Kitchen Table Chats #23 – Meals at the Ancestral Hearth – Our New Cookbook For You!!

In this episode, we give a snapshot of what’s bubbling in our kitchens right now. From medicinal vegetable ferments to historic fizzy Turkish drinks, come listen and share in our creations.

What our own ancestral kitchens and this virtual community has taught us in 2021.

Today we got to sit down again with Meredith Leigh, a butcher and author of The Ethical Meat Handbook, and ask her a lot of questions about Confit, Rilette and Terrines. Meredith has a course on these three items – including headcheese, by the way – a course which Alison and I both took, and made use of in our own kitchens, and we loved the tasty results so much we wanted to ask Meredith more and get her on the air so you could hear her talk about these incredible versatile and thrifty preparation and preservation methods of storing meat, fat and scraps that honestly would often otherwise end up in the trash.

The world of essential oils is an ancient and ancestral one. From the Mesopotamian valley where the Sumerians, Akkadians and ancient Hebrew tribes were distilling, trading and using oils to the apothecaries and wisdom of the ancient Chinese; from the dusty tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs like Tutankhamun to the Silk Road and spice merchants guiding camels burdened with precious ointments, oils, resins and salves.

“I just can’t afford to eat ancestrally” is something that we hear all the time. And we get that, the mainstream, shop-bought side of ancestral eating can sometimes be eye-wateringly expensive. Notwithstanding that we’ve both been eating this way on a very tight budget for over a decade each. We’re going to show you that it is possible!