carrot to look these kid who if his dad hadn’t grown a carrot in the back garden would have thought for how long I don’t know, years, until he tried to grow a carrot or he went to someone’s house and they’d grown their own carrots, he would have thought that carrots have to look like supermarket carrots.

Andrea:
[30:01] Right.

Alison:
[30:02] And it’s just how far removed can we be from –, actual food what it is like grown by a human and in lizzie’s case here how far can we be removed from what it’s like to cook three meals a day in a kitchen, with various ingredients sometimes when it goes right sometimes when it goes wrong and just be happy to have a meal placed on the table, that tastes good no matter what it looks like you know we we’re getting further and further away from our food and as lizzie’s brought up in this, question with you know even starting with magazines You know, food magazines have been around for years, you know, and illustrations in cookbooks. I’ve got a cookbook that’s from the war downstairs and it’s got, you know, illustrations of perfect kind of weird gateaus and strange dishes that look like hedgehogs in them and all that kind of thing. So it’s not a new thing, but Instagram makes it so much more readily available to everyone and has put the… The gas pedal down on it has to look absolutely kind of perfect. So that’s just where I wanted to start with. Andrew, what do you want to say about this?

Andrea:
[31:11] Golly, this is just such a good one. And I’m guessing Liz has read this book, and I know I’ve talked about it before, and I think the author is Gary Tobes, and it’s called Why We Get Fat or How We Get Fat or something like that. And this is a book that has good crossover with her industry experience with food tasting because he does talk about a lot of the science and then the you know the hidden cameras and the timers and the mechanisms and everything that they do with that when they’re tracking people with flavors and and things like that and they’ll do things you know, and lizzie’s certainly had experience with this where they’ll you know change the gradient of the color just a little bit and see, like like people people don’t like a clear root beer shall we say like a kind of a clear-ish colored beverage. But if it’s a dark brown, they’re like, now this is good. And then if they drink like a grape soda, it has to be purple. And then they rate it as tasting better based on.

Alison:
[32:06] Just the appearance.

Andrea:
[32:08] I remember reading about this chef who did this. He had this thing where he would bring out, I don’t remember why this was his thing, but he would bring out a platter and there would be a little green jelly on it and a little red jelly on it. And the green jelly was cherry and the red jelly was like lime. And he did it to throw you because it wasn’t the you look at it and you’ve already started to shape the flavor in your mind, and he wanted to kind of toy with how the appearance, we’re already starting to develop our opinion about it based on the appearance and I just thought it was kind of an interesting experiment that he was doing with that but it does feed into what she’s saying like when she said I made pasta with a soft white flour and it dried grey that isn’t what you look for on Instagram and you know, I think her connection to the visual food image, brainwashing, you know, is good when you think about the way, you know, you see people represented online. You know, if you’ve ever met a celebrity in real life, don’t you always think, wow, they’re older than I thought, you know?

Alison:
[33:09] Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
[33:10] Because online they’ve got their, you know, their faces pulled back and they’ve got their kind of image, you know, even though they’re being like, I’m very authentic, you know, you’re still seeing a version of them that’s been prepared for public consumption.

Andrea:
[33:25] My sister sent me an article just maybe two or three days ago she had made a beef stew and she was telling me it was so incredible and it looked so ugly and she she said i came across this short article someone wrote i’ll link it for you lizzie in the um notes here and it’s called deliciously ugly, and somebody was just saying you know uh really good food does not look very good but it tastes delicious. And I was telling her, I’ve always said, have you ever, for the Americans out there getting ready for this holiday coming up, have you ever taken a picture of your Thanksgiving plate? And then you look at it and like, that looks disgusting. But as you sit there in real time, you just can’t wait to eat this pile of brown food, you know, just so good. So yeah, we’ve definitely been programmed. I think it’s like anything, Alison, the longer you spend away from the programming yeah and the more you talk with people i mean some food is very delicious like look at the picture of hannah’s berry crumble for instance in the um, in the in the treasury treasury that just came out the updated one yeah that uh is a very appealing looking food very simple and, you know but it’s got all those colors and things like that.

Alison:
[34:41] I think i think maybe part of us beyond the magazines and beyond instagram is kind of programmed to, be more be more attracted to a colorful plate because you know out in the wild the different colors would have would have given us different antioxidants different vitamins different this and that and therefore we probably, you know we probably are attracted somewhere deep down to a colorful plate um but that doesn’t there’s a there’s a leap between that and expecting our food to look a certain color you know um, because um i don’t know if you just take something just like spaghetti with a calcio and pepper just just a, pepper sauce then there’s no color in that apart from the spaghetti but you know if you do a spaghetti that’s gray everyone’s gonna be like that’s not the spaghetti that i bought from the supermarket and i in the italian restaurants and so that’s going to put people off you know there’s a difference between being attracted to, a multi-color plate and rejecting food that doesn’t look like an expectation that’s been built up in you by various, media i mean various big big conglomerates whether they make the pasta or they, publish the pasta and put it into a magazine or it’s an advert somewhere or it’s an Instagram version reinforcing that kind of color of pasta.

Andrea:
[36:05] Yeah, no, I 100% agree. If you go back to the episode we just put out, Alison, 141, the Kitchen Beauty episode.

Alison:
[36:15] We kind of.

Andrea:
[36:15] Touched on that where, you know, the appearance, you know, it’s not that, you know, dull skin is something we’ve been programmed to. Like it’s or to be alarmed by you know dull skin is kind of a primal instinct of hold on is your temperature up like are you doing okay, your blood is not flushing through your body the way it should and something is wrong but then we get these um we get caricatures we get tuned to these extreme exaggerated caricatures you know like of um, you know the way somebody should look like that you know, the super tight facelift type, you know, blown out lips type thing where, you know, they’re taking kind of the, Oh, a plump lip is a good thing. Okay, so then let’s exaggerate it. Really, really extreme. And then that is what we’re tuned to. And it’s the same thing with, oh my gosh, stimulation. We’re now tuned to have such high levels of stimulation from computers and screens and beeping and notifications and thumbs up and things like that. That people can’t even stand in line with their hands in their pockets and like wait for something they’re like ah i gotta look at something i gotta look at something you know.

Andrea:
[37:35] So we we get tuned to artificial levels like like lizzie is saying yeah the dairy episode yeah we did the dairy episode like two a year, ago i think two years ago that you mean the real episode 107 no the one that’s easy dairy products to make.

Alison:
[37:52] Oh yeah i.

Andrea:
[37:52] Remember yeah it is 107 um and i said on there that a lot of people say, I want to make cottage cheese like the grocery store. How do I make that? And the thing that is hard for people to wrap their head around with dairy is that the version we’ve gotten from the store of something isn’t necessarily right or wrong. It’s an industry standard that even gets legally set, you know, the percentage of fat in it and the stability of something gets even legally described. You know, you can’t even call it ice cream until it has this. Otherwise, it’s a frozen dessert, you know. And so it’s a legally set standard. And then everybody in the industry has to play to that standard. And so it’s not necessarily that it’s right or wrong. It’s just this is the description and this is what it looks like.

Alison:
[38:46] You know, what you’re saying reminds me of something I’ve been struggling with, with one of the recipes for the oak book, which is black pudding, blood pudding. And traditionally, if you buy black pudding in England now, it’s put in an ox casing. So it’s much wider. It’s not like a pig casing. It’s like, you know, five inches across. And it’s got a lot, lot, lot of oatmeal or barley in it, a lot of cereal, less blood in proportion. And it’s made with suet. So you can’t see the pieces of suet in it because, of course, when you heat suet, it goes to a liquid and it kind of the fibrous bit, the bit that holds it together disappears.

Alison:
[39:25] And that’s what people think of as black pudding, but that developed as black puddings moved from being in a household to being commercially made, where a butcher would have access to an ox bung at the same time as he had access to blood from a pig, and he’d have access to suet, so why not put it in a bigger casing, because it’s easier to put something in a bigger casing, and then slowly people wanted more cereal in it so they put more cereal in it but if you go back to actual farmhouse recipes well I’ve been trying to find original recipes for black pudding, and some of them have just in the in the ingredients they just put a little oatmeal so you don’t know how much a little is but when you look at the modern recipes the oatmeal far far outweighs the blood, you know and they have pig fat in them because they were made when the pig was killed and the household would just have a pig not a cow as well they wouldn’t be killing them at the same time and they were put in pigs intestines they were much smaller like sausages because that’s what would have been available so when i make a blood pudding and i have done recently.

Alison:
[40:33] My blood pudding doesn’t taste or feel like the blood puddings that the majority of people who’ve eaten blood puddings in this country are used to because there’s less oatmeal in it, far less. And so it’s kind of got a more pate-ish feel to it, which is what happens to blood when you cook it. Whereas it’s not hard and dry like the ones with more oatmeal in it. It’s got lard in it, the back fat. So you can still see the bits of fat in it because that doesn’t disintegrate like suet. And it’s tiny, it’s small in circumference. And I’m kind of, I have to, if I’m going to put a recipe like that in the book, I have to make people aware up front, this is not going to taste like a British black pudding that you’re used to if you’ve had black puddings now, because you’re not, eating a black pudding from 300 years ago or 200 years ago, made in a cottage. You’re eating the industrial kind of, you know, meandering of a black pudding into what it is now. And that’s the same thing. It’s kind of we’ve got this expectation of what the food is. And if it’s not like that, we’re just like, oh, that’s not a black pudding or that’s not a carrot or that’s not pasta. But it’s just because of how things have developed and how we’ve been programmed.

Andrea:
[41:49] Yeah. Gosh, you know, Alison, this… This is definitely a problem when it comes to sharing recipes when people want ancestral food, because constantly you’re running into this, basically re-education of ourselves and everybody who’s asking for the recipe. And last night I was reading my book, Janice Meredith, and it’s set in 1776, is the year I’m in at the moment, and it’s written in 1899, so he’s fairly close to the time. You know, 100 years after the time that it was written about. And so, sorry, it’s definitely, there’s wigs and tories. There’s all kinds of conversations about King George III and all that. But there’s a scene where the kind of the hero, it describes he grabs a great hunk of cornbread and a couple of sausages, and he runs out and springs into the saddle of his mare. And as he rides down the road, he tells the mare, you better not bounce me because I do not want to drop one piece of this cake. And I then spent the next 20 minutes thinking.

Andrea:
[43:00] But what did that cake taste like? And so I started thinking, okay, they would have been grinding the corn. What kind of corn would they have had? This is on Manhattan Island. They’re in New York. So it would have been something that grows over there. Would it be one of these crazy ones that Lizzie’s tasting, you know? And it would have been fairly fresh ground. But how fresh ground? And if it’s more provisions and it was harvest time at this, maybe it was last year’s, like, dried corn. Maybe it was, was it moldy? Was it not moldy? Like, what did it taste like? And, you know, when you have cornbread here, somebody gave me a recipe for cornbread the other day, and it was just a regular pan, but it had a cup of sugar in it. And I was like, what? Yeah, that’s what I said.

Alison:
[43:40] Wow.

Andrea:
[43:40] And I was like, hold on.

Alison:
[43:41] It’s a cake.

Andrea:
[43:44] That’s more than a cake. That’s more than I’d even put in like a dessert cake. And that’s including, you know, a frosting or a topping or something like that. So then I thought, you know, if you tell somebody, oh, here’s an authentic recipe from 1776, a corn cake, they’re going to have this idea in their head of this very tender, falling apart, pale, corn cake that’s sweet. But what he was eating with the sausages, you know, riding his mare down the road to, you know, the battle, the route, then he was surely eating a very sturdy, probably somewhat dry so it stays together, baked in a pan on a fire, not in an oven most likely.

Alison:
[44:28] Yeah.

Andrea:
[44:30] What was it like? What was it like? Yeah. But yeah, Lizzie’s right. It wouldn’t be Instagrammable. It wouldn’t have that tender, you know, moist crumb that people would expect.

Alison:
[44:41] Absolutely. Gosh, I feel like we have to move on to the next question.

Alison:
[44:46] Exactly, because we’re going to be here forever talking about this.

Andrea:
[44:49] Let’s tackle Amanda’s. Okay.

Alison:
[44:52] Do you want to read or shall I? Yeah, I’ll read.

Andrea:
[44:54] I’ll read Amanda’s. We kind of already hit her Thanksgiving question, she will say. So for anybody listening who’s going to hop on Discord, she said she makes a cranberry chutney, but she wants to know what others are making. So if you’re listening to this and you’re on the Discord, or if you’re not on the Discord and you just want to email it in, I mean, I could put it on the Discord for you. But if there’s something that you want to share with Amanda, do let her know. She said she’s always curious about brewing and pressing apple cider, both alcoholic variety and standard. Well, I will say one thing I’ve learned through ancestral research is cider is fermented and everything else is apple juice that’s why i was always like what’s the difference and apparently it’s just us americans that call it cider when it’s not fermented is that correct ellison for you.

Alison:
[45:39] Yeah i mean i i apple juice is apple juice cider is the the one that’s fermented what are you talking about.

Andrea:
[45:45] Yeah i don’t know i don’t know americans i don’t know if it was from our teetotal years or what but we call yeah you know pressed apple juice cider.

Alison:
[45:54] Oh, really? Even if it’s not fermented. Yeah. That’s not cider.

Andrea:
[45:57] I’m sorry. So now we know. Now we know. Um… She said she’s tried to avoid the need for another hobby, but she’s losing the battle. We are here to support your future hobbies.

Alison:
[46:07] So, I just want to say, go back to the brewing. Can we put, I’ve got two blog posts about brewing ancestral ale, which I wrote a couple of years back. And they would definitely be worth a read, Amanda. So, we will put them in the show notes. And they will take you a long time to read because they’re quite some length. We do have an episode as well, don’t we? What have we done to beer and what can we do about it way back in the annals? I don’t know if you’ve listened to that already, Amanda. If you haven’t, go back and listen to that and read my two blog posts because that will give you plenty of food for thought about brewing. Okay, let’s carry on with our list.

Andrea:
[46:45] Now, remember, for Amanda, that blog post, I have a friend who told her husband, well, Andrea’s friend really knows how to do the authentic medieval beers. And he was like, well, I’ll go do my research and then we’ll come back and discuss. And then he came back and he said, you know what? I found this really good blog post. This is the authentic thing. It’s got everything on it. And she was like, yeah, that’s Allison. He was like, oh, that’s the one I was telling you about. So he came to it on his own conclusion.

Alison:
[47:11] Excellent. I love it.

Andrea:
[47:13] So Amanda said, oh, and Amanda, go back and listen to the KTC Live from September, because we talked just briefly, but enough to give you an idea about cider apples. And there are different apples for ferment in terms of, you know, they’ll have way higher starch or way higher sugar, things like that. There’s ones that are better for fermenting versus others. And of course, you know, you want the skin and everything like that for the yeast when you press it. But if you go on, I’ll listen to there. Also, Mr. Roundy came on. He and his wife are supporters of the podcast and he gave a really good description of his orchard, which he is very dedicated orchardist. So that’s a really good lesson there. It’s kind of in the, I would say, in the first hour of the KTC Live, which went quite long.

Andrea:
[48:00] Okay, she says, I’m always in need of packed lunch inspiration, both for my kindergartner and my husband, and a good cookbook roundup. Always looking to expand my collection. Amen. Book suggestions, period. I love food history. I am currently reading A Square Meal, A Culinary History of the Great Depression by Jane Ziegleman and Andrew Coe. That sounds amazing.

Alison:
[48:23] I want to read this. So I wanted to say about the—I’m just writing something down so I can try and remember. Yeah.

Alison:
[48:30] The Pack Lunch inspiration, I feel like that maybe needs to go on our list of episodes for next year. Pack lunch for little ones and big ones too, because I think we’ve got quite a lot to share on that. So hopefully, Amanda, we will do something on that for next year. The Cookbook Roundup, well yeah, exactly. Your book sounds really interesting. I was going to say there’s two books that I’m reading. Well, I have just read. One of them is Dr. Neil Buttery, who’s written a book called The Dark History Sugar, which is really interesting. And then I’m in the middle of reading another one. I think the author’s name is Liz Collingham. It might be Cottingham. And it’s about how Britain’s quest for empire shaped our food history around the world. And it’s absolutely amazing. She is just an incredible historian, the facts in it that she has. Just blown me away how someone can do that much research. And each chapter starts, with a dish, with someone eating something. And then she unpacks the kind of history around, well, why were they eating corn when they originally had been growing mate? You know, something else, sorghum. Why were they doing this? And they’ve got little recipes in it that are from, you know, the original time. It’s just, it’s a fabulous book. And I can’t exactly remember what it’s called, but we will put it in the show notes. I will look it up after we’ve finished and we will put the name of that book in the show notes as well.

Andrea:
[49:55] I have also, Alison, this year, I’ve just come across so many wonderful books and cookbooks and books about food and food history that I’ve been reading. And I keep, you know, I’m always gunning for a book episode. You know me. I’m like, that’s no one all about books. So I think this should go on the schedule. Maybe we could do an episode where we have some good and unusual cookbooks we discuss. We could have some good history books that we discuss and maybe even some good fiction books that have good exposure to ancestral food that might be a good episode. So… You know me. I love the book episodes. I’ll add on, Amanda said at the end of this question, I love the podcast. My husband and I run a raw dairy in Virginia, so I frequently take y’all with me out to do cow chores or when I am bottling milk. Yeah, that is a chore, and that does have to happen every day. You’ve saved the day on more than one occasion when I’m stuck at the sink for an hour plus washing milk bottles and lids. Appreciate all the work that you do and the energy that goes into production. Thank you, ladies. And Rob, Rob. Look at that. Rob, she remembers you. I love it.

Alison:
[51:00] That’s nice.

Andrea:
[51:00] She knows the person who’s behind the scenes. That’s so good.

Alison:
[51:04] Yeah.

Andrea:
[51:05] Yeah. Oh, that’s amazing, Amanda.

Alison:
[51:08] Okay. So we’ve still got another question, haven’t we? I think. Shall I read the last one?

Alison:
[51:13] Yeah. Okay. So this is from Bethany, who is in Wisconsin, who’s a new-ish supporter, she says. I just adore this community and podcast. Thank you for all that you do. I find that my kids, one, three, and seven, really thrive on a simple carb at each meal that sort of whets their appetite for eating more of the protein and veg on their plate. I raise all our veggies and my husband raises all of our meat. Wow. So we really want to want to instill a love of what we produce here. As a result, I’ve made a concerted effort to experiment with cooking more nutrient-dense carbs and starches that are grown locally by our lovely organic grain farmers that stone millet all fresh monthly. Things like cracked wheat porridge that I can ferment all day and then cook in broth and herbs. And a new discovery has been yummy cracked rye risotto.

Alison:
[52:02] Since implementing the episode on preparing beans properly, I have added that to my easy weekly meal prep which I can just add as a quick starch to almost any meal too but one of the carbs I still go to at least once a week is white rice. I’m trying to be gentle with myself and not aim for perfection but there are some dishes that rice just has the right texture and consistency. I’m open to the possibility that rice might be something I should just stop purchasing and get used to not having it often but it’s so easy and fast which is good on busy days with less food prep time. Thankfully, we do have access to wild rice, manumin from up north, I’m going to pronounce this wrong, Ojibwe land. So that might be a nice transition. But I’m curious what your thoughts or opinions are on this. Can I prepare white or brown rice more nutrient densely and earlier in the day like these other grains rather than just as emergency carbs, water in the rice cooker and done in 30 minutes? Thanks. So, Andrea, what’s your take on that?

Andrea:
[53:06] I want to come over for dinner. That’s my take.

Alison:
[53:11] Yeah, veggies fresh from the garden and their own raised meat.

Andrea:
[53:14] Invite me!

Alison:
[53:16] Yeah.

Andrea:
[53:16] That all sounds so good. I think there’s something to be said. Well, she’s putting a lot of nutrient-dense food on the table.

Alison:
[53:25] Absolutely.

Andrea:
[53:26] And I think, you know, if you made a simple rice and you put butter on it or a simple rice cooked in broth and it went next to all that fresh meat and the, protein, the veg and things like that, I don’t think that would be a problem. It’s not like they’re exclusively eating rice. But what do you think, Alison?

Alison:
[53:46] Yeah, I think I feel the same. I mean, I understand the desire to have food, local, local food, and to have as many of your food, as much of your food locally as possible. You know, that veg is coming just from your garden and the meat is something you’ve raised yourself. That’s just amazing. Absolutely amazing. And the more we go into that, the more we kind of want the rest of it to be like that too, you know, the further we get. And so I can completely understand that, um, that desire and I do feel like you know the wild rice that you’ve got which is local um Bethany that is a nice addition but I also feel like you know you must be very busy with your veg and your meat and you’ve got three kids who are both we’re all really young and so, sometimes we just need that easy option and, we eat rice here in this in this household I was able to eat more local carbs were in Italy because they produce millet in Italy and they produce sorghum in Italy and they produce rice in Italy and they produce oats and rye in Italy. I was just in this amazing place for eating local carbs but back here in England, no I’m not. There’s no millet, there’s no rice, there’s no sorghum. I can still get sorghum.

Andrea:
[54:58] Refer back to the soggy opening of this episode and that would be my house.

Alison:
[55:02] Exactly, exactly. But I feel like with rice, the ideal for me is to not just rely on white rice. So we have white rice, brown rice and risotto rice in the cupboard. And I like to, when I have the forethought, I like to turn to that brown rice. Now all of those rices can be fermented if you have the time, but the brown rice, I feel like, well, at least we’re having some more fiber when we have brown rice but not brown rice all the time because it takes longer to cook all of them ideally i would cook in broth like you said andrea i’ve cooked rice in way as well um, but mainly in broth you know i’ve got like it all way or.

Andrea:
[55:45] Water and way.

Alison:
[55:45] Generally halfway and half water and sometimes it’s too strong gable can’t eat the one that’s that’s halfway he has to have less way but rob really likes it with way in, um so i feel like if you cook it with broth and you’re having it with other food, and with fat on it, then nutrients wise, you’ve got those wonderful veg from your garden, you’ve got that meat that you’ve raised yourself, you’ve cooked potentially the rice in broth, and you know, you’ve got some salt on it. So you’re bringing that in as well. And you’ve got fat all over that. I don’t feel like the rice is a detriment to that meal. And I would feel like it’s okay to do that. But I can understand, you know, the desire to be as local as possible, because oh I feel that.

Andrea:
[56:33] Absolutely absolutely I do and I think I always come back to, look back through history what do we observe and there are spaces where you see kind of filler things, that I mean yes typically it’s going to be a more nutrient-dense version the farther back you go because you know it won’t be all kind of, hybridized for size and things like that like we have now, yeah but it does occur you know filler does happen sometimes people needed a lot of millet to get through a season, you know yeah and there wasn’t a lot of uh possums for the taking so some kind of a grain went on the table but but i it sounds just absolutely incredible and it’s not like you guys are exclusively living off of rice or something so.

Alison:
[57:23] No exactly exactly.

Andrea:
[57:25] Sometimes you gotta.

Alison:
[57:26] Have that fast food there are a lot of heritage rice great rice and varieties as well oh yeah and i i’ve read a couple of rice books and there are lots, especially in the states because i remember reading a lot of them came from the states so you know there is the possibility to look up um heritage varieties and.

Andrea:
[57:42] She’s right in the bring those in she’s right in the nest of all of that so it sounds like she’s she knows where she’s getting it close by to her yeah because like wild rice if you’re in the u.s is probably going to come from the Great Lakes area, Wisconsin, kind of Michigan area. And then if you’re getting white rice in the U.S., it’s probably going to come from California, jasmine rice coming from there. That’s just kind of how it goes sourcing-wise. But, And it’s something that I’ve gone back and forth on a lot myself because I’m like, there’s nobody growing rice out here. I’m like, well, do we just not eat rice? And then my family goes, no, I eat rice. You’re crazy. And yes, we did run out of rice, you know. Remember when we did our country thing.

Alison:
[58:25] Yeah.

Andrea:
[58:25] And kind of still in that mode, but just buying things here and there. And the one thing that I went and bought was the rice because the family was like, and I think I told you about us. And it was when I brought the rice home, you know, it was definitely like, wow, everybody was dancing around. The kids were so excited. Mommy got rice, mommy got rice. I was like, well, you know how to make it special. Just don’t have it for a while.

Alison:
[58:51] Looking at Bethany’s message, I’m thinking, Bethany, let us know what your cracked rye risotto recipe is because I want to have a go at that.

Andrea:
[58:58] I’m into that. That sounds like something Rob would like, given that he loves the rye and loves your risotto.

Alison:
[59:04] Definitely.

Andrea:
[59:05] That would be really good. Alison, what else do you want to say on here?

Andrea:
[59:08] I can’t believe it. We got through all the questions.

Alison:
[59:10] I know I know I was just thinking about the bread and Lizzie’s question and how you know in this house we have bread that’s really really dark like the rye is like the darkest the black einkorn is quite dark spelt somewhere in the middle the gluten-free bread that I’m eating is quite light Gable’s had breads of all different colors and all different kind of textures and crumbs and and how, I’m grateful that he just likes the bread no matter what it is and I remember you know when I went to a, kind of barbecue once in italy we had you know bring some food along and i brought a whole grain spelt loaf with me and how people were like, a bit like what’s that you can it’s like kind of dark and it’s got a closer crumb it’s not kind of white chibata kind of bread what’s that and and it felt like this wonderful bread that i’d made, that was wholesome and sourdough and homemade people are like that’s not bread, and seeing that right i’m trying to go off and back on a tangent to lizzie’s question about, what we’re used to and and i feel like that’s that’s a big thing that’s holding back people from changing because they don’t want to eat the thing that they’re not used to eating you know.

Andrea:
[1:00:28] No i mean i get that and and again i don’t think that’s a moral failing I think it’s probably a very built-in kind.

Alison:
[1:00:37] Of survival instinct.

Andrea:
[1:00:39] Eat what’s familiar, lest ye die. And so I don’t think it’s, oh, you’re weak, and so you can’t try something new. I just think we need to be very conscious of it. And I think very judicious with our family. Like, you don’t want to be harsh on your family. Like, well, you don’t like my blended raw liver with egg yolks on top? How dare you? Like, well, you know, go easy on them. I think the thing people complain about the most is the bread, Alice. And when people switch over to even homemade white flour yeast bread, the thing that I hear the most is, how do I make it like the bread from the store? And I want to tell them that you don’t want like the bread from the store. Like that floppiness that ability to stay in the cupboard for three weeks without molding that fluffy texture that isn’t that’s like that’s not bread that’s a sponge of some sort yeah and you know bread that, breaks in half by the second day that’s real.

Alison:
[1:01:44] Bread yeah yeah okay so yeah do do go and explore the christmas hamper that’s what i’d like to end with yeah because either it’s with you or it will be with you very shortly and it is getting bigger and bigger every year and if you explore it now then you’ll be all that inspiration will be kind of milling around in your head ready for thanksgiving and christmas yeah so yeah beautiful.

Andrea:
[1:02:11] Good to chat allison as.

Alison:
[1:02:12] Always yeah uh definitely i shall speak to you again um for the next recording thank you andrea sounds good bye.