Kitchen Table Chats #45 – Do we Brown? Plus Simple Tortillas, Our New System, AI and Crazy Storage Unit Talk!

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:

• Blood draws/tests and ‘normal’ levels
• Asking ‘why’ before going ahead with medical procedures
• To brown a piece of meat before stewing or not?
• Alison’s slow-cooked beef brisket
• Making headspace to do stuff in the kitchen
• Andrea’s tortilla dough
• Paul Bunyan
• Freezing/refrigerating dough
• Andrea’s in-person canning class
• The new membership system is live!
• Sales techniques that suck
• AI doing people’s exams!
• The modern nightmare that is the storage unit
• Labor day meet up at Andrea’s!

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Transcript:

Alison:
hello andrea.

Andrea:
Hello alison how are you yeah.

Alison:
I’m good i just had to take my top off as you know or one of them.

Andrea:
At least i’m not here with no top on geez private broadcast that’s why it’s called.

Alison:
The private podcast.

Andrea:
You just never know what’s gonna happen exactly.

Alison:
We don’t have the cameras on though.

Andrea:
And you’re right oh yeah here i am i automatically started leaning forward to try to get closer to the mic now i can’t i can’t believe it i got i had to force myself into that habit for so long and now i have to enforce that habit.

Alison:
Step away away from the microphone.

Andrea:
Yeah technology so.

Alison:
Have you eaten breakfast yet today.

Andrea:
No, I haven’t. Actually, I’m going to go do a, like a blood draw this morning. So you’re not supposed to eat beforehand. And I’m really excited. It’s really fun. My chiropractor is… She’s just one of us, you know, she loves all the things that you and I love. And she’s a great reader of books and a recommender of wonderful books. And so, she and I, we just enjoy learning together. And so, I want to learn more about what’s going on with my thyroid and things like that. And she can order tests as a doctor. and okay so here i am gonna go do some fun tests and see what what we learned um and, did you know this is something that somebody can ask if they’re getting a test typically tests they’ll you know if they say they’re going to test your iron or calcium or something there’s the range that they give back on a blood draw is i don’t know if it’s the same in the uk Okay. But in the US, I learned that they get that range based on an average of the people who get blood draws in your area. And the average…

Alison:
And therefore, it’s not right, necessarily.

Andrea:
It’s not necessarily, yeah, not necessarily a good thing. You know, a lot of people going in for blood draws, like me, is because they suspect something’s off. And so, why would you want to use me as a, you know, as a standard of care or whatever? Yeah, so she draws from what’s called a functional range, which is, you know, as you and I know, in the case of nutrients and things like that, tends to be much higher than an average range. You know, your body can survive with a certain level of nutrition, and your body can thrive at a much higher level. And, of course, you and I aim to get to that thriving level with everything as opposed to just the… we’re making it through and coping level.

Alison:
Yeah so.

Andrea:
Anyway so she’s going to be looking at everything in the functional range and she just ordered.

Alison:
The the.

Andrea:
Biggest most complete whatever of everything she could because i was.

Alison:
Like might as well just do it all i was gonna say that before you talked about those levels because i know that in this country um you know if you have blood drawn for a thyroid test there are the standard thyroid um hormones that the nhs national health service here will say is normal you know if you’re in this range then your your particular thyroid hormone is okay but actually it’s quite well known in the alternative health arena that those levels are not right i don’t know if they’re they’re an average like yours but you can be in the normal levels and still have a thyroid issue that could do with some you know support or help so it kind of sounds like a similar thing i also yeah the other thing that i think is really fascinating, and i take my hat off to anyone who kind of studies the minerals and that you know you you can have a certain level of something that looks okay but if you haven’t got a level of something else that kind of synchronizes with that then you’ll struggle so you know your iron needs to be a certain sort of percentage compared to your calcium or compared to your something else and they all kind of work synchronously together and so it’s not just a case of looking at levels of one going oh my gosh i’m high i’m low in iron i’m a supplement iron if you have got too much of something else or too little of something else then the iron’s not going to work properly or how it should i always think absolutely this is where it’s important.

Andrea:
To have that whole picture of the body instead of just isolating you know.

Alison:
The pinky.

Andrea:
Toe and looking at the pinky toe because our bodies are incredible and we put them through you know the the fact that anybody can survive on the standard american diet is a testament to the resiliency of the human body and, our body compensates for a lot of things and it makes up the difference and it steals from organs and it pulls from bones and you know it does what it has to do to keep you alive, And so a lot of times a blood panel can be very misleading if you’re just, like you said, checking for one or two things. But if you are someone like my chiropractor who just, you know, loves a puzzle and digs deeper and wants to know what’s behind everything and wants to look at the body as a whole and includes, you know, how do you spend your afternoon and how much sleep did you get? and what’s your relationship with your husband like, you know, in her whole picture of what’s going on. then you start to shape a different, you know, a different picture of what’s happening.

Alison:
I have a kind of a little example of that thing of something not working properly. I remember it was maybe about 10 years ago. And it starts from an osteoporosis. My mum’s got osteoporosis and she had a urine test and the urine test found lots of calcium in her urine. And then she had more tests. and the reason she had too much calcium in her urine was because her parathyroid was leaching that calcium because it had problems from her bones and dumping it in her urine. And so the doctors took her parathyroid out. And I know, you know, she’s like nearly 80, but I just think, well, why was the parathyroid leaching calcium from her bones and putting it in her urine? There was no, as far as I know, there was no questioning of, actually, why is this happening? You know, if I was sitting in front of a doctor, I’d be like, but why is it happening? Why do you have to take that, you know, put a 70-year-old, you know, through an operation, which is never an easy thing to go through, to put our bodies through that, to take something out, when, without even asking, why is this happening? It just seems stupid to me.

Andrea:
Oh, Alison, don’t get me started. They’re like the entire how in the 50s and 60s, everybody just took out everyone’s tonsils.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
You know, all your tonsils are sore. Take them out. Right. And no discussion of what the tonsils do and how important they are in the body and their function and, you know, like white blood cells and all of that. Like, no.

Alison:
Yeah, that actually happened to me. just whip the tonsils out do this and then you’ll be feeling better and no one actually said well hang on what’s going on in your body Alison I was only like I think 15 or something maybe 14 or 15 at the time no one actually said well why are your tonsils like this what’s happening you know you’re overweight obviously I was back then you’re the way what you’re eating what are you you know you have an allergy to something maybe you’re having pasteurized dairy is it an allergy to wheat what think about changing your diet no they’re just at the tonsils no no i don’t have tonsils.

Andrea:
That’s that’s frustrating because nobody’s wondering oh why do you have this body part.

Alison:
Yeah serve a purpose yeah oh well on that note have.

Andrea:
You had breakfast.

Alison:
Yeah oh um yeah i had breakfast i had dinner sorry lunch too yeah no i had lunch too um rob and gable went out for a little while because a friend a kind of family friend of rob’s family came um kind of was coming past stroud and so rob and gable went to meet him for an hour to just say hello they haven’t seen rob hasn’t seen him for a decade so they went out i was here.

Alison:
Trying to sort out things with the patron community and trying to sort out moving my courses from the fermentation school you know there’s all those little things that yeah just you do the big thing and then there’s like a million little things that you forgot yeah that you’re saying oh no what about that oh no what about that so I was here doing all those little things this morning and um then uh I thought oh I better have some lunch before we record and I had a really nice lunch we um I made something yesterday so it was leftovers and the way I’m working with kind of gently treading the histamine path at the moment is I allow myself to have leftovers the day after but then after that I don’t have any I freeze anything that’s going to be older than the next day um so yesterday we had a beef brisket joint do you have briskets is that an american color yeah you do yeah okay good um and we’ve been often buying these beef briskets from albert at the market because they’re a reasonable price and rob’s been cooking them quite often in the instant pot without you know just me i showed him the first time and then he kind of does it and we hope for the best um and the last couple of times gabriel’s been like I don’t like this don’t want this um because Rob’s not paying as much attention to it you know because.

Alison:
He’s paying more attention to other things so I thought I’ve got to take this I’ve got to take this back under my wing for a little while because this should be really nice so um on um Sunday night.

Alison:
I browned the brisket. I don’t do that very often. Usually I just put my meat in the stew pot and I don’t bother with that whole browning thing. But I thought, no, I’m going to do it this time. So I put the cast iron pan on and I took the brisket, which was rolled, so it was tied up in a, you know, as a joint, and I browned it on all sides so it was really kind of dark brown and lots of reactions happening and put that to one side. And then I put the onions, some onions in the pan and fried them and got all the kind of bits of juicy stuff up and then I put a load of mushrooms in after that fried them and then I put all of those in the instant pot with um stock beef stock that we made the day before oh my gosh it was good stock I put a lot of bones in not very much water and it was really it was like the most solid jelly in the world so rich in flavor so sometimes when we’re cooking um joints in the instant probably just put water in because the meat gives you know enough of a juice in that water but i thought no i’m doing it properly this time so i put loads of broth in um and then i put tomato paste in and as i’ve talked about before some horseradish i like putting horseradish in my beef and then salt and pepper and garlic and thyme dried thyme.

Alison:
And i put it on the low low setting the instant pot slow cook low is very low much lower than the low setting on my old slow cooker rest in peace old slow cooker um so it really does go quite slow so i put it on delayed start and it started.

Alison:
Within enough time that Rob wouldn’t say to me, oh, that meat’s been partially cooked and it’s in the instant pot and you haven’t started cooking it yet. I’m worried. It’s a bit like that. So I got that to start and it cooked through the night. And then we had it yesterday for lunch and it was absolutely delicious.

Andrea:
Well, you cooked overnight. How long?

Alison:
12 hours.

Andrea:
How much of those? Oh, wow.

Alison:
12 hours. See, what’s frustrating about the slow cooker, I find, with meat, for us, is we eat our main meal at lunch. And I like to slow cook for a considerable amount of time. So, you know, if the recipe says slow cook for four hours, I’m going to slow cook it for six hours.

Andrea:
Right.

Alison:
Particularly on the instant pot slow, low, because it’s slow and low. So, I know with brisket, you know, in the oven, you’re going to need three or four hours. So, that means in my slow cooker, I want six or seven hours. and we eat at 12 30 so six or seven hours means i’m gonna have to be browning that joint at like five in the morning well in order to get it all in the cooker in time to turn it on for six to give it six hours and our kitchen doesn’t have any door so the smell of the brisket that is going to smell amazing at five o’clock in the morning is going to go upstairs probably wake gabriel up with the noise and the smell and then gable’s going to be downstairs at quarter past five in the morning and it’s probably don’t really want that yeah so i’ve it’s frustrating i don’t necessarily want to cook it for 12 hours but i don’t want to brown a brisket at five o’clock in the morning either really so this time i chose the overnight option, And yeah, it was very, very good. Yesterday I had it with some potato and Rob and Gable had it with rye, sourdough rye. And we had some extra cauliflower. Then today we had the leftovers. I had the leftovers. They had it too, but they had this later because they were out. With some cabbage that someone gave me for my birthday. It was a 50th birthday present. Happy birthday.

Andrea:
Great birthday present. Yes.

Alison:
She gave me some liver and a cabbage. so um cooked steam some cabbage put it in the bottom of the pan heated up the stock put some extra broth in there and then i i’m trying to save the rye sourdough but this is such a long answer to the question what did you have for lunch um i’m trying to save the rye sourdough for rob because we’ve got a really busy like five or six days coming up with a friend coming over to stay And then Amelia and Fiona, the patrons, are coming over on here on Saturday. And then I’m meeting Charlie, who we did the cooking accessory in a van episode with, who I’ve never met before. I’m meeting her on Monday. So there’s so much going on that I actually cook two rye breads. One’s in the freezer. But I’m trying to save the rye bread for Rob because he loves it. So I made myself a pancake. This morning I just put some, the square heads master wheat, which is the thatching wheat that we’ve talked about before on here from Hobmer Dodds. I put some of that into sour with some sourdough starter and then fried it up as a pancake. So I had a bowl with a lovely stew in, which was just delicious the second day, and some pancake. And I went out into the garden and sat at our garden table. Sun was out. All the bees were buzzing around and green things everywhere. and I peacefully ate my lunch out there and then I.

Alison:
They’ve got these chairs that kind of go back a bit. So I’ll put the chair back, put my hat over my face and stayed there for 25 minutes. It was lovely.

Andrea:
Perfect.

Alison:
That sounds delightful. So, yeah, I think that it’s worth sometimes browning your joints before you put them in to stew. Not all the time, because sometimes you just want to make a stew.

Andrea:
And you.

Alison:
Can use other tricks to perhaps make it super tasty but um and so i don’t brown mine very often but this time it really did make it just notch it up like many levels to make it something that was absolutely delicious.

Andrea:
Really lovely i think coming off gaps make made me appreciate more the browning and what it adds because you’re so consciously absenting that from your diet during gaps yeah and then after gaps it’s like well i can so might as well yeah exactly i’m gonna yeah but sometimes like you said you just need to kind of get it moving along wrong but I like that you took the extra steps but I’m curious what was Gabriel’s response oh.

Alison:
Gabriel likes it much more.

Andrea:
I just.

Alison:
Remembered I put some pearl barley in as well I forgot to say that so it went a bit thicker.

Andrea:
Yeah I like it when the juice.

Alison:
Goes a bit thicker but I don’t want to necessarily thicken it with a flour so I just threw in.

Andrea:
Some pearl barley um yeah no he he.

Alison:
Much preferred it i much much preferred it.

Andrea:
That’s interesting because it’s the exact same ingredients right more or less it’s the same food the same items and you probably didn’t take much more time really no if you ran a clock on it but those little steps i sometimes surprise myself you know, either with the level of laziness, when I’m like, why am I not doing this? You know, I’m just skipping something, like you said, the browning the meat or something. And then with the… uh level of return that i get when i do.

Alison:
Make that little.

Andrea:
Tiny extra effort and it it really does add up though and it.

Alison:
Makes a big difference you know i i like the food when i haven’t browned it too you know i like it when i don’t put the pearl barley and i like it when i forget to put the time in because the beef is just wonderful and the vegetables are really good oh yeah but um for me it’s it’s a matter of headspace you know like i had the headspace on sunday night to say okay i’m not doing anything else now i’d like to be in the kitchen and and i’m gonna go and i’m gonna sort out that brits again and i’m gonna make it really nice for us tomorrow, and quite often over the last couple of years it’s just been i just don’t have the headspace for this we’ve got some beef yeah we’ve got you know we’ve got the onions we’ve got the and water we’ve got the whatever extra vegetables go in there just put it together and get it on the table and trust that it’s good ingredients yeah um and that i’m trying really.

Andrea:
Hold up that can hold up.

Alison:
Really well exactly when you have it makes it nice yeah until you get someone like gable’s like who knows what it’s like when it’s really really nice um and um i’m trying to created these these monsters for ourself i know i’m trying to actively create more space to to allow time in the kitchen to come.

Alison:
More naturally like that because i feel like since oh i don’t know since when since like way back last year when i knew i was moving back to england and i knew you were going to have another little one and we were manically trying to you know organize all those podcast episodes for the summer I feel like I just haven’t really stopped you know then we didn’t manage that and then I moved countries and then I had to find a place to live and then then it just goes on and on and and I’ve I’ve been missing just being in the kitchen and not doing a recipe for a notebook and not doing a recipe for this just just cooking for my family you know um and so i’m i’m trying to say okay it’s important to make space not just to sit around and be in the garden or play with gabriel or read a book but actually extra space so then that that desire to be in the kitchen can arise not in a way that i’m pushed in there but i go actually i want to spend an hour in the kitchen now it comes naturally so that was and then you end up with a lovely dish very much so the headspace yeah yeah.

Andrea:
There’s times you just need to feed everybody and you need to feed them quickly and you.

Alison:
Need to.

Andrea:
Do something else pack.

Alison:
Their house and then uh.

Andrea:
But yeah i think there is a, sort of a tendency for people like, you know, you and me have the tendency and I don’t know if it’s a personality trait, but, you know, you just, yeah, you just keep on going and you keep filling the time with, you know, occupations and then having to, like I was telling you when we talked about the trip that we took away.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Just actively seeking out doing nothing sometimes is really important.

Alison:
Yeah, I agree. So what did you eat last night?

Andrea:
By doing nothing, we don’t mean using the font. Yeah, no. What did you eat last night?

Alison:
Because I want to listen to something you’ve eaten. Yeah, tell us.

Andrea:
Last night was quite good. I made tortilla dough, and so I ferment it overnight at least. But I’ve also tried making it and putting it in the freezer as raw dough.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
And that works out quite well also. So, in that case, I ferment it first and then put it in the freezer.

Alison:
What’s in your dough?

Andrea:
Let’s see. Flour. And this is the last. I was just teaching a class on Sunday and I was telling them this is the last thing in my kitchen that isn’t at least partially home ground flour, if not whole home ground flour. And I told them, I don’t know why I haven’t taken the time to convert it because we make tortillas a lot, but I haven’t. So flour, lard, salt, water, sourdough starter.

Alison:
And what’s the flour?

Andrea:
Goes in the dough.

Alison:
Just wheat?

Andrea:
Just like an all-purpose white organic wheat flour. and then mix that together it ferments overnight or for a couple days I tend to make a multi-batch and put it in the fridge in balls and then I can take one ball out cut it into eight pieces and make like lunch or something with it so then it’s sort of quick and ready but you know that I tend to not like my baked things done way ahead so that’s why I have to have the balls of dough ready to go and so last night um actually i asked gary i said i really need i knew monday was going to be the probably the only day i was going to have i even when you and i talked i said i don’t think i’m going to get the newsletter done until monday and that was because i knew we had the glampers coming in we had the ktc live saturday and we had the big class on sunday yeah here at the house um, So, I told him, I’m going to have to, I said, I really want to get this newsletter done, and I don’t want to wait until after dinner, because I’m afraid I’ll be too tired. So, I passed the making of dinner on to him and Jacob, and I sat at the table and did the newsletter while they asked me questions.

Andrea:
And so, they rolled out the dough, and if you take tortilla dough and you roll it out nice and thin, you make great tortillas, and if you roll it out kind of thicker, you have like a naan bread or a chapati. So I told them, I want to make chapatis. So they were making like thicker chapatis. And then Jacob took, we have this curry paste. Do you guys have curry paste over there? Just like little tiny jars.

Alison:
Yeah, we have curry paste. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah. Okay. So I said, put curry paste and butter in a pan and heat it. And like, how much? And I was like, I don’t know, like a blob of one and a smaller blob of the paste.

Alison:
A dob of this and a pinch of that.

Andrea:
Yeah, it’s hard to try to come up with measurements.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And then I said, put in a bottle of strained tomatoes and another bottle of coconut milk. So, they put that in. And they simmer that. And then I said, dump in two jars of our homemade canned chickpeas, which is so nice to have that because it’s just on the spot, ready. And, like, how long does it cook? And I said, you know, it could, I said, this is the kind of thing that it can cook for like 12 hours and it just gets better.

Alison:
Yeah, it depends when you want dinner.

Andrea:
Or if you’re just going to eat, get it hot. I was like, just get it hot. I forgot to say salt, but I figured we’d get salt around bowls. But anyways, so they heated that and Gary made the chapatis while I finished the newsletter. And then when I finished, everybody was eating. So then I just put the computer where I think I had one of the kids take it back downstairs. And then I went and ate with everybody. And then I had one more batch still in the fridge of the dough. And after the kids ate, they still wanted more of the chapati. So I then, I got up and I divided it into, I got the dough out, divided it into eight balls and then i don’t know if you’ve done this but so you take your dough ball and like push your thumb into it and make a hole like not not through not through it but like like make it into like if you make a little clay bowl and then fill it with cheese and then a shredded cheese and then pinch it back together and flatten it and make a little disc pack it down and then bowl it out and then the cheese rolls out into the middle yeah so the kids like that because it’s fun so then we cooked those and it only takes minutes to get a whole, if the dough’s already made, you can make chapati, for the whole dinner in just a couple of minutes. And actually.

Andrea:
And I had priced it out, Allison, for the class because I was telling them, oh, look, you can make organic sourdough tortillas for so cheap. So, actually, I priced it out how much it costs to make a batch of eight. Let me pull that up real quick.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Because it fits in well with our theme. Because this is with what I consider pretty expensive flour because it’s already milled. and it comes in smaller bags but if you were using home ground flour this price would probably drop by half.

Alison:
So what’s interesting about this is that apart from the price is that the terminology because you know we don’t really use the word tortilla that much over here unless you are going to a mexican restaurant or eating mexican food really um so unless that’s just me i don’t know So I would never say I’ve made tortillas, even though I’ve probably made the thing you’ve made many times. But I would never call it a tortilla. The chapattis you make are still flexible, yeah? They’re not crusty or crunchy on the bottom.

Andrea:
You could fold food in the middle or whatever if you want.

Alison:
Yeah, okay. So the tortillas, I automatically think of corn when I hear the word tortilla because I’m assuming that’s the kind of ancient grain that tortillas were made with in Mexico. But tortilla doesn’t mean exclusively corn to you, no?

Andrea:
No.

Alison:
Would you say corn tortillas if it was…

Andrea:
Yeah, you would define it.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
I see.

Andrea:
Yeah. Do you say… You know, that makes sense. Why when I read… uh uh the piper’s farm book.

Alison:
Yeah they.

Andrea:
Called it flatbread.

Alison:
Yeah i would call it and i was.

Andrea:
Like well i’m calling a tortilla flatbread okay fancy.

Alison:
Yeah i i would i and what i told i.

Andrea:
Told the recipe to my mexican friend and she’s like you mean a tortilla and i was like yeah it’s a tortilla.

Alison:
I was like i don’t know why it’s called a flatbread you’re laughing.

Andrea:
About it but that’s funny oh i didn’t know that yeah tortilla i don’t know we used to do it well.

Alison:
We’re on the border here you know if i have a batter there’s.

Andrea:
A lot of crossover.

Alison:
Not a dough and i pour it in the pan i’m going to be making a pancake even if it’s not thickened and risen like your pancakes so would that be a flatbread to you because that’s what i did for my lunch i mixed up wheat that master heads wheat thatching wheat with sourdough starter salt and it was a batter and i spooned it into the pan which we had tallow in it and then i wait for it to dry all the way through and then i flipped it so it was still flexible but it wasn’t risen like an american pancake but i call that a pancake yeah.

Andrea:
I wouldn’t call it a tortilla if you didn’t roll it.

Alison:
Okay i see yeah you would call it you would call it uh what would you call it.

Andrea:
Uh i’d probably call it pancake like our so a thick and fluffy pancake like in the pictures like.

Alison:
Till she was.

Andrea:
Posting those pictures at one time.

Alison:
Yeah um.

Andrea:
That is like a personal preference thing or a customer style. And my mom always makes her pancakes very, very thin. So probably people would even call them crepes. But she doesn’t like the thick pancakes. She says, you know, they’re dry and then, you know, you try to put something on it, it just soaks it all up. And so she prefers the thinner pancakes so you can enjoy it or you could roll it up with like jam or something. and it’s harder to hold the thick ones you know yeah so okay so the thick ones is something that i’ve always thought of more as a restaurant sort of a thing because when you go to a restaurant, if you order a pancake they’ll give you those really thick i see yeah ones that like if you try to fold it in a stack cracks yeah and then no they don’t give you a stack they just give you one lame do they and then if you ordered crepes though somewhere yeah because they’re trying to be american yeah.

Alison:
Exactly fill the pan up put it.

Andrea:
So high.

Alison:
That they can’t see the plate covering sauce put cream everywhere.

Andrea:
Oh you just made me think of something has gabriel ever read uh paul bunyan stories no have you ever heard of have you ever heard of them no.

Alison:
No i i recognize the name but i’ve no idea what he writes.

Andrea:
Okay so you know how every country has their their mythology mythology, legends, things like that. Americans have tall tales, so we didn’t have mythologies, you know, as far as Americans that emigrated over here. If you go into the Native tribes, yes, you have the mythologies, the legends, the fairy tales, the folk tales.

Andrea:
We didn’t have mythology, so we had tall tales. Okay. And it’s kind of an American version of a tall tale, or of mythology. And Paul Bunyan, it’s like you take a stereotype, kind of, and you exaggerate it, and it’s just like crazy. So, like, Paul Bunyan is a lumberjack, but he’s, like, not just any lumberjack. Like, as a child, you know, he’d put out his candle and run and jump into bed before the light went out, you know. Like, he’s just so amazing and so quick and so huge and so, you know, like, so his, at his logging camp, then they would grease the griddle by putting butter blocks on their feet and skating around the griddle, you know, to make gigantic pancakes for him. So, there’s all these fun legends and tales. I’ll send you a title if you ever I don’t know if you’d ever come across one in the store over there probably not but, Paul Bunyan is one there’s lots of tall tales in American legend if you will so that’s like the massive pancake stack yeah and I think kids really like tall tales because they’re just so ridiculous fun.

Alison:
Yeah exactly so you were trying to find the price of those tortillas chapatis whatever we want.

Andrea:
To call them Yeah, so if you made a pack of, well, I made, it was $2.23 when I made 36 tortillas.

Alison:
Wow.

Andrea:
So, and that’s organic and sourdough. If you try to buy them at the store, I think if you bought an eight pack of, like, organic tortillas, which I don’t even know if they sell. But if you bought organic tortillas and they would still be made with some kind of hydrogenated seed oil or something, it’d probably be like $8 for the little pack.

Alison:
It’s incredible, isn’t it?

Andrea:
Yeah. But $36 for $2.23. Yeah, and that’s with an expensive, small… you know small bag type pre-milled flour um if i were to, get it figured out and make it with something a milled at home again it’d probably cost like a dollar fifty for the whole yeah yeah for the whole thing and.

Alison:
The good thing about it is you can just do like you said big batches it’s not like you have to be there making that dough all the time you can make a big batch of it and.

Andrea:
Then freeze.

Alison:
It or fridge it.

Andrea:
I have tried freezing the finished ones and i i sent some of those to leah so amazingly they traveled by air in a in a frozen in a frozen case with other things and um they came out fine and then i have heard and have not tried rolling them out and freezing the rolled out piece raw um i haven’t done that although Maybe I will sometime.

Alison:
I think it works both ways. I found that pancakes or like the Staffordshire oat cakes in the book, they freeze really well and really, really well. And you just, if you’ve got the cast iron pan on, you just heat them up again. It takes like three minutes and they’re really good. But I’ve also frozen the dough and that is fine too. It’s better, I find it’s better to freeze dough for pancakes or flatbreads or whatever you want to call it than freezing the dough for a loaf. Because I think freezing the dough for a loaf, you lose a lot in the rise when it comes out. I have not been able to successfully do that. But for pancakes, it doesn’t matter so much, does it?

Andrea:
I think, well, and pizza crust too. That’s another great one to freeze. Because again, you’re not asking it to get that tall. I do think you lose something. If I’m freezing dough, I like to do smaller things like rolls or like cinnamon rolls or buns or something. something that you’re just not asking the dough to put as much pressure on or create as much of a lift with less activity.

Alison:
Tell us a bit about your class that you did on Saturday.

Andrea:
Oh, it was really fun. I haven’t done a class in a really long time. And so… I wasn’t, I was like, oh, how will I do? But, you know, I went right, I fell right back into that groove and it was just so much fun. And everybody, as they’re leaving, you know, they’re like, oh, man, this is so great. You’re so great at speaking and teaching. You should have a podcast. Ha, ha, ha. They’re like, you should really think about that. but i i invited some some people over to do a class on refried beans caning refried beans and part of what sparked it was the episode you and i did about um, gosh what do we call it the one where we said basically it’s cheaper to eat good food than to go to the grocery store yeah the.

Alison:
Nourishing traditions have many recipes.

Andrea:
16 recipes.

Alison:
Or something i think.

Andrea:
Something or other that one yeah we should contact our producer and he won’t know he just does.

Alison:
What the project management board tells him what i tell him to do.

Andrea:
Just put the ad there just do it uh so anyways um at a like a periodic meeting that i was having with all these ladies we talked about that episode and i said i’d like to teach a class.

Andrea:
On, you know, canning the beans because it’s all well and good to say, do your own beans at home until, you know, like yesterday when you need beans now. And so I was really happy we had that.

Andrea:
Home canned ones for that and um the refried beans i priced out once too and i think it’s something like you know for these organic they’re already seasoned uh refried beans that have been soaked properly the way weston a price would recommend and and then cooked and canned and everything it was like a 70 cents a can or something and if you were to again try to buy them i think we priced it on the episode and it’s like a couple dollars for yeah um a can of those and they that i’ll just honestly say the flavor of the ones from the store is not even nearly as good yeah so we wanted to do this and what i they they asked me um could we bring like dinner because we’re going to do it at three o’clock in the afternoon so they could be bringing dinner like we could bring pizzas or something and i said why don’t i teach you how to make tortillas, because that’s another way to save money and it’s easy thing and you have to sit and wait while the jars are processing so i could do it during that window and they said okay great what can we bring um and so i said well why don’t you bring sour cream and cheese and then they also brought salsa.

Andrea:
And so, we processed the jars, we talked about, you know, sourdough bread, kombucha, the podcast, all sorts of things come up. You know, there’s lots of questions that people have, and they’re all very, just very interested in making their own food and maybe not all growing it, although I think they pretty much all have gardens. And, you, buying from farms around them, things like that. That’s very much what they’re interested in. And then once the jars are in the canner, by the way, Alison, when I taught the class, I started by, I took out the bucket of beans and I said, okay, you know, this is how many pounds is about this many cups and you put it in this and you put water in it. I said, now this has to soak overnight. So what should we do until tomorrow? And they’re like, what? And then I was like just kidding i have another one over here it’s.

Alison:
One i made earlier.

Andrea:
Yeah but um the sourdough was the same you know i showed them i said here’s how we mix it up i said then this is gonna sit overnight but i’ve already made one yesterday so we have this one that i can show you right away, but i like everybody to see the whole process yeah yeah um then we rolled out the tortillas, and everybody took a hand at you know everybody did everybody filled a jar of beans everybody what.

Alison:
Do they say.

Andrea:
About the lard and their tortillas.

Alison:
I just want to ask that do they say anything about the lard.

Andrea:
Oh they’re they’re like yes lard oh good yeah lard they’re very interested in okay um they they seemed to very much know that this is the way they they all seem fairly educated on that.

Alison:
Okay that’s good because.

Andrea:
I was just expecting lard are.

Alison:
You trying to kill me.

Andrea:
No they’re all like how do we get lard how do we get lard you know and and one of them who knows who knows me and and knows gary very well she was like uh you have to raise your own pig, she was laughing but i said yeah you you can buy good lard you know you can buy lard, without raising a pig yeah so then we you know it was really nice because the jar is actually processed for an hour and a half or something so so that’s plenty of time to make the tortillas we talked a lot they had questions about making kombucha and water kefir i showed them the cookbook I said, just go buy this cookbook. It has all the water kefir instructions you could ever ask for.

Andrea:
And the podcast cookbook, I should say. And, um… the sourdough book too i sent them the links for that and everybody ate and i actually had a batch of jars that i had already made of the beans same recipe, but they were already finished because yeah i just knew not everybody would be able to stay for the whole time and that worked out great because some of the people just grabbed one of those jars and went to head out okay yeah yeah and then others of them live really close by so that I can just give them their jar later. Not a problem. But they all had such fun. And they all asked, you know, should we bring a jar? Like, we have so many jars. I said, no, you don’t need to bring a jar. I’m happy to give you one. But they brought a jar and one of them brought an entire case of brand new ones. So I was like, wow, that was very generous and kind. But it was really, really fun. I enjoyed it. And it made me remember how much I loved teaching classes on cooking and getting people in the kitchen and seeing people try things that they didn’t think they could do.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Was really fun.

Alison:
That’s really nice to be reminded of that. You know, it is. Wonderful. And do you want to talk anything about your break? You had a lovely break. We’ve all been up to things. Both of us have been up to things since the last time we spoke.

Andrea:
Well, let’s have you talk for a minute. i’m gonna i’m gonna sip some of.

Alison:
My water over here and you don’t you need a break what do you want me to talk about um.

Andrea:
Well you you’ve been up to a lot too you guys have been busy i mean between.

Alison:
Rob doing.

Andrea:
The the new music stuff he’s been doing and then.

Alison:
His demanding.

Andrea:
Boss making him build a platform for the podcast.

Alison:
I know gosh and then yeah then so maybe we’re just on.

Andrea:
Him all the time for everything.

Alison:
Maybe we’ll talk about the podcast new platform then a bit a little bit good idea um so this as probably everyone knows has been in the works for about six or seven months i remember having a call with you um last year deciding are we actually going to do this you know that was a fun call i wish it was recorded how do we feel about what’s happened with apple how do we feel about you know being beholden to large companies that can do whatever they want well you know it kind of sounds a bit like a supermarket doesn’t it you know um you like these tomatoes now there’s no other tomato it was as if it was predestined it had to happen um it’s true so rob’s been using our website is built on wordpress and using wordpress plugins and things he’s built the community kind of membership um set up to go by that so, As a supporter, nothing actually really changes for you. You know, we’re still using Discord. So everything now we’re managing Discord rather than Patreon managing Discord because Patreon is managing the, oh, this person’s joined, this person’s left, this person’s changed their level, etc. Now we’re doing that manually. Yeah, the Patreon robot was. We’re doing that without robot, with a real person.

Alison:
And so Discord stays exactly the same. there shouldn’t be any changes with that the private podcast stays the same the website is still the website with a list of downloads remember you’ve got a special kind of big long section of downloads that go right back like you know years now that you can download anything at any point um the live meetings still stay the same they’re all on zoom everything you know in regards to what you get and what you can access and what you can share with other people every day everything’s the same the thing that’s changed is how your pledge to us is managed and so there’s an item in our shop now on ancestral kitchen podcast.com which is our community and that’s also on the page ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash join.

Alison:
Rob put some kind of drop downs on that page so you can buy directly from that page and all of the offerings are there so there’s the five dollar sponsorship twelve dollar the companionship, the $50 stewardship, and then the $120 mentorship. So if you want to change your levels or swap from monthly to yearly, you now go to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast to do that, not to Patreon. And we are going to be sending all our correspondence from our domain. So all the emails, instead of coming from something at patreon.com, and it’s andrew or i writing it will be something at ancestral kitchen podcast.com, and it’ll just be us writing so all of the emails that come to you are going to go through that which we have our own kind of mail software um so it’s our kind of management that’s changed and we feel i just think it’s incredible that we’ve managed to to do this and you know you’ve said to me several times you know if.

Alison:
What about the people who don’t have access to that kind of knowledge and experience to be able to do this themselves? You know, they’re stuck with Patreon and Patreon enables people like that. But it also takes a cut and it also means, you know, we’ve struggled with getting support from them when things have gone wrong and trying to figure out how their system works.

Alison:
So this feels really good because it’s all it’s all with us now. It feels like we’re holding the whole thing. So you might have seen via email or on Discord, if you’re on Discord, that we would love it if existing supporters who are currently paying via Patreon would come over to our website subscription management system instead. and as a kind of a celebration and a thank you we’ve got a 25% discount on annual memberships taken out for existing supporters on our site so you might have also heard an advert that Andrew and I recorded explaining for people who aren’t currently a supporter they can come on with a 20% discount. But for current supporters, we’re offering even more because, you know, you’ve been so, we’re so grateful for your support. And we’d love you to come over to our website. So if you use the code WELCOME25, you can sign up on.

Alison:
Our site for an annual membership and get 25% off. If you don’t want to be an annual member and you don’t want the 25% off, you can still set your monthly membership up on our site. So if you, I’ll put the link in the notes for this. If you go there, then once that’s set up, you can then go to your Patreon and cancel it. So it might be that if you’ve got an annual membership perhaps it doesn’t renew until like September so then you want to wait until September when Patreon sends you a renewal reminder and then come across and do it then but if you’re paying every month or if your annual renewal comes up shortly then you can go and do it now it’s there now it’s live now and a few teething problems like there is with all IT but we’re working through it slowly um and yeah did that make sense it’s quite a lot of information to impart and i’m wondering if i’ve imparted it well andrea does it make sense to you you.

Andrea:
Always impart well allison you do you should have a podcast.

Alison:
Yeah exactly yeah it’s really fun that.

Andrea:
It’s really fun that we can do 25 off.

Alison:
For our existing members of 20.

Andrea:
Yeah because patreon actually limits.

Alison:
So So.

Andrea:
When we did our sale last year, 2024, we did the maximum allowed sale that Patreon lets you do. And we thought, we must be reading something wrong. There’s got to be a way. But we had to go into their Discord and read through their fine print. And yeah, 16% is the maximum that we could do. And I’m not sure why that is, but now we have the power and we can choose. And so, we chose and we did what we wanted, which was fun to be able to do.

Andrea:
And, yeah, Patreon and I guess maybe the precipitating problem, is that what we would say, was Apple. You know, you and I wanted, from the very beginning, Alice, and you said, I would like us to be on our own platform. But we didn’t have funds and no way to, you know, buy that much IT time. And so, it was actually because of Patreon and because of all of the supporters we have that we were able to build up. you know a bank enough that we were able to then say okay we can make this plunge and the timing was great because we ran a sale last year so quite a lot of people’s yearly renews in June and so it works out great and that was you know kind of by design kind of by you know divine stroke of luck.

Alison:
In April I was like we’re never gonna have it ready by June.

Andrea:
I know I know in my ahead i was like september maybe you know like it just didn’t seem possible but we’re.

Alison:
Almost there well.

Andrea:
We are live we.

Alison:
Just got a few things to to tidy up now really.

Andrea:
Yeah um and we’re grateful for everybody’s been so patient in discord you know those they’re having little hiccups and things um and i think one or two people in the beginning they thought maybe they wouldn’t they couldn’t see the discord or something but it worked out they could and we’re just trying i’m trying to stay on top of discord messages as quick as i can if anything comes up but it really doesn’t seem like there’s been that much so no.

Alison:
It’s gone smoothly it’s gone.

Andrea:
More smoothly.

Alison:
Than i thought it would um.

Andrea:
It’s gone more smoothly than like changing microphones or something like yeah yeah this is incredible i’m impressed and the apple the apple thing where they’re charging an additional 30 for you to process through their app which is weird because if you go to apple’s website and do things and they don’t charge that but it’s their app but you know once they once they make a decision like that you’re like okay you could do whatever you want i see yeah and you’re just making sure that i know that yeah and and it’s not on the website yet but how long before people are inured to the 30 increase and then yeah and how long before like.

Alison:
How long before google decide to do it.

Andrea:
And other people decide you.

Alison:
Know and it’s just.

Andrea:
Exactly no.

Alison:
It feels um like a kind of extension of the philosophy that rob has you know he we we use android devices we use as much as possible free software he would always choose the free software option if that is viable for him and has always been like that and so you know we are using some paid software for this we’re using a plugin for WordPress where we pay a certain amount a month for them to maintain the software that manages the renewals but we’re not paying Patreon a large amount of money each month that keeps going up you know when we started and when you had like 10 supporters Patreon’s take wasn’t really much.

Andrea:
But as.

Alison:
We grow and you know we’ve got to over 100 now there’s the money that goes to Patreon is really quite substantial. And it doesn’t have to be that way. We always think it has to be that way. We have to have these gatekeepers. But unfortunately, you need the expertise to step outside of it. And because Rob has that, we’ve been able to capitalise on that without paying, you know, a ridiculous amount of money. We would have had to pay for some consultancy to do it for us.

Andrea:
Oh, geez. Can you imagine?

Alison:
But like you said, we’ve had to wait, you know, because way back when we started the community, Rob wasn’t even getting paid for it for anything. You know, for doing any mixing or anything. So the thought of going, oh, by the way, could you build our system for us? I was just like.

Andrea:
No. He’s like, you do understand that I’m also trying to put food on the table.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. So that was a no-no. But like you said, thanks to the support that we have had, it’s given us kind of a backbone. And the fact that people do sign up for a year and if they sign up monthly, they stay. They enjoy it and they love it. And that gives us some security that that’s not going to kind of just disappear next month.

Andrea:
Right. You know, I have learned so much from Rob, just, you know, basically via you, I guess, his oracle.

Andrea:
And he has made me so suspicious of every online gimmick that, you know, an app or a program or a thing, I look at it. And now that I kind of know what I’m looking for a little bit, I look and I’m like, oh, I’m basically paying them to do nothing. Like, you’ll get this membership to a thing and…

Andrea:
Like like patreon could be like this i i don’t know because i i didn’t i never figured out their website to be completely honest but they’ll say okay we have these 500 amazing offerings and you’re like and we’re really only here for the one yeah like we’re here for the point of sale or whatever like you’re we’re not cashing in on if you will you’re not using all these zillions of other features that they’re like well because you have all these features we can raise your price because you’re paying for all these features, but we don’t want them. And so, now Rob has made me pay attention. Like when we were looking, when, you know, we recorded on Zoom in the beginning, and then after a while, we were looking for a different software. And Rob looked through how many different podcast recording softwares did he look at? And he said, all of them, you’re paying for a ton of features that we’re never going to use. yeah and he’s so right there’s so many things like that and now he’s got me using i mean for years now almost since we started he told in the beginning you guys told me about.

Andrea:
The libre office yeah libre office or whatever so microsoft back in the day you know you would buy a disk with microsoft word on it and saw it in your computer and then you had microsoft word forever and now you have to pay a yearly subscription yeah to have the privilege of using excel and things like that with the constant updates that you don’t even need or know that they’re making and rob said well there’s this what do you guys call it open library office open open office open open service or open source yeah come to me for my lecture on IT. And it is amazing. I used to spend so much time frustrated because I would try to open a document. I was like, you need to enter a code. You need to do this. You need to buy. Do you want to buy our program? I was like, no, I don’t want to buy your program. I bought it 10 times. So, it’s really nice. And I just feel like Rob has given me a.

Andrea:
A little bit more confidence and also the belief that I can pause before I plunge into some subscription service and really look at it and say, are you really giving me something? Or is this just a lot of bells and whistles and you’re not actually showing me anything? This is just some entrepreneurial startup, millennial, Gen Z, something that.

Alison:
You’re like.

Andrea:
Trying to put really cool hipster pictures on and make me think is something that I need.

Alison:
That pause before you hit the buy is so important and so many marketers work to make sure you don’t have a head don’t have any space in your head for a pause you know so that’s where you see those countdowns on this is only for sale for the next three days you know it’s got three minutes to go oh my gosh I’m going to miss out if I don’t hit the buy button now or this is only available for 10 people and you’re thinking oh what if I’m the 11th and having that you know that that’s a marketer’s kind of raison d’etre to make sure that there’s no pause before the buy button and.

Alison:
Feeling like you know trying to be in business in this online world and communicating with end users who are making those decisions, it’s challenging because the world… teaches you that in order to be successful you’ve got to do that thing where they just hit the buy, by putting these things in your in your and I’ve fought against it in everything I do no I’m not going to do no I’m not going to put that on no I’m not going to say that there’s a time limit no I’m not going to say this no I’m not going to say that and and yet everyone kind of thinks that you you need that and you have to do that and and yeah I still want to make the sales you know I still want to make enough money to feel like I’m earning some money for all the hours that I put into this work so it’s like this little dance between integrity and what works and and and how can I find the people who actually pause before they buy and and then they still buy because they love what I’m doing and and that’s yes that’s the kind of the people people.

Andrea:
Would ask me things when like when i was teaching a lot and like i still have a young living business but i’m not teaching it like i once was you know you know working much as hard as i was and um, people would say you know oh you have to use these tactics or whatever.

Alison:
I was like no you don’t.

Andrea:
Because first of all i don’t want to convince anybody to buy.

Alison:
Anything yeah absolutely because.

Andrea:
Then what do i have to convince you to stay in the relationship like i’m not interested in that.

Alison:
Like.

Andrea:
If you want it, I am here to help you get it. If you don’t want it, then don’t get it.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I don’t think why it’s so difficult. There’s this picture, a meme, Allison. It’s like this little kid sitting with his hand on his head, kind of staring into space. And the caption says, when you order a book called How to Scam People, and it still hasn’t arrived after three months. Yeah.

Alison:
Oh, dear.

Andrea:
Lesson learned. The online, they’re selling you something you don’t want.

Alison:
Absolutely.

Andrea:
Have you heard about?

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
What were you going to say?

Alison:
I don’t know. No, I was going to say that I’m, since starting Ancestral Kitchen and doing what I’m doing with you, I feel like I’m trying to build a different world where those rules just aren’t valid. they’re just irrelevant because i’m creating something that people actually want and need and then i just find those people and if they want it like you said then they come and be part of it if they don’t want it then it’s up to them.

Andrea:
Yeah you.

Alison:
Know and um that feels really good really good.

Andrea:
It does well because you can you can live with yourself yeah exactly yeah uh have you heard of this trend of the last couple years of kids using ai in school to like write their papers and college and stuff if you say you have this trend it’s likely that i haven’t automatically no yeah stay stay safe there’s even you can even oh my gosh allison you can have you can pay and buy robots that take your classes for you so online classes the student may never actually even turn up in the class and then the ai writes the paper yes yes yes but then what happens when.

Alison:
That person needs to do something that they.

Andrea:
Need that knowledge for that’s what everybody wants to know because these people will be graduating coming up so we’re all curious how that’s gonna work but it it made me think you know those papers they can you can tell the computer like like and then they tweak it and adjust it so it looks like their voice and stuff. And there’s a technique going and add a couple of misspelled words and things like that so it looks real. And.

Andrea:
If I were in that class, I would be competing against somebody who was doing whatever they wanted all day, wrote a paper so-called in 15 minutes that took me three days to write and research, because I did it by hand. And then I’m trying to compete against that person. And if you’re in a class that’s grading on a curve, then it’s possible that you’re at a disadvantage because the teachers have, you know, there’s programs to try and determine what’s AI. And in this one article I read, the author said, you know, this girl wrote her paper entirely with AI and then he ran it through the generator and it said it was like 3% chance of being AI. And then he said he ran through a chapter of the book of genesis and it said it was 97 chance that it was ai so i guess god wrote it yeah god is the ultimate ai isn’t he, but anyways um all that to say the the detectors aren’t very good and students you know there’s there’s people teaching you how to get around the detectors you know add a misspelled word The point is.

Alison:
This is a life. You’ve got to actually feel like you’ve done something, you know. You have a psyche.

Andrea:
How is there, you know.

Alison:
You have a life. You’ve got to get on with things. How can you get your.

Andrea:
Yes.

Alison:
What’s the point? Just what’s the point?

Andrea:
Where’s the internal locus of control or the sense of autonomy or the sense of accomplishment? And then you have to get a plaque that says you’re a good person because you don’t feel like a good person.

Alison:
So I need to be told and awarded that I’m a good person. And that not feeling like a good person follows you every second of your life.

Andrea:
Oh, sure.

Alison:
And you may be able to push it down by going and watching television or drinking or eating chocolate cake. But it will be there and it will be with you for the rest of your life.

Andrea:
Yes.

Alison:
And I know the more I shoo that away, the more I just do things properly and slowly and with integrity, the more life just gets so much better.

Andrea:
Yeah, but you don’t know that until you do it. It’s like trying to tell a drug addict, you know, it’s really good to not use drugs. It’s a great idea. It’s hard for them to see that, even if they can cognitively grasp it. But the reason I said this was not just to make you mad, but to actually.

Andrea:
Although that is always fun, but it’s because sometimes it feels like in the online space, that’s what you’re competing with that because you’re competing with someone who they used AI to write a thousand newsletters and to generate all these pictures. so there’s no real art, there’s no real music, there’s no real writing, they just, they used a machine to do it all. So now you’re up against, well, write a newsletter every day, like, okay, that’s not physically possible, unless you have a robot doing it. And then you’re up against someone who has the sales page that is like, if you don’t sign up, your whole family’s gonna get herpes or something. So, you’re like, how do I compete against that with your honesty? And I truly think there are a lot of people that are just now seeing and feeling very burned out on being treated like that, like being sold to and sold at and told what they want and told what they like and told what’s important to them for so long. I think people are just kind of like, okay, You tried it and it was gross. Now I want to.

Alison:
Yeah, I just think you can’t compete with them. You just let them get on with it. And I do whatever they want to do.

Andrea:
They’re going to get sales. And I think they’re going to get sales and then they’re going to end up with disgruntled customers ultimately as you end up seeing when somebody tries to sell you something for nothing.

Alison:
And they’re going to bring nothing into the world. Nothing for something. They’re going to have people who’ve bought things who don’t actually engage with the things they bought because they bought them in a panic. and then they’re going to have done nothing. They’re going to have brought nothing into the world, moved no one forward, not even themselves. And so…

Andrea:
Then what do you have the same phenomenon in your country of storage units do you guys have those yeah okay yeah so so they’re everywhere and they’re building them still they’re building more yeah they’re building them everywhere and you have to ask yourself don’t get me started storage units sorry i unlocked another trigger phrase of alice yeah what what is happening that so many like I could see purposes for storage units there’s definite purposes like when we moved countries yeah yep that was really useful there’s two months between I don’t want to just get rid of anything but I also don’t want to just leave it in the street or I had a boss who, he didn’t have an office but he had a storage unit where he had like cabinets and things where he would keep paper so we’d go there get documents and things like that but he didn’t have to pay for like an office with overhead and everything like that it was great he could store like equipment and things there um but that is not why we are building another one on every street absolutely no and so again people are being sold something they’re giving away money their their vitality for something that they don’t even want and then they’re paying do you know how much those cost allison yeah you just have to pay for one yeah and you probably got there like first month, discount price when when the discount.

Alison:
Runs out we’re like oh my gosh that’s going up quite a lot we’ve got to get our stuff out there placing into a new home.

Andrea:
By then well i mean you don’t you don’t have to have much of a calculate calculator in your mind to think how many months of this could i just have bought all of this for brand new and um colleen she and her husband have this entire, epic operation going where you can go online and buy because if somebody doesn’t pay their unit for a certain amount of time it just gets auctioned they open the door they take a photograph they post the photograph and then you can pay and we all are allison this is insane colleen sends us these pictures me and sabrina and like we look at them and we study them and some of them they’re just like like closed boxes you have no idea what’s in it you know or some of them like i saw this one piece of equipment i sent a picture of it to gary and he’s like yeah that’s like a two thousand dollar piece of equipment like brand new you know like some of them the storage units sell for more because you can tell there’s a lot of value in them some of them go for like for a living 10 or 50 photographs oh my gosh it’s just like one or two pictures there’s not a lot that’s That’s the whole point is you don’t know what you’re getting. And so Colleen will get a storage unit for like 20 bucks and then they’ll take stuff out and they’ll sell it for like a ton of money. And it’s insane, it’s just insane. And some of it she’s like, yeah, you gotta account for that, there will be trash, you’re gonna have to take stuff to the dump or whatever.

Andrea:
It’s insane what they find in these units. And I’m like, who was paying to store this?

Alison:
Yeah, to store that rubbish tonight.

Andrea:
I don’t even think about it.

Alison:
There’s a whole nother world going on outside my door. I’m just sitting in here trying to sort out Patreon and write a book and do all these other things. And there’s all these things going on outside that I have no idea about.

Andrea:
But those people, that’s online too, though. People are subscribing to things. There’s now an app you can get that goes through and cleans out your subscriptions because that’s how many subscriptions people have. So you can get an app to manage. Yes, you can pay for another app that goes through and tells you how many things are.

Alison:
Or you could just not subscribe in the first place.

Andrea:
Alison, how dare you? Why would you say that?

Alison:
I think that a lot of these people who have those AIs and newsletters, they have like, I don’t know, 100 and whatever thousand subscribers on their mailing list. How many people actually read their emails?

Andrea:
Well, that’s my question. Is anybody reading it?

Alison:
You know, and let’s go, oh, I’ve got this, I’ve got this. But really, do people really read your emails?

Andrea:
If you get a newsletter from Alison, or if you get a newsletter from me, we wrote it. Please read it. We did not use a computer. Okay, we used a computer. We did not use a robot. We did not hire a robot to write it. So please read it. yes that is one thing i have found is a majority of these newsletters are written by by bots and you can tell there’s some that come out yeah definitely you’re like oh this is a person wrote this this is so good like this is i.

Alison:
Have stumbled across newsletters that are ai and and and it’s like it’s obvious they’re ai.

Andrea:
Well it happened to us we had a one of our own podcasts written with ai somebody else used it for newsletter and that was yeah it was a startling moment for us but you know when we learned a robot found it and wrote that article it was like what, yeah okay a.

Alison:
Robot took one of our podcasts and wrote it as a newsletter thank you very much.

Andrea:
Hey i guess it was a good episode yeah.

Alison:
Well exactly anyway we should we should not talk about this for much longer because otherwise we’ll just be talking about.

Andrea:
It allison’s gonna have to go back into the garden and put her hat over her head again exactly and.

Alison:
Just lie down um i i don’t think there’s anything else well obviously there’s a million things to talk about but and i had a pile of one two three four five books here that i could have talked about maybe.

Andrea:
We’ll save that for next time everybody listen to the live yeah it was really good we shared about the books and i posted the books all in the oh you did in the show notes so people caption yep they’re all in the show notes okay so if you want to look and see um then uh show notes are in there i’m just popping open the okay i have paul covey’s book next to me and people.

Alison:
Who who haven’t been on discord won’t know that um i turned 50 this month.

Andrea:
So um.

Alison:
Andrea will be bowing to my.

Andrea:
Seniority exactly as.

Alison:
A post 50 year old.

Andrea:
From now on that’s right that’s right he.

Alison:
Still feels 57 he still feels 37 not 50.

Andrea:
Oh my gosh yes that’s the, the beauty of this.

Alison:
Way of life life yeah yeah exactly I get that I get that well right should we finish here oh.

Andrea:
I guess we should I guess we should.

Alison:
So we do we could talk endlessly this this recording’s going out June um there will not be a KTC live in June so you won’t see that coming up on your feed but there will be a ktc live in july um let me get the date of it so that people who july 12th oh 12th 12th of july that’s our next ktc live um so you can come come talk to us then because you won’t see us in june even though you’ll hear this in june if that makes sense.

Andrea:
July is the only month when we have a different time and that’s because i have the young living convention on the third Saturday in July. But I wondered, Alison, if we should just move all the breaks into July, but then that means in August, nothing would go up. And I kind of like that we still have something goes up, you know, in each month.

Alison:
Oh, just before we go, do you want to talk about your Labor Day thing briefly?

Andrea:
Oh, right. I was like, what? My what?

Alison:
Because someone who’s on Discord might not, someone who’s not on Discord might not know about it, but might want to come. So do you want to talk about that briefly?

Andrea:
If you’re not on Discord, you would definitely need to get a hold of me. But Labor Day weekend, we’re getting together out here on the farm. And it started, it was kind of actually sparked by Leah, who you heard on one of the episodes on the private podcast a couple episodes back in April when she and I got together and talked about meal planning. And she actually came down here so that we could work on planning the Labor Day event. So, she really wanted to be able to get together and her whole initial thought was singing solfege together. And then we, you know, it could be more than just that. You’re not just going to sing all weekend. So.

Andrea:
So we’re going to get together and camp out and we’ll cook together. We’ll eat together. She’s going to bring down a ton of salmon that her husband caught in Alaska. And so we’ll be feasting on salmon, at least for one of the meals. We’ll be sharing meals. And we’re kind of working out how, you know, people are flying in. It’s going to be difficult for them to bring food, but they still want to contribute. So, would they rather just contribute cash or they could place an Azure order at my drop if they’re Azure subscribers? Yeah. And then I’ll just pick it up when I kind of be picking up like a big camp out order. And so, they could place orders there. We aren’t charging for the event, but we do have expenses. So, I’m leaning on people coming to provide some of the food. so that we don’t get too much down the drain.

Andrea:
So that’s the event. We blocked off Wednesday through Wednesday over the Labor Day weekend so people can come early and leave late if they like just to accommodate all sorts of travel schedules. You would be camping here on the property. If you don’t have camping equipment, do let us know. We’re trying to see if we can find local tents to borrow and things. and um i think our main programming will be since it seems like the majority of people will be trying to get in thursday and friday then we’ll probably have main programming friday saturday sunday and then maybe monday morning and then people are kind of you know you could stay longer or or not you would just be on your own planning your own meals and cooking yourself so so.

Alison:
If people want to come but they’re not on discord or they’re interested in finding out more.

Andrea:
What should they do what should they where should they probably should they contact you and which email is my email somewhere i would say andrea at ancestral kitchen dot com.

Alison:
That’s the first time you’ve ever told the supporters your email.

Andrea:
Oh, no. Take it off the air.

Alison:
I wanted to make sure you were happy with that. I know your history with email inboxes that are a bit of a nightmare.

Andrea:
They fill up and then I get a new email.

Alison:
Exactly. I wanted to do that with dishes sometimes. Thank God I have robbed, you know. I eat the dishes and I leave them and I buy three ones.

Andrea:
I need gary to go through my email and delete everything that i don’t need to read okay.

Alison:
That’s good so anyone who is not on.

Andrea:
Discord now has the.

Alison:
Opportunity to come to you in september which is going to be really awesome.

Andrea:
And hopefully it turns into a turns into an annual i’m down with it being an annual event i don’t know if it will always be labor day weekend or not we’ll have to see how everybody feels about that but i don’t get this.

Alison:
Down with it thing it’s got to be up for it.

Andrea:
Oh Sorry, up for it. Yeah, we say it both and I don’t understand why. It’s an immigrant thing, I guess. We brought all versions.

Alison:
Sideway on it. Something.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
So if anyone’s up for it.

Alison:
I wish I could come, but unfortunately I can’t for various reasons.

Andrea:
Well, you get to see Amelia and Fiona.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
Quite often. Nicole. Yeah. That’s exactly. Now you get to see Charlie.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. we’ve both got really cool things which is nice yeah okay we’re gonna say goodbye now yeah ciao i shall see you again bye for now.