Kitchen Table Chats #43 – Nebraska Runzas, Mechanization of Humans, Big News!

These are the show notes for a podcast episode recorded especially for patrons of my main show (Ancestral Kitchen Podcast). These patrons pay a monthly subscription to be part of the podcast community and in return receive monthly exclusive recordings (like this private podcast) along with lots of extra resources. You can get access to the recording and see how the community works by visiting www.patreon.com/ancestralkitchenpodcast.

What we cover:

• What we ate – making runsas and baking with mixed ancient grains
• Alison’s instant pot lunch!
• Resting after eating – how it feels in the body
• Andrea shared a passage from Why Literature Still Matters by Jason M Baxter regarding treating ourselves as machines; the usage of cars and moving faster
• Alison surprises Andrea with some news! Can you guess what it is!?

Transcript:

Alison:
I’m good, thank you. Hello. How are you?

Andrea:
Good. So, for anybody listening, we’re giggling because we started and then when we started, I, for some reason, immediately clicked stop and then we had to start again. So I don’t know where my, I don’t know. I am addled this week.

Alison:
Addled and confused. That’s all right. You have a young baby. That’s understandable.

Andrea:
Growing boy. He’s got a couple new teeth. So like that’s part of the picture. Top two. Front ones.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Yeah. Classic. and he is eating and i mean an insane volume of food all of a sudden he just went from like nibbling things here and there to wolfing down entire bowls of things and when he had his milk and kefir the other night he drank 17 ounces and was perfectly happy and then went to sleep and up for three hours so so he’s eating a lot i think he’s gonna grow processing quickly a lot in the next few weeks so i think he’s just just grown boy yeah so that’s life over hey do we i for some reason i can’t remember do we do what we last ate on these episodes okay we do because i had interesting food yeah i had interesting yeah i’ll go on then we made uh Last night, we made ronces, which is like broszki, kind of, basically. Same thing, different country.

Alison:
Which country is it then?

Andrea:
I want to say ronces is Polish, but I might be wrong. So, if somebody knows, please do tell. But it’s definitely popular in the Midwest. Or was, I don’t know if it still is, but it was back in ye days, since we had a lot of Eastern European settlers in the Northwest. And… I have not, I don’t think I’ve actually made them since before Jacob was born.

Alison:
Wow, that’s a long time.

Andrea:
I know, it’s been a very long time. But the kids absolutely went bonkers for them. They love them. And I’m excited because they’re such a nice portable food for Gary to take to work.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And you can eat them cold, you can eat them hot.

Alison:
So talk us through it. What did you do?

Andrea:
Well, I just made dough, and I wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted the dough to be, so I kind of just kept throwing things in until it turned out to be the consistency that I wanted. I used wheat, kamut, and rye mixed. The least of the rye, but I would say equivalent of wheat and kamut. I wasn’t sure how the dough would hold together if I used too much rye. So I haven’t tested the tensile strength of rye in something like a standalone bun. Yeah, that’s kind of what I figured. But I just love the flavor of rye, and I was trying to get some of it in there. I think in retrospect, I could have used more rye than I did. But anyways, it has lard and milk and eggs, you know, things to make like a kind of sturdy, enriched dough. And then I, for the filling, I cooked a couple packages of our sausage and shredded in a cabbage, of course. And we had some leftover rice, so I threw that in. And I diced in an onion.

Alison:
Salt.

Andrea:
I think that was it.

Alison:
Sounds like kind of cabbage rolls, but with the cabbage on the inside and dough on the outside.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Yeah, pretty much.

Andrea:
Yeah. And then I had a partial block of cheese left over from that event at church that I told you about. And so I cubed it. And right before I filled them, I just threw the cubes into the sausage filling and give them a good stir. And then Camille, so I cut it up. Let’s see, I made… Eight, 16, 24, 48 of them. And I cut the dough into pieces and then Camille, she rolled them and I filled them. We just kept piling them on pans. And then I ran out of filling. So then I took out, I had made shredded cabbage and ginger and stuff the night before. So I put that in and then when I ran out, I just baked the last few as little buns. And I brushed it with eggs, egg white, because I had made tapioca for breakfast. So I had some egg whites in the fridge and it was delicious.

Alison:
Sounds like it.

Andrea:
Yeah, so I’ll probably…

Alison:
Your recording is still uploading. So I’m hearing you cut out quite a bit.

Andrea:
Okay i don’t wonder if you can press pause on it again it looks like on this side it’s at 93 percent um so.

Alison:
It should be on zero.

Andrea:
So it should be paused, oh wait no i thought that was for the one we did before the tiny one or is that something else.

Alison:
No i think it’s it’s for the one we’re doing now because it keeps kind of going up and down.

Andrea:
It says upload paused for both of us and you’re right mine is showing 95 67 of 74 megabytes uploaded oh.

Alison:
So maybe it’s.

Andrea:
68 yours says 0 of 0 I’m gonna resume and then pause again, okay I just paused it so we’ll see if the audio should be okay from the listener’s side correct it’s just yeah you are not gonna have me here okay now mine is says 70 of 79 uploaded and it’s not changing so that might be okay now my percent is starting to drop now it says 89 okay so maybe.

Alison:
It has paused now.

Andrea:
Yeah well um we’re learning the program folks it’s fine exactly i don’t know what’s.

Alison:
Going on we do know what’s going on but But, you know, technology is always, always more complicated than you think it’s going to be. Always. I just.

Andrea:
And then you know what doesn’t help? You know what doesn’t help, Alison?

Alison:
What’s that?

Andrea:
For those of us who like things that haven’t changed for two or three thousand years or more.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
It’s very annoying when just when you start to figure it out, then there’s an update. And then you don’t know again. Yeah, and then everything changes.

Alison:
You know, I went to the library, this is an aside, a couple of weeks ago to print some things for the book that I’d just, you know, I’d actually finished a few bits and bobs and I wanted to see them. And our printer was intermittently working. So I just went to the library and I had to go on a Windows computer to try and print. And because I haven’t, you won’t believe I used to work for Microsoft, I haven’t been on a Windows computer for I don’t know how long. I got to it. I was like, what do I press? Where’s that? That’s not where it used to be. I had no idea. I was like some 90-year-old. I had to go to the desk and say, oh, I did this and did that. But now nothing’s working. In the end, I sorted it out. But I was a bit like, whoa.

Andrea:
I think you should have told them, I do work for Microsoft.

Alison:
There was just this massive light screen in front of me. I was like, that’s a big screen and it’s really bright and the lights above me are really bright. And it was like going into a supermarket when you haven’t been in a supermarket for six months. And then all the other people around me were just like staring at the screen, like with the headphones on. I’m thinking, I’m in some weird world here where people do this every day. Hello. I have to get out of here now.

Andrea:
The Matrix. Yeah, exactly. It makes your skin crawl. You know, that’s interesting, Allison. As soon as you said the lighting, it made me think, gosh, maybe that’s part of why I don’t like libraries. There are all these fluorescent lights, and it just feels like… I don’t know. When I’m reading, I want me some cozy lights.

Alison:
Yeah. Or natural light.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Some libraries are lucky because they have windows and you can go and sit by the windows and that’s nice. But there’s a new library here in Stroud and it’s underground, literally.

Andrea:
Wait, what?

Alison:
And it’s just got the most horrible lights. I don’t want to go in there.

Andrea:
Under, like, you go down?

Alison:
Yeah. It’s like in the basement of a shopping center.

Andrea:
Oh, wow.

Alison:
You know?

Andrea:
I mean, there is a way to do that.

Alison:
Horrible.

Andrea:
You know, there is a way.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
You can make it like a cozy.

Alison:
Natural spectrum lights, et cetera.

Andrea:
Well, don’t get us started on lights. What did you eat?

Alison:
Yeah, no, exactly. Well, I almost ate. I just about ate, I would say. When we record these sessions together, we record at my time, 1.45. And so I have to kind of get my luncheon done so I can be up here. And it got to about 11 o’clock and I knew Rob was in charge of dinner I’d kind of left everything with instructions in place and nothing had happened at 11 o’clock and I thought, he didn’t start doing it so it’s gone really nastily wrong and I’m gonna have to go down and kind of try and figure out what’s the matter.

Andrea:
Wait like he was editing.

Alison:
Well he was doing something on the computer and I could hear some some kind of um you know like stars and hashtags and things coming up from his area so I don’t think he was very happy um and um, I went down there and he had an awful software problem this morning. Again, back to technology.

Andrea:
No.

Alison:
Having someone around who gets involved in software on a daily basis makes you realise how difficult it is. Just things go wrong all the time and you don’t know why and you have to spend ages in the code trying to find out why. So he had some problem with the software this morning and he was still on the computer and not very happy. Gable was being really patient down there instead of doing stuff with data which is what you should have been doing and the kitchen.

Alison:
Looks like a bomb had hit it there was all the washing up from breakfast there was um i cooked a bread this morning really early so the bread was there and the tin was there and then we’ve been doing um rendering suet over the last 24 hours and we tried it for the first time in instant pot and as happens when you try something for the first time in a particularly new situation it doesn’t necessarily go as planned um so there’s like bits of hard tallow all over the place like on the rim of the instapot down the front of the instapot and the plug of the instapot on the surface and then all the tallow had hardened all over the equipment so there’s just like you know and tallow’s so hard it’s not like large you know it’s like solid no so there’s tallow everywhere there’s all the stuff that i got out for for lunch it’s just everywhere and i was just like oh my gosh okay if i don’t step in here there’s gonna be no dinner so um i’ve managed to pull rob off the computer because i know that sometimes most often when he moves away from the situation and has an hour or so’s break he sometimes gets back and and fixes it just like that because he’s a mathematician.

Andrea:
Isn’t that like a thing.

Alison:
They say take them away and on the problem cogitates in the background yeah so then we try to clear up all the tallow um and then render the niblets down in um i’m trying to um season my cast iron wok by rendering niblets in it in the last bit of the fat making just to coat it each time instead of using the cast iron pan to make the niblets crispy um i’m using the wok to try and make them crispy um and yeah niblets is what we call them but what are they actually called um i’ve forgotten what the actual word is now cracklings i think cracklings yeah nibbles is cute um so i was doing that getting more of this tallow out just more and more tallow we’ve got so much tallow now we don’t want to do with it like literally stuffed in every corner of the freezer and in the fridge just just tallow everywhere.

Alison:
And then we had to clear up all the mess and clear up all the breakfast things and then get all the stuff chopped and in the now clean instant pot, ready to make lunch. And what we had was stewing steak, beef, with carrots, onions and a cabbage and a bit of kale. And then I put a liquid in there, which was just water with some tomato paste and some horseradish. About half the amount of horseradish to tomato paste. I like putting horseradish in my beef stew, I’ve found. It’s really, really nice. Does not taste it.

Andrea:
Eat the horseradish?

Alison:
It just gives a depth to it that you don’t get otherwise. And then you just get the lid on. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?

Andrea:
It’s a really good idea.

Alison:
Really, really wonderful. Put the lid on, put it on high for 35 minutes and then carry it on cleaning up the kitchen. And I cooked a bread this morning, as I said, which was a sourdough spelt with a scaldin, which was black barley. So I put the black barley through the mock mill on number 15 so it’s quite knobbly quite thick, and I made a scald with it and then I let that cool down and I put it into my dough which was spelt which had been ground finally in the mock mill is it and I did that yes slack yeah it actually is black yeah it’s actually purple when you grind it it looks black on the outside but when you grind it’s purple. So my dough was actually slightly purple. I made the bread last night and then I put it in the Emile Henry tin and put it in the fridge overnight to proof and then pulled it out this morning about half past four and cooked it about half past five. So we had that sliced with lard on it, our home rendered lard with the stew and just about, it was done about five minutes after the scheduled time for me to be able to finish it and get up here and record with you.

Andrea:
So you barely ate.

Alison:
Yeah, I did. I did eat. It was all right. It was calm. I like to rest after I’ve eaten, which is just a practice that I’ve been trying to put in place for about a year now, relatively successfully. And after I eat at lunchtime, I like to just try and sit down for half an hour. Sometimes I close my eyes, try not to take any information in and just be peaceful. And I had time to do that just about before I came up here.

Andrea:
Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to start that practice. And if there’s things you, what do you notice in that practice?

Alison:
Yeah, I think what inspired me was just, just being so tired. Because my Achilles heel really is sleep that I’ve struggled with since my 20s. And done a million trillion different things to try and fix it. Gone down rabbit holes and goodness knows what. And I naturally, if I don’t sleep very well, get tired after I’ve eaten, which is normal, you know, because I’m digesting. And if I’m a bit tired, I’m going to be even more tired after I’ve eaten. And it feels good to be able to stop after I’ve eaten and have a moment to just let what’s in my stomach go down. You know, respect what’s happening in my body. And I started it, I think, because I was tired. And then I kind of thought, well, this is nice. This is helping. It’s making me feel better in the afternoon. And I know, you know, they say about babies, well, if a baby sleeps well during the day, it’s going to sleep better at night. It’s not necessarily stopping it sleeping at night, which is what you might think.

Alison:
And, you know, lots of our ancestors have had in the Mediterranean, obviously where I used to live and an afternoon nap and so I just tried it and I found that I sleep better if I rest properly for half an hour after my lunch um I noticed that you know just the days that I couldn’t do it or the weeks where it kind of went out because it was a busy week and I got out of the habit I’d sleep slightly worse and it just it feels obviously saying it’s experiential it’s only my own experiments but it just feels like I sleep better if I rest and it feels like a reset you know well then I’m ready to face the afternoon I’m not getting up and slamming into the next task after food and not allowing that food to settle down and digest I’m respecting my my body and my needs as a as a person by just resting so yeah I’m.

Andrea:
Very interested in that. And I’m thinking… For one, they left that out of the Mediterranean diet book. But in the Lark Rays to Candleford, I remember her describing, and I’ve seen this in other agricultural sort of narratives, how the men out in the field would eat and then they’d all lay down under the trees at the edge of the field and sleep for like half an hour before they went back to work. Which i always thought sounded so pleasant you know you just think of a, kind of a summery hazy day under the sun bugs making their noise and birds making their noises and it’s hot and it’s the worst part of the day and you just ate and you’re just laying under the tree resting and then you get back up and work until that’s lovely the sun goes yeah until sun goes down yeah yeah yeah but that’s i’m really interested by that alice and also the.

Andrea:
Well you know this that i’m kind of at this place in my life where i’m admitting things to myself and like well if you um once again come to four o’clock and don’t have a meal planned, shocker you knew this was coming so thinking of something like you said the rest you know you said well i get tired and so instead of denying myself well i know i don’t actually get tired i could get over it or i should be stronger or something just saying well actually you are tired admit it and, deal with it yeah in a healthy way i realized as soon as i said deal with it it sounded like, dismissive but like like no but find a way to acknowledge it yeah address it that’s probably the better thing to say address it.

Alison:
Yeah and it feel it it’s it’s hard to keep it up as a practice It’s just like any of these practices are, you know, because there’s always something to do. You know, there’s always more work to do. There’s always tidying up to do. There’s always something exciting to do. And it feels just like a negative space resting. But it’s important to remember that it’s not a negative space. Yeah. I mean, it’s so, I know just how much rest is important and how much better I feel when I rest. And so I have to kind of view it. I don’t want to view it in, oh, rest is productive, because that’s the backwards way of seeing it. But rest is important.

Andrea:
Yeah. I think. Well, you’re actually bringing me into something that I brought downstairs to this discussion because I wanted to send it to you over an email. And then I thought, no, I’ll send it to you on a voice message. And then I thought, no, I’ll just say it on the KTC. I see. But, so I’m thinking about your rest specifically, and thinking… How, I don’t want to say this in a like pity party way, but sometimes it’s hard to do things when you’re constantly against the grain of the culture. And sometimes you think if everybody was doing that, you know, if everybody’s laying down at the edge of the field under the trees and you’re like, well, I’m going to go back out there and start like trying to rake up some more grain. You’d feel like a moron out there by yourself you know and everybody would come out all refreshed and rested and you know be able to work twice as hard as you after their rest and you’d be grumpy and angry but when you’re the only one sitting down to rest then you feel awkward too and so sometimes I feel like it’s hard to know in my body does this feel right or not because I’m so, cluttered with the the culture or you know without realizing that i’m cluttered expectations.

Alison:
And yeah yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah so i had this passage from a book i wanted to read it’s a it’s almost like a like a three essay or a mini essay book um it’s called why literature matters and it’s written by Jason Baxter. And he’s been doing some classes for us at the Literary Life, which is how I’ve become familiar with him. He wrote a book called The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis.

Andrea:
And that’s relevant because I’m going to read something he wrote about Lewis. So, he’s a Lewis scholar, very interested in the way Lewis thought. And as any listeners who might not know, Lewis is considered the most well-read person that we know of in the world in terms of how much he read and he possibly has read more medieval literature than anybody and knew it quite well. So his mind was always in a medieval space and so he saw things a little bit different, When I read this, I thought, ooh, I need to call Allison. This is a quote from C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy. He says, the deadly, oh, hold on. Let me just give a little bit of context. He is talking about cars.

Andrea:
He’s reflecting, Baxter says, on how fortunate he was to grow up as a child without access to cars. Lewis says, The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance. In return, I possessed infinite riches, what would have been to motorists, a little room. The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it annihilates space. It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. That is the passage, which I loved. And…

Andrea:
I guess I’m thinking about it in a, kind of think about it like computers. You know, I say, oh, I’m so lucky I didn’t grow up using a computer. But then kids today don’t know what it’s like to like not, you know, like I can be in town and call Gary on the phone. That wasn’t like if we were in town when I was a kid and we wanted to call my dad, we had to like go to the lobby of the grocery store. and be like, can we use your phone or something? And hope he was at home. Yeah, or call his office or something. So what’s interesting to me in this passage and then the later reflection in the essay is that Lewis talks about also a theme that comes up, Baxter alludes to in That Hideous Strength and also Abolition of Man. And then in a lecture he gave at Cambridge called Descriptione Temporum. I don’t know how to speak Latin, so sorry if that’s totally wrong.

Andrea:
And he said, in that lecture, Lewis provocatively claimed that we have less in common with our grandparents’ grandparents than they had in common with Caesar, Beowulf, Achilles, or the pharaohs. He arrives at this stupefying assertion by reflecting on a fascinating question, which, Allison, I think I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this question. What would happen if we spent more time around our machines than we spent with the natural world?

Andrea:
What would happen if machine metaphors got into our imaginations so deeply that we forgot they were there, and thus, without us even knowing it, we began to think and feel about ourselves and our lives and our goals as if we were machines or work functions, too. In Lewis’s view, this is exactly what happened. As metaphors drawn from classical mechanics slowly began to penetrate the vocabulary of the residents of the modern world, eventually, even everyday people began to refer to themselves as consumers and producers who bring their labor supply to human resource departments and try, every day, to optimize their productivity. What is more, Lewis also reflected on how there were shifts within our individual words, so that sometimes what had been words of praise for our ancestors became words of condemnation for us and vice versa.

Andrea:
For instance, Lewis wondered why we use the word stagnation, a word that has overtones of malarial swamps. For social conditions, our ancestors would have praised because of their permanence.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, exactly. Lewis also asked why it is that when we use the word primitive, we instantly feel connotations of clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity, whereas our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of a constitution and meant pure and vital. And then, Baxter says, my personal favorite, why does latest in advertisement mean best? The answer, according to Lewis, is that now the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones has become for us the controlling archetype in our imagination. Lewis noted that machines and technologies are so important for us as moderns that they began to mark the great milestones of our lives. Lewis was prescient then. Machines are in our brain and our blood and our words and in our air and in our water.

Alison:
So

Andrea:
That is from chapter three in why literature still matters by jason.

Alison:
When was no his writing.

Andrea:
Let’s see when he let’s see.

Alison:
When he assumed his chair yeah.

Andrea:
He passed away in the 60s so if he was when he assumed his academic chair at cambridge was when he wrote that specific.

Alison:
Talk so.

Andrea:
I guess that would have been like what the 30s 40s no.

Alison:
That was after the war so let’s see so i mean there’s about a million things in there that i i could have stopped you and talked about i think that the looking back and thinking that primitive is a word that denotes backwards that’s a theory that Chris Smage talks about in his book Small Farm Future and he calls it the progress narrative it’s kind of the other side that we just believe that progress is the answer to everything and progress is obviously equals better and the past obviously equals backwards, past you know the word backwards we’re going backwards we’re primitive and how we write off, the technologies and ideas and processes of the past because we automatically think, well, those people were stupid. Yeah. And there’s this idea that…

Andrea:
They’re stupid because they were in the past. That’s the logic.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. That’s it.

Andrea:
Which is so dumb.

Alison:
And anything that’s forward and technology is the answer. And then you look at something, like we were talking about in the last KTC, about the Green Revolution or the industrialization of agriculture, and you think, it’s just messed up everything, you know? How is that advancement? And yet the majority of people just live in this sort of river, like the fish doesn’t know it’s in the river because it’s in the river, because they just think that technology is automatically the answer and forward. And the past is primitive and stupid. The thing about the cars… Go on, you want to say?

Andrea:
Well, I was going to say that the fish swimming in the water is exactly the thing with the idea that new is better. We don’t even know that we have that idea. We don’t even know that that’s an idea. It’s so ingrained in us. We don’t even realize. Like, marketing advertisers don’t say the newer version is better because, you know, new is always better. They just say new and you’re like, oh, new. Okay.

Alison:
Well, yeah, of course.

Andrea:
You don’t have to tell me that new is good. I already know new is good. But if a medieval advertised new, they’d have to be like, sorry, it’s new. Yeah. Nobody wants it.

Alison:
Well, yeah, everyone was suspicious of it. Everyone was suspicious of it. And you just don’t have to go back.

Andrea:
Like we’re re-ended up.

Alison:
You don’t have to go back that far. You know, the amount of people that I’ve read about in 1900, 1920, 1930, who were seeing combine harvester technology or binder technology that was driven by a tractor come to their farms. And they thought it was the devil’s work they thought it was they were suspicious of it they didn’t want it they they noticed how when it when it got the sheaves of oats together it didn’t tie them properly and it threw them off the back anyway and someone had to go off and try and tie them up and and everyone was suspicious of them all the you know the the kind of grandmother of grandmother reports that I’ve read have said that the in the past people were suspicious of things new whereas now you know people are buying the latest apple thing when they’ve got the just before released Apple thing.

Andrea:
People are suspicious of things that are old now. You have to prove why lard is good, whereas seed oils were accepted.

Alison:
But I think, but lard.

Andrea:
Which people have been eating as long as they’ve been eating pigs, you have to prove it.

Alison:
Oh, it’s going to kill you. I think that’s because of the growth of mass media and the growth of corporations since industrialization, because they’re the ones who have money to make in it. And they’re the ones who managed to pull the levers of media because there’s so much money involved. And therefore, they can do this thing, which is essentially brainwashing. whereas in the past it there was no kind of people making food just to make money you had to get the food around you and there was no math media made food to not die be able to brainwash and so you couldn’t have generations growing up with that same kind of water around them um i.

Andrea:
Checked the date just so you know lewis assumed the academic chair in june 1954 so that was when he.

Alison:
Was giving that essay that I and then I don’t know when he got surprised.

Andrea:
By Joy but I think it was after that.

Alison:
It’s a nice title I like that a lot yeah.

Andrea:
Anyways keep going.

Alison:
I wanted to yeah just talk about the car thing at the beginning and place I’ve been musing a lot on place recently, partially prompted by books that Nicole our patron from Italy left with me when she came over for the UK meet-up at the end of Jan. And it’s written by an artist. And it’s called How to Do Nothing. But it’s not really about how to do nothing. It’s more an activist basically saying…

Alison:
That we’ve been fed this productivity thing and social media so people can sell things to us. And it’s not the right thing. We’ve got to find some way of going against it. And she talks a lot about place. And having moved around a lot, I struggle with place quite a bit. Because I don’t really feel like I have a home, really. I don’t feel at home where I grew up. I don’t really feel at home here. I don’t feel at home necessarily in Italy. Some parts of me do. But I’ve never, because I haven’t stayed places and built communities and had land that has been part of my life for a long time, I don’t really, I struggle with sense of place. And I remember when we moved to Cornwall, just after Gabriel was born, I did a lot of art by just going around to the parks and the gardens and picking up pieces of wood and leaves and flowers and things on the floor, moss and all this stuff and putting it in art. And I didn’t really realise at the time that I just was trying to get my sense of place there. You know, this is where I’ve landed. Okay, so what’s growing here? You know, what’s going on and how can I celebrate that?

Alison:
And I feel like the description of Lewis there talking about cars is important because…

Alison:
The further I’m away from cars the more I see them with different eyes it’s again like the fish in the water and I’m sure you know so many listeners know we’ve talked about it with supermarkets so much if you go into a supermarket every week or twice a week you think it’s normal you think the lights are normal music’s normal the buy and get one freeze are normal the packaging’s normal everything’s normal and then when you leave a supermarket and you haven’t been there for six months and you go back you’re like oh my gosh what is this place um and it’s the same with cars the same thing happens you know to the point where a couple of months ago a friend wanted to take us to um the forest of dean for a kind of a walk with gable and one of his little friends, and the only way we could get there was in her car and we were like okay and we did not enjoy it and I thought it was just me on the way back.

Andrea:
The ride?

Alison:
Yeah, on the way home. It was dark and there was a lot of traffic and the lights of all the cars were on and music was on in the car really loud and it was not very nice music. And we ended up getting out and I was just desperate to get out of the car. I felt sick. I just wanted to get out of the car and I thought I was the only one and I got out. And Gable was like, oh, thank goodness I’m out of that car. And you just start crying. And we were just so glad to be back on our feet and have, you know, half a mile to walk back to our house because we got dropped off early. But the further you are away from cars, well, the further I am, I shouldn’t say you, the further I am away from cars, the more I just realise how much I don’t like them and how much they just seem wrong. But I know in the same breath that, you know, the meat that I buy from the market is transported there by the farmer who comes in his car. And, you know, the eggs I get from the market come by a road.

Alison:
And I rely on services that come by road. I know that. But I am so glad that we don’t have a car. And I’m also really glad that I’m giving Gabriel a childhood where he doesn’t have the option of just getting in a car and he doesn’t see his parents having the option of just getting in a car. You know, that’s why we stuck with towns. And there’s a whole thing there because really I want to be in the country but I don’t want a car. So there’s always a compromise to be had somewhere, isn’t there? You know, if I lived in the country then I would have to have a car, you know, because it’s really hard to be in the country and not have a car. Um, so, I mean, we do travel, we’re on the train and so we are moving from place to place more quickly than, um… C.S. Lewis describes, and you know, we have been on aeroplanes, and although I would love to not go on an aeroplane for the rest of my life, I’m sure I probably will.

Alison:
But I do think there’s so much richness to be found by using your feet, your body, and having to do that, and having, no choice most of the time, and also in seeing what’s around you and noticing, because you go at such a speed that you you see things that you just you don’t see when you’re in a car I mean it’s just it’s a completely different interaction and experience and it’s so weird you know people say to us quite often I’ll ask someone where someone something is and they’ll be like oh you go down this road then you turn right at this place and I’m like I have no idea what you’re talking about I just know the road to get from here to town and a bit up to the park and a bit or you go past the traffic lights at so and so and you don’t go around the one-way system. I’m like, what, what are you talking about? So it’s like we have to have a whole different language for trying to find places.

Andrea:
Absolutely.

Alison:
As long as well as with words. Yeah, I think it’s amazing what you read. And I feel like, you know, it’s even more relevant now to what it seems it was in the 50s. Because there’s a generation now growing up that knows no different.

Andrea:
Exactly what you feared happened. And that’s exactly why you feel that. And he you know you the image of you guys getting out of the car instantly brought to mind a passage that he quoted in this book from another book that I really like I don’t know if you’re supposed to call it a book but um the odyssey of Homer oh yeah and the one that my mom read to us as a kid is the Richmond Lattimore translation and that’s the one I have now and that’s the version he quotes in this book so i like it because it feels familiar but he describes odysseus in one of his um you know water churning him tearing his skin off crushing his bones together and then he staggers out of the water and lay down again in the rushes and kissed the grain giving soil i can’t just picture you guys kidding out of that was us kissing the grain giving soil i think Gabriel actually just said something like.

Alison:
Thank goodness I’m on my feet, you know, I can use my feet to actually walk, you know.

Andrea:
So that’s really interesting that he said that because he’s going to have such a resonance when he reads these, well, for one, the things Lewis wrote or when he actually reads medieval things. There’s a sort of a texture, a sort of a context that he’ll have that one can try to imagine it, but we don’t really. It’s really hard to imagine. And put yourself in that place of, you know, not having a phone or not having a car. You know, there’s been short times in my adult life when I didn’t have a phone and it was just so oddly freeing. And I had a car when we lived on Coronado, but I never used it because it’s an island. So, you know, and I didn’t have kids, so I could just hop on my bike and go wherever I wanted to go. And you’re so right like you would see different houses like if I was driving I wouldn’t have even seen them.

Alison:
Yeah we see a lot of cats we tend to stop for every cat takes us twice as long because we see all the cats yeah and then we see all the plants and you know if someone’s moved something we noticed that it’s um it’s nice especially when the weather’s good we went out yesterday the weather is so nice here and we went down to the canal and walked along the canal, Gabriel has been given an old camera by Rob to play with. And so he’s taking pictures of things. And we went down to the canal and the sun was out and the birds were tweeting. And I just thought, oh, my gosh, it’s spring. And I remember sort of dragging him almost to the canal through winter when it’s pouring with rain and really cold. It’s like, we need a walk. Come on, we’re going out. Whereas he was skipping along the path, you know, in the sun. And looking at the daffodils coming up and the snowdrops and all the different birds and ducks and taking photos of everything. It was lovely.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Really lovely.

Andrea:
It’s incredible what kids notice when we kind of get out of the way and allow them. I mean, I told Gary yesterday, I was like, I just cannot… Like the level of detail that Jacob has in the understanding of our chickens just blows my mind for one he’s read every book I have in the house on chickens he’s read them all and then he reads them again and then he’s asked me to have any other book on chicken I can read anything he reads the catalogs backwards and forwards that come about chickens so he can tell you about the breeds and then the birds that we have even when we had a ton of birds and right now we only have 17 birds in our pen and when I’m up there with him like I’ve been up there the last couple days with him just kind of doing some spring cleaning we shoveled a bunch of stuff out we brought in a bunch of new material we filled up buckets with new things and and while we’re working.

Andrea:
We would hear a sound and he would say oh that’s the gray hen she always does that right after she lays an egg or another hen would make a sound and he’s like yes that’s honey she does that because she gets irritated when this other hen does that and like we’re not even in there and he knows how do you know this but it’s just because he sees them and he just and i never told him go watch the chickens or anything you know well i did once when we had an egg eater but he just kind of observes them because he doesn’t have headphones on and he you know has nothing else to do because i won’t entertain him so he just sees the chickens and and he notices um i mean just i find that interesting with the kids and the gabriel and the canal and seeing things in the it’s a natural thing isn’t it but but it it involves a lot of slowness like a lot of not programmed time And you know what.

Alison:
As a kind of a parallel, we were in the independent bookshop in town about a month ago. And I was poring over a book about lemons, which is just amazing. I think I’ve talked about it on Discord.

Andrea:
Oh, I want to see it. Sounds amazing.

Alison:
Gabriel picked up this book, which is The Wildlife of the UK, with like an identification book, you know, with pictures and things saying what all the things were. And Rob just said, OK, you can have it. So he bought him this book.

Alison:
And it’s like a tome, you know, like pages and pages and pages. And I’m sure he’ll use it for years. So I don’t, I think Rob made the right decision. Anyway, so he’s since then, since then he spent his pocket money on buying a bird feeder for just outside our window. We had an old one from Italy, which we put out the back of the house. This one’s out the side of the house and he bought loads of seeds to put in it. And so he’s been watching the birds in the bush outside going to his bird seeder that he bought and looking them up in the book and telling me what they are.

Alison:
And I was watching him and kind of seeing what he’s doing he’s learning all the different names of them and I just thought this is so nice because he’s just sitting there watching them and so a couple of weeks ago after we came back from the market I said look let’s get everything away help me get all the food away and sort it out and then I’ll sit with you before lunch and we’ll just watch the bird feeder and I was just I was kind of saying it was him but I really wanted to do it because I just thought it’d be really nice to just sit down for 45 minutes and watch the birds and then maybe look a few up and um so we each had a drink and we sat down at the table, and looked out the window and just watched the blue tits and the great tits and the sparrows and the other birds come and each time we looked up you know what they were and then we learned the difference between the male and the female blue tit the different size of the black on the front of them and it was just it was so nice just to sit there and just do nothing just watch the birds, Really lovely.

Andrea:
Yeah. And, yeah, it’s hard to summarize or, no, not summarize, quantify, maybe, because it feels like it shouldn’t be quantified. And then by trying to quantify it, you’re trying to mechanize it. But then there’s this feeling of needing to explain our indulgences. Well, this is why, you know. So, Jacob and I walked over to our, we call it the feed barn, but it’s just a carport back in the woods where we store all the buckets of things. And as we walked, you would have thought that the angel of the Lord dropped down beside us or something. Oh, my gosh, look over there. And I was like, well, I can see nothing. He’s like, it’s a spank toe. I’ve never seen one. I’ve always heard them in the bushes, but I’ve never seen one. And I just saw one. And I was like.

Alison:
Oh, my gosh.

Andrea:
And it was so exciting. You know, I’m celebrating with him. I could see nothing. I have no idea what he was looking at. But he was over the moon that he’d seen this specific bird that he’s heard, that he’s always wanted to see, and is only here for a certain season. And I just thought, you know, I don’t know, sometimes you… I think part of what scares homeschool families is that in some states or some places, I don’t know, countries, the government makes you quantify it all. Like, well, measure up how smart your kid is and how much they learned. And it’s really hard to say, well, by a zillion hours of just sitting on the pond with our chin up staring, he’s cultivated this deep interest and love of the birds that is now beginning to become more, you know, incorporating more book knowledge and things like that. And so his life is more beautiful. How do I quantify that?

Alison:
I have heard horror stories of that kind of, please quantify happening in this country through people. I hope it never kind of comes to visit us. But I do feel confidence even if it did, you know, because I look back to when the health visitor found out that we were feeding Gabriel raw goat’s milk and called to our protection services. And they phoned me to tell me that I was potentially harming my child. And it looked really bleak. And yet we managed to find a way out of it. We managed to find, with Rob’s help of kind of documenting and arguing and that kind of thing and having the right people, it worked out okay. So I kind of feel if that ever does come our way that we’ll find a way through it, hopefully.

Andrea:
And you know what’s funny? when it does come to that specific subject my mom can play the game she’s like oh i know what they want she said she’s like it’s not a question of can you do a test it’s a question of can you put the answer that they want to hear on the test yeah absolutely and so she’s.

Alison:
A whole of education isn’t it really.

Andrea:
Right it is unfortunately that’s modern progressive education that’s not education as you and i see it but that is progressive but, She would take something like this interest he has in birds, and she would just generate a paper with, like, a list of tasks that they want to hear.

Alison:
Yeah, 15 for that. Yeah.

Andrea:
Spend 12 hours observing, listening, and noting.

Alison:
Take.

Andrea:
Different types of birds. Yeah, check. Spot 12 birds while going on various walks. Check. Read 13 manuals about birds in the north american and pacific northwest region check yeah i can imagine she just did it after we did it she didn’t like actually assign it and yeah so i always thought that was kind of clever of her i’ve.

Alison:
Got something here on the.

Andrea:
Computer to.

Alison:
Read you if you want to hear it.

Andrea:
Oh look at us reading to each other on this cozy yeah no it’s.

Alison:
Not anything like c.s lewis but but it is interesting um okay the we’re recording this kind of early march a little bit earlier than normal and today the bacon with ancient grains episode went out and there’s a comment on youtube which took me by surprise today oh um it’s a person who has commented on youtube before i think they listen on youtube because we are on youtube as well as on your podcast to play it.

Andrea:
Yes, we have 100,000 subscribers there.

Alison:
Go listen, people. 10 million, isn’t it? This person says, Hi, Andrea and Alison. I just wanted to congratulate the both of you ladies on the fourth anniversary of Ancestral Kitchen podcast. Hard to believe it originally started on March the 4th, 2021. Tomorrow will officially be its fourth anniversary.

Andrea:
What? I have no idea.

Alison:
Did you know?

Andrea:
I didn’t know that.

Alison:
No, exactly.

Andrea:
Whoa.

Alison:
I didn’t know that either.

Andrea:
No. I was just like.

Alison:
Really?

Andrea:
Wow, this is our anniversary?

Alison:
And we’re meeting? And I’m just like, when did that happen?

Andrea:
Wow, thank you to this person for noting that. My goodness. Well, congratulations, Alison.

Alison:
Isn’t that amazing?

Andrea:
We’ve been doing this for four years?

Alison:
We’ve been doing it for longer because we started like three months before the first episode went out, didn’t we? With all the planning and recording.

Andrea:
I think we actually recorded in January, didn’t we?

Alison:
When we began yeah because.

Andrea:
We wanted to have what did you say three episodes ahead.

Alison:
Or something or four i forget yeah yeah yeah.

Andrea:
That’s what it was.

Alison:
So yeah we’ve been doing this wow wow happy anniversary yeah it made me think we should do something next year to celebrate our fifth anniversary i don’t know what but we should kind of make a mental note in our head the next march much we should do some special thing i don’t know what i asked i said that to remind us i said that to rob this morning i said we should do something special next year to um to celebrate right now, and he went he went well of course you have to meet don’t you went oh yes, yeah.

Andrea:
I will happily actually now rob a little bit eerie that he said that because i was just talking to rachel the.

Alison:
Friend who.

Andrea:
Made our nourishing traditions.

Alison:
Schedule yeah and.

Andrea:
I told her i’m pretty sure i’m going to england next year i.

Alison:
Don’t even know.

Andrea:
Why i said it.

Alison:
Just got a feeling okay.

Andrea:
The traditional gift for fifth anniversary is.

Alison:
Wood.

Andrea:
Okay i just looked it up so i’m thinking spoon yeah.

Alison:
Ancestral kitchen spoon okay.

Andrea:
A button a wooden button i love wooden buttons i.

Alison:
Just love wood full.

Andrea:
Stop makes me want to crochet something or knit i don’t know how to knit but if i could um.

Alison:
How’s the read along going by the way.

Andrea:
Oh it’s going great we are this let’s see this is is this the march this is the mark yeah no this is the april ktc this april sorry yeah okay so we are on our april sections are carbohydrates the text section from the beginning where she has her facts as she calls it and then the recipe sections we’re reading are stock-based sauces and salad dressings and i think that’s actually really cool allison because uh sauce and dressing are two things that are basically usually made a hundred percent out of some kind of partially hydrogenated seed oil and have lots of horrible ingredients and can only be purchased in bottled versions and um, are really nasty. So that’s a good chapter.

Alison:
I wish I had my nourishing traditions here because I’m wondering what’s in the stock-based sauces section.

Andrea:
I have mine right here.

Alison:
Have a look. Because I have been diving back into my copy of Lateral Cooking by Nikki Segnet, the same woman who wrote The Flavor Thesaurus. And I just, I love that book so, so much. And I’m in the section which basically is talking about sauces. And I was reading about gumbo and thinking of Adriana and her kind of gumbo cuisine and reading how to make it and how to make the roux for it and I was reading about how to make a lighter roux and how that kind of links in with bechamel and where that goes and all the different varieties that you can have off the roux and then we made a chicken at the weekend, and I tried to make a roux to make a gravy because we don’t normally have gravy with our chicken, we just have it dry, not bothered at all, another thing where you go to a house and I’m like you don’t want gravy huh what um but we’re just used to it um and so because I it said use all-purpose flour I was like oh forget that I’m just going to use freshly ground spelt so I used sounds all-purpose to me.

Alison:
Exactly some fat from the chicken and the freshly ground spelt to make into the roux and then I had some chicken stock that I put in to make the sauce and then I put the juices in from the pan as well and I served that as a gravy over our chicken but also then the next day which was um Sunday I made a curry with um some of the leftover chicken and I’d made extra of this roux and kept it in the fridge so I just kind of lopped a bit of it off because it kind of turned to jelly, um put it in the pan with the chicken and all the spices I made I made Gable and Rob guess all the spices in the curry while they were eating it. Oh, that’s fun. They were 10 and they got 7.

Andrea:
Wow. I’m impressed.

Alison:
And then I… I stirred the roux in and put a bit more chicken stock in. So I made, with all the spices, I made kind of a sauce for the curry out of the roux. And then I had a little bit left still, which will do another meal. And she says you can just freeze it. So I packaged it up, put it in the freezer. So I’ve now got a kind of a ready-made, delicious chicken dripping sauce thing in the freezer just to use whenever I want. So I’m kind of playing with sauces because I’ve never really been a gravy maker or a sauce maker. And I would really, I just, I love that book and I love the way it kind of gives me permission to play around. And I wondered what sort of stock-based sauces there are in Nourishing Traditions. Does she have that kind of thing in there?

Andrea:
Well, she just has a page called About Stock-Based Sauces. And there’s two paragraphs. One is reduction sauces. The other is gravies. And so she gives sort of the process and then she lists, you know, you could flavor it with these things. And then boil it, and then reduce it, and then add this. You could do this, that, or the other thing. So it’s one of those structural things, you know, where it’s going to be based largely on what you have around you. You know, start with a fat, put in a flour, let it toast. And then the salad dressings. I’ve never really done much with the salad dressing section. Have you?

Alison:
No, not at all.

Andrea:
No, I’m interested in this. Gary and I were talking about this last night because we want to kind of knock the last vestigial remnant of grocery stores from our lives. And… That is that Gary likes chips with some kind of a dip okay and he’s like he really doesn’t want to have to get anything from the store that that would sort of be the last thing that well there is this one store that has ice cream I really like but um um I told him I want to you know as As we progress through these sections of the book with the dressings and the sauces and things, I’m kind of looking with an eye towards, well, could I make sort of a, you know, thick sort of, I don’t know, dip or, you know, use her bean paste and things like that. Because we were talking about how, you know, if you buy a dip of some sort at the store, even if you try to get a good one and they’re all really expensive, they still have canola oil.

Alison:
Yeah, they have terrible oils in.

Andrea:
Don’t they? Yeah. And I was telling him, you know, if you make a dip at home, you’ve got maybe smoked mackerel, lots of iodine, you could put in a high protein, kefir, cream cheese, things like that. It’s just not something I’ve really messed around with that much. Probably partially related to the fact that I don’t really eat it. And so I don’t think about it. but um since we’re trying to just analyze like what is it that we still go and get, um besides toilet paper when you when you say chips.

Alison:
You mean you mean like potato chips or corn chips what do you mean.

Andrea:
Um yeah so there there are two brands of chips that i can get out here that are organic and made with non-seed oils supposedly but i say supposedly because, i don’t know like is it really, you know like are they really using avocado oil when you can’t even know for sure if you’re buying avocado oil half the time um so so at least those are i don’t even know if i’d call them decent but you know they’re perhaps better than they could be but because.

Alison:
We call chips fries so i had to.

Andrea:
Think oh.

Alison:
She actually means.

Andrea:
What is a crisp what is a crisp use the word is a.

Alison:
Chip for you.

Andrea:
Wait our crisps oh chips oh oh okay so yeah okay so you know the all the weird um, uh like the way languages evolve and things like that and um how well sometimes we keep the hard sea and sometimes it’s a soft sea because yeah the greeks and romans and writing on stone versus wax tablets and paper and then the anglo-saxons and then they like shot an arrow in this guy’s eye and all there’s a lot of reasons kids but um we have some of these vestigial remnants where we still keep some of your british isms but only in a specific context so for instance we say fish and chips and everybody knows that that means like battered fried fish with what we call french fries yeah.

Alison:
Yeah i see.

Andrea:
I don’t know i don’t know i don’t know what we have against the french fish.

Alison:
And french fries which doesn’t sound.

Andrea:
As nice does it it doesn’t roll off the tongue but if you said i’m gonna have a burger and chips everybody immediately would think a burger with like a bag of potato chips really yeah nobody would think that you meant french fries on the side of a burger you’d say burger and fries yeah because it’s not come from england so i don’t yeah although i did allison i did eat fish and chips with my sister in some kind of weird basement pub situation outside of some castle of you guys’s.

Alison:
I don’t know i’ve got too.

Andrea:
Many of them i don’t know where to start you have a lot more than we have and speaking of castles allison the c.s lewis thing i just learned something last night which when you asked me the date that he said that i just integrated that piece of information which is i did not realize but i learned that in the 1950s because y’all were hurting after the war and there wasn’t a lot of money etc that people couldn’t maintain these great country houses and i learned that about 1500 of them were destroyed or burned or like smash down and and i’m kind of thinking about that in context of what lewis said because everybody was kind of getting rid of all the old stuff like smash down the old country house smash down the old county seat smash down the old castle um and i’m sure a lot of those houses went you know way back yeah so now i’m thinking also about that in light of what or what he said in light of that, I should say.

Alison:
And now I’m thinking about Henry VIII and that last national, the old monasteries. Yeah.

Andrea:
Destroy the monasteries. Burn all those beautiful old books. We don’t need those. They’re written in that stupid Anglo-Saxon language. Nobody reads that anymore. Exactly. Alison, we don’t have time for this.

Alison:
I know. I did have a long list of things we could talk about, but who needs a list?

Andrea:
We always have a long list. When do we ever not have a long list? That’s why we had to make a podcast, Alison. I know exactly we still haven’t made it through the list it’s been four years i know i know i know gosh we’ve never had that like hmm what should we make an episode about problem we’re always just like how are we gonna pick too many yeah.

Alison:
Exactly i’ve got some exciting episodes coming up this year.

Andrea:
Oh yeah you do ones.

Alison:
That i’m organizing i’m very excited about them.

Andrea:
I do too. Well, I know of some of them. I’m really excited for the tea interview with Megan.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah. I’d like to listen to that. I’m trying to work on a scone to be released when your tea episode comes out.

Andrea:
Thank you.

Alison:
But it’s in the queue of all these other things that like, you know, I’m going to play with some room.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Alison:
And I want to.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Obviously, I have to keep making oak things all the time because that’s what I do.

Andrea:
Alison, put the whatever you have of the recipe, put it in the Discord.

Alison:
And let the patrons work on it too.

Andrea:
That’s a good idea.

Alison:
Yeah, that is a really good idea.

Andrea:
You just know something crazy comes out of there. Whenever you give them a recipe, oh, it’s glorious. It comes back 10 different ways and it’s amazing.

Alison:
That’s a really good idea. I’ll do that when I go on Discord next. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

Andrea:
Did you have anything on your list that wasn’t very long or is it supposed to be done? I don’t even know.

Alison:
I’m just trying to think. No, that’s not really. no no no they’re all too.

Andrea:
Long we’ll save them for next time i think yeah knowing us there is no short topics yeah.

Alison:
We should we should stop and save them for next time yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah right we’ll have 50 new things by then just post it in the discord we’ll discuss yes.

Alison:
Yes i will i will thank you very much andrea.

Andrea:
That was good to visit this morning allison and happy anniversary i’m I’m going to tell you that.

Alison:
Yeah, happy 4th anniversary. Definitely. Here’s to a cool fifth year.

Andrea:
All right. I’ll take it.

Alison:
Okay. Thank you.

Andrea:
Bye.

Alison:
Bye for now.