#98 – How to Have a Green & Peaceful Christmas

If you’re bringing raw milk into your home, whether it is through a herd share, shopping from a local raw dairy or co-op, or you have a cow on the back pasture, it is inevitable that we start wanting to value-add that milk; both adding nutritional value to it by culturing it in our homes, and adding monetary value by making raw milk into what would be higher priced items from the store. In this episode Robyn who is the creator over at Cheese From Scratch on Instagram is here to teach us about creating your own cheese starter on the counter at home, and producing naturally fermented cheese in your own kitchen.

If you asked both Andrea and I who’s inspired us the most we’d both put our guest today, Sandor Katz, right up there in our top couple of names. We’ve read his books, underlining phrase after phrase, we’ve taken his advice; we’ve made his ferments, so many of his ferments. He’s inspired, educated, and hand-held us both through our food fermentation journeys.

In this episode, Alison talks to Carwyn Graves, author of Welsh Food Stories, a beautiful chronicle of the ancestral food of Wales. They talk about food born from landscape, sustainability, women as the holders of ancestral heritage, fermentation, bread and much much more…

We get a lot of questions about butchering chickens over here on the podcast, and those questions range from “I have a backyard flock and I would like to be able to cull a few hens and some roosters every year,” all the way up to, “We are planning to raise enough meat birds for ourselves and our neighbors and we need to know what tools we need to get started on that.” In this episode, I am going to do my best to get you comfortable with the idea of butchering a few hens on your kitchen counter, and reassure you that you have every tool you need, and it really is a simple and straightforward process – but there is a learning curve, and it is worth learning.

Piper’s Farm was founded in 1989 by Peter Grieg and his wife, Henri. It’s just north of Exeter in Devon, Britain, and today it is run by their son Will and his partner, Abby, in a multi-generational partnership and succession achievement.