#112 – Find More Time in the Kitchen (& Do More When You’re There!)

Hands down the question we receive the most is:

How do you have enough time to cook this way?

Children, work, families, friends, community commitments, earning money, doing life’s admin. It all adds up, and before we realise the time we need and want in the kitchen has just disappeared.

If you have ever thought, I just don’t have enough time to do this, the next 90 minutes will help you.

Even though we’d love to, we cannot promise to double your kitchen time. What we will do is share practical, real-life strategies that we both use to prioritise the time we spend on food and pass on the many ways we, over our shared 30 years of cooking ancestrally, have learnt in order to efficiently and effectively get what we need to and want to get done in our beloved kitchens.

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One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

For US listeners, we recommend Grand Teton Ancient Grains. They sell regenerative, organic flours and berries that can satisfy all your baking needs. Stock up and get free shipping at AncientGrains.com

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If you love the show here’s how to leave one:

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Resources:

Alison’s article ‘Routines in my Ancestral Kitchen’

Our episode (number 91) 7 Meals in 1 Day

The recipe ebook, 7 Meals in 1 Day, is available for supporters here

Megan’s garlic powder and ranch seasoning

Andrea’s freezer casseroles:

Layered “Enchiladas”

Lasagna

Swedish Meatballs

Where Andrea gets her salmon and halibut – Ketchikan Sam’s, Sam and Leah’s fish business (they are podcast supporters as well!) – opening Summer 2025 for shipment!

Why I Gave Away My iPhone (episode 12)

10 Nourishing Traditions Dishes Cheaper Than Supermarket (episode 103)

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The podcast is on Instagram at Ancestral Kitchen Podcast

The podcast is mixed and the music is written and recorded by Alison’s husband, Rob. Find him here: Robert Michael Kay

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Hello, Alison. How are you today?

Alison:
I’m good, Andrea. Thank you. How are you this morning for you?

Andrea:
I am very good. I’m very good indeed.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
We both have our tea. Yes. I have a blanket.

Alison:
Very important.

Andrea:
Oh no, I don’t have a blanket. I don’t know what it’s like over there, but it’s just cool in the morning here. So.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
I’m ready to settle in for this one.

Alison:
Excellent. It’s going to be a long one, possibly. We seem to be saying that quite a bit recently.

Andrea:
You know what we just have a lot of good stuff to.

Alison:
Go over well.

Andrea:
Before we start though i know you’re drinking oat straw tea which maybe.

Alison:
You should say what.

Andrea:
That is but what is the last thing you ate.

Alison:
Yeah okay well oat straw tea is what it says on the tin really it’s made of oat straw so not the grainy part of the oat but the story part of the oat and it’s been prized for many centuries as a nervine tonic and you can buy the milky oat so sometimes you can buy tinctures of what’s called milky oat milky white oat and that’s different to oat straw milky white oat is where the grain is not yet ready to make bread with you take it early and you squeeze it and you get kind of the milky sort of sap out of it and that’s used as a kind of an emergency herbal medicine if you’ve had a shock or you’re struggling with something more immediate. But oat straw is.

Alison:
Um is also a kind of a herbal medicine and it’s more long-term it’s like one of those sometimes people call them herbal allies and they’re herbs that you kind of get to know and you you take them all the time you take them every day for a long period of time and they kind of work with what’s happening in your body and make some changes and oat straw does that in a way that it’s a nerve tonic so it’s really good for anxiety it’s really good for anyone who has kind of nerves that are not calm um and it’s also full of nutrients um lots of minerals magnesium and lots of other ones that i can’t remember um and but it takes it’s not just pour on the water and then drink it like you know you might make a normal tea bag um you can steep it overnight in cool water and then heat it up or I boil mine for 25 minutes on the stove and it’s delicious, really really lovely so yeah that’s what I’m drinking so the the milky.

Andrea:
One is more potent you’re saying.

Alison:
Yeah the milky one is more people make it into a tincture and then you’ll put it on your tongue if you’ve had a shock or if you’re having a kind of a I suppose people might use it for panic attacks or you know going through a bad time particularly with with nerve with the nervous system whereas oat straw is more of a long-term actor you know it won’t necessarily work as effectively the first time you take it but if you take it every day for a period of months then it will have an effect on you and i feel like oat straw has i feel like it’s obviously i’m a bit biased because it’s oats but i feel like it’s had an effect on my nervous system um obviously that’s impossible to tell kind of objectively but subjectively I think it has yeah so.

Andrea:
You know this is where the journaling that we’ve talked about from time to time is really good because sometimes, You don’t really realize until you look back and you say, wow, 10 days out of 11, I said I felt like this. And I realize now I only really feel that one time out of 11. And sometimes it’s kind of hard to pick up on those patterns.

Alison:
Yeah, we get used to the kind of new normal.

Andrea:
Right, right. Yeah, you kind of readjust, which is a nervous system thing.

Alison:
Coping mechanism.

Andrea:
Yeah, but that is where the journaling is helpful, because you can really tell. It’s great when you go to a chiropractor or something, and they have an intake form when you start that says, you know, how do you usually feel like this? Because sometimes, like a friend of mine who realized after she was seeing her chiropractor and doing various herby things for her nervous system, she actually started eating gluten again. And she didn’t make that connection until her chiropractor had her do an updated form. And she goes, wait a minute, actually a lot of these things have changed. And she realized her body was just kind of in a high state of stimulation all the time and was fighting everything. And gluten was just one of the symptoms that she was having a problem with. It was interesting.

Alison:
I think, you know, that journaling or noting is very important. And to do with food as well. You know, there are so many symptoms that I think can be put down to our foods, what we’re eating. Whether it’s just generally not good food or not good for us specifically and we might notice as you know Rob and I have over the years that when we eat a certain thing for a little while our mood changes all the way we are change changes I mean Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride would have a lot to say about that with her GAPS diet but that can help with with that as well I think so yeah 100%.

Andrea:
And you can’t hear the cricket upstairs, can you?

Alison:
You mean the game of cricket or the actual insect cricket?

Andrea:
We’re in America. We don’t play cricket.

Alison:
We don’t play cricket. Sorry, I forgot about that. What a shame.

Andrea:
We play cricket as much as you play American football.

Alison:
Yeah, not much.

Andrea:
No, I can’t hear the cricket. There’s a cricket in a little dragon’s cage. It ate them all, but like one survived. And I actually like it because it’s really, you know, you’re upstairs and you’re drinking tea. and it’s just like a cricket chirping is kind.

Alison:
Of soothing.

Andrea:
And adorable but i just suddenly realized oh.

Alison:
No i can’t hear the microphone although maybe i i lived in italy so i’m used to crickets like deafening you for six months of the year constantly really you’re just like well they just stop stop that thing they just go on and on and on and on i think the saccad but.

Andrea:
I didn’t know.

Alison:
Yeah yeah they just if you’re near trees they just go on forever and then it’s weird they go on and on and they’re so loud so loud they’re just like background noise and then they all stop, For about three seconds, all of them. And then they start again. And you wonder, how do they know to all coordinate a stopping? Is there one going, right, last one, chaps, blank? I don’t know. Anyway, you asked me about my lunch.

Andrea:
I hope it wasn’t crickets. Is this a lead-in?

Alison:
No, no, it wasn’t.

Andrea:
It was.

Alison:
It is actually quite relevant to today’s episode, though, or some of it is. Usually our lunches and our food is relevant to what we’re talking about which is a good sign um i had leftovers um bolognese which um i made yesterday and i made four meals worth yesterday so we’ve now got this massive cast iron wok which enables me to make more than i can in my lodge cast iron pan it’s like twice the classic yeah you.

Andrea:
Need a skid steer to move that like how How do you.

Alison:
Move a cast iron wok? It’s really, Rob had to get it out of the cupboard for me yesterday morning because there were lots of other things on top of it. It was a gift and it is just, it’s absolutely wonderful because I can cook more. Whereas in the lodge cast iron pan it was always, oh, bits were falling over the edge because I put so much in it, you know.

Alison:
Anyway, so this one did four meals and I had half ground beef and half beef heart. So I went to the market on Saturday and our farmer, Albert, had just slaughtered some cows and he had a heart. And I was like, oh, I’ll have that. The difference in price, interestingly, between the ground beef, which is minced beef in England, that is 12 pounds a kilo which I know both of those a lot of listeners will struggle with because they’re not English but the beef heart is four pounds a kilo so 12 pound a kilo compared to four pound a kilo so I it was basically half and half the mince I got a crank handle mincer made of cast iron which cost nothing on ebay and um i got the um heart home and instead of doing my usual you know slow cooked heart thing which listeners if they’ve been listening for a while know about my slow cooked beef heart it’s in our cookbook um i decided to mince it up so i cut off the sort of hard fat bits around the edge and then chopped it into the you know reason-sized pieces put it all through the mincer and then put the ground beef in a bowl mixed it together with heart So they were together, put some salt and pepper in and then left enough out for four meals and then froze the rest of that mix in two bags to do another two meals, each of them.

Andrea:
Oh, I love it.

Alison:
And then I left that in the fridge then yesterday I cooked it up in the wok with Gabriel’s help with onions and mushrooms and garlic and a massive bunch of kale tomato paste basil salt and pepper I think that’s about it and we had it yesterday for lunch and then I left some in the fridge for today and then the other half of the mixture I froze, And so that’s ready to eat in the freezer. So I got four meals out of that one cooking session. And we had the leftover sort of second day of it today. And then I had it with an emma sourdough. I have received some emma grains from our new podcast sponsor, Grand Teton. And I’ve been experimenting with them, trying to see what I can do. And emma is notoriously as i found out difficult to make into sourdough and i’ve been experimenting and finding out that it’s very different got very different working properties to wheat or spelt.

Andrea:
Or rye.

Alison:
Um and so i had my second go at an emma sourdough yesterday and i left it in the tin in the fridge overnight and then cooked it first thing this morning for breakfast and then i had some slices of that with my bolognese with lard.

Andrea:
On and salt it’s lovely that’s that sounds so amazing Alison so it was.

Alison:
How about you what did you eat did you eat last night this morning.

Andrea:
Have I ever eaten actually okay are you fine last night I was so tired when we came in from working outside I didn’t even eat dinner I took a hot shower and went to bed but I will yeah it’s it’s the beauty of spring and you know what i think because i had so much i’m gonna credit i guess the protein in my breakfast and lunch that i i didn’t feel you know sometimes you don’t feel hungry because you feel sick i just never even felt hungry i felt kind of comfortable the whole time um i guess mine kind of fits with our episode two because the um the way that i make our pizzas is I intentionally make, like an extra pan of pizza so that typically Sunday is the day we have a leftover pizza because if you come home from church and then there’s a pizza already cooked and we can just heat up pieces or sometimes you can eat them cold if that’s your preference. But it’s kind of nice to have that fast food ready. But I had made pizzas and…

Andrea:
I was trying to think of a really fun lunch because my sister was coming over and, or a couple of my sisters were coming over and so I was trying to think what’s something fun we could have for lunch but, you know, I wasn’t thinking about this until the day before and I didn’t want to go buy anything so it was kind of just in my mind scrambling through what I had and it ended up being really lovely. I took some of the salmon and halibut that I got from Leah out of the freezer. I know, it already bodes well. And then I baked it when we got home from church, because this is the day I was making the lunch, it was actually on Sunday. And I baked it per the, if you were reading the Nourishing Traditions book, then in their main courses, then she has a section called Fish. And right in the front page of that she has um baked salmon and a baked i think like a white fish or rock fish or something and so i just kind of baked them per that on the same pan.

Andrea:
I had already made spelt pizza dough so i rolled those out and put them on big sheet pans and i when i went the fish was baked and i flaked it and kind of scattered it across the pans and then I had a package of cooked shrimp that I sprinkled across the pizzas as well so it was fish and shrimp for meat and then I didn’t have what you would kind of think of as like a cheese you would shred or something but I had some cream cheese I had kefir and I used a scoop of an avocado mayonnaise and I whipped all that together and then I just chopped in all the herbs I could lay my hands on. So we had cilantro, we had basil, parsley, chives, just everything fresh that I could grab. I chopped all that in and then I put in a scoop of Megan’s ranch mix. I don’t know what to, dry herb mix that she calls like a ranch mix. And I put in a bunch of her garlic powder because that garlic powder is just my life right now.

Alison:
That’s Megan from Ori’s Farm Fresh, who is a supporter of the podcast and also helps us greatly with admin.

Andrea:
Yes, she does. I’ll put her store link in the show notes because everybody needs some of this garlic powder. It’s so amazing. Anyways, I was just thinking through my head, like, how can I get this on there? There’s not enough you know to like spread across the pizzas so i sort of piped it across the pizza like if you’ve seen pictures of when people make like pastries and there’s like a dessert yeah yeah i don’t know like sauce drizzled across the top so i piped the cheese across like that and then i also drained a can of diced tomatoes and sprinkled those on and i picked a bunch of basil and kind of chiffonade chopped it and put that on um i think that was everything and you did.

Alison:
All that on the raw pizza base and then put it in the oven.

Andrea:
Yep yep yep okay and it didn’t take long at all um and then there was some baked fish left over you know i think i baked like eight pounds or something so there was still some left over and then i had a bunch of salad greens from the little farm stand neighborhood farm stand and I made ranch dressing which I’m also kind of addicted to this right now so it’s just basically a quart jar of kefir and I mix in a little bit of the avocado mayonnaise just to make it more fatty and then I put in Megan’s ranch dressing and a bunch of chives and I shred in carrots as well and then just kind of add salt or garlic powder as it needs and shake it all up and then um so we served that with uh greens so anyways wow all that to say my breakfast was and my lunch was spelt, seafood pizza with salad greens and at breakfast time i also poached eggs for everybody so i had poached eggs in the side of that and then um the kefir dressing which is like fatty and filling on its own so yeah that was breakfast.

Alison:
That was yesterday and you haven’t eaten since yesterday lunch.

Andrea:
Yeah nice yep yeah it sounds like a really nice day i do have tea and milk wow, Our lunch took a long time to talk about.

Alison:
It did. I know.

Andrea:
We both had fancy lunches today.

Alison:
You have a lovely review to read for us, I think. Do you want us to go to that next?

Andrea:
Yeah, let me read this. Mm-hmm. And this is from Miriam, right?

Alison:
Yes, that’s right.

Andrea:
Okay. So Miriam Abrams, who’s a nutritional therapist. And it says, Coming out of a lifetime of burnout, I had lost my love of cooking and was feeling unmotivated and fairly low. As a nutritional therapist, I was already interested in ancestral nutrition, so finding you two was such a blessing. I now just put on your podcast and feel like I’m with the most incredible friends. Your voices are soothing, your information is so well delivered and fascinating, not to mention evenly balanced between science and experience, that every episode is both riveting and relaxing. Thanks to you, I’ve started up making water kefir again, cooking beef heart, chicken hearts next, fermenting my oats again, making bone broth again, and generally just reacquainting myself with the joys of cooking this way. I can’t thank you enough. Oh, that’s beautiful.

Alison:
Thank you, Miriam. That’s lovely.

Andrea:
Thank you, Miriam. Yes, I love that. I appreciate that.

Alison:
We do. We love to read these, you know, just the thought that we’re actually having an impact. Yes. It’s a big difference.

Andrea:
And the saying how she… And just puts the episode on and then kind of started doing these other things. It reminds me of the feeling I used to have when once a month back in Virginia, me and some of my mom friends would get together and everybody was very serious about farming and eating local and all of that. And everybody would make something, you know, basically an ancestral type dish and bring it. And I always called it food church because I felt like, you know, if I started getting sort of tired, like, oh, I don’t know if I can keep doing this. And then I go to food church and I’d be like, oh, yeah, inspired. Yeah.

Alison:
Yeah. That’s what it’s like. So thank you. Thank you very much, Miriam. Do leave us a review on Apple if you are able to. They make a big difference to us and to getting us out there. And remember, we’ve got a newsletter now as well. So if you go to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com, which is our website, you will see at the top of every page, you can sign up to our newsletter. Our community is now over on the website too. If you go to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com forward slash join.

Alison:
You will be able to see all the details, us talking about what’s involved, how much it costs, how you can come and be part of our world and get all those goodies as well. We have a private podcast feed which has got many many episodes on it that that’s part of it um this month we’ve got an extra episode going out which is in my head at the moment because tomorrow i’m recording it with another megan this time megan francis who’s also a supporter of the podcast and she’s just brought out a book she was the lady that andrea talked to on the tea episode a few episodes back and we will be talking about our experiences writing books and that will go up on the private podcast feed on top of all of the other stuff that’s up there so that’s i think we might actually be able to get to the topic of today now yay so today’s topic is finding time to be in the kitchen and i feel like this episode has been brewing for so long because i would say.

Alison:
It’s probably along with money the most kind of um the most popular question that I get in my inbox and people asking me I just I’m time tight I don’t have enough time how do you do it how do you have enough time how can I make more time I just I want to do it all and I haven’t got enough time help um do you experience that Andrea with people that you talk to your end yes.

Andrea:
Definitely I agree, for sure. It might even be more… More pressing than money?

Alison:
I feel like it’s a reflection of me and how I feel. I mean, because, you know, I’m concerned about money. I’m on a very tight budget and I’m trying to do everything I can to spend as much of that on food. And then when the money that I do spend on food spend well, but I’m also always feel like there’s not enough time. I’m always trying to make my kitchen time more efficient work at how I can be in the kitchen more and just it feels like it’s it’s my battle just as much as it is reflected in other people’s battle who email me so this episode um I’ve decided to divide into three section so the first section will be using your kitchen time more effectively when you’re in there the second section will be making more kitchen time in the first place and then the third section will be tips tricks reassurances and stuff that both you andrew have learned and i’ve learned along the way um do remember at this point andrew you reminded me that we have a download on our website which goes with an episode we recorded last year called seven meals in one day and that talks about how you can take one cooking session and turn it into meals for seven days and that’s um really really useful and that is that just available for supporters andrew i can’t remember i think it is that is a supporter.

Andrea:
Bonus and it it doesn’t just talk about it actually has all the recipes.

Alison:
All the recipes in it that was yeah i remember now so in the episode we talk about the recipes but if you want to um come and join us as a supporter then you can download those recipes and just have them you know ready to print out and it’s basically another cookbook.

Andrea:
We just don’t call it that.

Alison:
Yeah okay so before we dive in let’s go to a quick ad break, okay so the first thing that I want to talk about is using kitchen time more effectively, and before we talk about how to do that I want to remember that all of us have competing priorities we are stretched in many areas you know some of us have a lot of kids some of us have family commitments some of us have work commitments some of us are doing a lot of things you know most of are doing a lot of things and it’s not just in the kitchen we’re trying to get more time for me, I want to be in the kitchen more but you know what I want to be in the bath more too I want to be in the garden more too yeah and I want to be with my books more too I mean every day.

Alison:
I’m thinking oh I wish I’d had a bath today oh you know I could have been in the garden more doing this and and I’ve got all these pile of books that I want to read and it just goes so slowly you know so we all have those competing priorities kitchen time for me is a joy and I think it is for a lot of people who listen to us you know when we get in there we’re actually giving to ourselves as well as serving those we love so you know we want to do that more which is understandable and in addition you know for people who follow this ancestral way of living we want to do as much as we possibly can do for our health and also for our creativity, for art and for our budget you know we we have all of this knowledge that we’re learning about we’ve learned about and we want to put it into practice you know if there’s an opportunity to be healthier we want to do it if there’s an opportunity to be more creative we want to do it so there’s there’s really big push factors on us and I want to remember that we cannot do it all I need a t-shirt with that written on you can’t do it all but we can with wise choices do enough.

Alison:
Okay um you’re right if I dive in now to making more time when you’re in the kitchen okay so I think the key to having more time when you’re in the kitchen is to manage that time and the way that I best do that is make the basics as efficient as possible so that I can then use extra time to create or play or learn something new to bring that into my you know basics routine. So to wait the way to make the basics most efficient is to keep them simple.

Alison:
So I make in my kitchen, my staple meals really simple. And then I take creative time to play or try something new when I see a window of opportunity, a window of time. And the simpler and the more routine that I can make that every day, the more time and the headspace that allows me to go and do something different or learn something new.

Alison:
So keeping it simple really means being prepared to eat the same thing um like I said I made four bolognese meals today and we ate the same thing yesterday as we did today and then I froze half of them so we wouldn’t have bolognese four days in a row because that’s kind of for me that’s a bit depressing um but i very very often i the same thing two days in a row and i think that because the food’s so good and so tasty i enjoy every time and then around the edges of that food i can make variations so i can have a different bread you know i could have had emma or rye today i could add some extra spices or extra vegetables into the second thing that i’m heating up to change it up a bit I could serve it in a wrap instead of having bread I could serve it with you know on a jacket potato there’s ways of switching up the meals which are the same in quotes and making them different um Andrea how do you kind of deal with the fact that you’re eating the same thing a lot of the time I.

Andrea:
Would just say literally the same thing as you said for one the food is really good so.

Alison:
I’m excited.

Andrea:
To eat it you know like.

Alison:
When I.

Andrea:
Woke up and I knew there was seafood pizza I couldn’t wait.

Alison:
To go eat breakfast because I just.

Andrea:
Can’t wait to have that. And, you know, I kind of freshened it by having fresh greens beside it. And then it was slightly varied because I put a poached egg next to it. And then, you know, I had the… Fresh dressing so it didn’t feel like a bunch of you know wilted old stuff it all felt very fresh yeah and um yeah I would say the same thing you know like if somebody’s making the meat sauce you put in our cookbook then you know one day you do it with one meat and one day it’s with a different meat um or you know you cook it like your bolognese like probably I would end up cooking that one way for dinner and then the next day I might be like oh I’m gonna add this spice into this before I serve it again or I’m going to put it on a different carb like you said so it doesn’t always look the same but I am we are very friendly with eating leftovers and I intentionally cook the modern way to say it is meal prepping but I intentionally cook ahead some elements that I know will make my life easier later exactly.

Alison:
So that kind of leads us into talking about batch cooking.

Andrea:
So I wanted to give.

Alison:
Some kind of real life examples of how I do that and the bolognese is just one of those. I mean, I almost always cook two meals every time I cook, at least, you know, even if I’m doing something even simpler than a bolognese. You know, if I’m boiling eggs, I will boil eight eggs or four eggs instead of two eggs that I want to eat. So then I’ve got some in the fridge. Sometimes, as I did with that bolognese, I will cook four, five times the amount that we need to eat at that meal. And then I will freeze the rest. Now I’m mindful of histamine. That’s why a lot of it goes in the freezer rather than being left in the fridge. So I generally leave one meal extra out to eat. And then anything extra I will freeze. Sometimes I freeze them together, knowing that, you know, that’s two portions and I’ll take it out. That’s two days food. Sometimes I freeze them in separate containers. So I know I’ve got one meal. And when I make a soup, I make a huge batch of soup. And then the rest of it goes in the freezer and it’s available for us.

Alison:
Because when you’re batch cooking, you can just be so much more efficient. You know, you’re using less heat. So you’re spending less money in the kitchen. But you’re also you think about just onions for example for my bolognese I’ve got the chopping board out I’ve got the knife out and whether I chop four onions or eight onions doesn’t actually make that much difference I’ve only got to wash the stuff up once as well so almost always you know if you if you’re not used to batch cooking kind of try to reset the way that you think about your kitchen and just double up what you’re cooking each time make sure you’ve got enough containers and freeze it. I do that with sauerkraut as well. I’m not making one jar of sauerkraut at a time. I’m making four jars of sauerkraut at a time. And then, you know, I’ve saved time and money doing that. And those are sitting there ready for us. I make salads in bulk. So I will wash and prepare more salad than we need. And generally, we will always have a bowl in summer, we will always have a bowl of salad in the fridge which we pull down usually for our evening meal and dish some of it out that will last maybe four days and then I will make another salad put it back in the fridge so that salad’s always there I do the same with dressings.

Alison:
I very rarely make dressing just for one salad. I will make a big batch of dressing and we will use that for four or five days and then I’ll do a different one next time. We do it for roast vegetables. So we often roast root vegetables, sweet potato, celeriac, potato for me, Gabriel doesn’t eat potato.

Alison:
Beetroots, swede, parsnips. And we will just do, we will fill up a whole oven with roasted vegetables, cover them in spices turmeric allspice cumin garlic salt pepper and then afterwards the rest of them go in the fridge and those then I’m using either perhaps in the morning in an omelette for me or just heated up and some fried eggs put over the top of it we will have them in the evening for supper to go with some fish or for me a couple of eggs with some salad and again just like the salad we’ve usually got roasted vegetables in the fridge another example is my oat cakes so I make very very big oat cakes they’re like eight inches across and when I make them I usually make 10 and it takes a while you know I’ve got that time in the kitchen and I will sometimes put some music on or a podcast on and I’m quite happy in there making those oat cakes and then I put them in the oven to dry out for an hour or so so they’re really crispy and then I will keep those in a Tupperware container you know an airtight container and they will last us like you know five five or so days they’re just there and then we can use them I’ll do the same with the Staffordshire oat cakes that are in the cookbook meals at the Ancestral Hearth I will make 10 15 of those in one go and freeze them.

Alison:
So really, I’m never, I’m hardly ever doing anything in the kitchen that is just for that next meal. It’s always intentionally bigger than it should be. And that just allows me to efficiently use my time. I feel that’s a, without that, I’d be a bit lost. I’d be in the kitchen twice the time I am now, I think, just trying to put three square meals on the table once a day. can you give us Andrew some examples of how you batch cook because I know your kitchen’s a bit different to mine.

Andrea:
Yeah so anybody who’s listening with um a big family like bigger than my family and you’re thinking oh well this doesn’t apply to me we do not forget about you and we do have things that apply to you so what Allison said about um Allison everything you said there that I want to say to somebody with, like, a large family, it still applies to you and me and people with more. We just have to scale how we’re thinking about it. And I have the same logic that runs through my head, Allison, where I think, well, I’ve already got, you know, like, lard all over this thing. I’m just going to make enough lard for, you know, the next couple months or something. Like, everything’s lardy now. It’s going to take me as long to wash it if I make just as much. So I have the same thought process because that’s how I eliminate time in the kitchen because I count washing dishes as part of the cooking time. So I just want to be washing less.

Andrea:
So with a large family, you can’t always batch the main dish as much. Sometimes, you know, even you make your biggest soup pot and it’s still all gone in one dish. Which is always kind of discouraging but um also oddly invigorating but I I find that sometimes I can batch the staples that go to the big thing so maybe it’s a little easier to cook 10 pounds of beans yeah that might not all be used in the same pot of you know we’ll say tortilla soup or something but I can put basically I’ve got these like restaurant containers that I can put in the fridge and then scoop out beans the next morning, you know, have tortilla soup one night with beans in it and then the next morning scoop out beans and heat them next to fried eggs for breakfast. Like, I’ve done some of the work for that next meal. So, don’t count yourself out if you’re thinking, but my biggest pot still only feeds us one meal.

Andrea:
Also, when it comes to preparing mains, you know, sometimes I make exactly like you said, I’ll make enough that I can freeze two dinner pans full of a certain menu or a certain meal. But I will say that if I just said, I’ll make this and then I’ll see what’s left and I’ll freeze it, that wouldn’t work. I have to make it. And before I even put the dinner on the table, the frozen meals are in the freezer.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Because if people see it, they’re like, ooh, there’s extra fat. At all. I’ll have some of that for lunch. Yeah. So if it isn’t hidden, it isn’t made ahead. So that’s kind of how it goes. I know in lots of homes, especially when there’s lots of kids coming through, young and growing kids and teens and stuff like that, the food just vanishes. If you’re cooking for a really large family, just think with a caterer mindset. Don’t think, you know, how does one person make twice as much for two people? Just think, what would a caterer do? And you know what? A caterer would go to the restaurant supply store and get a bigger container. And a caterer would, you know, when Allison’s making the griddle cakes and you’re thinking, well, 10, my family would eat 12 just for dinner. Okay, so go get a griddle top for your stove. You know, think on a scale that suits what you’re doing. And don’t, Don’t be constrained, necessarily. Like, Allison, you said you have that bigger wok. That was something I did when our third was kind of reaching eating age. I went and I bought the biggest cast iron pan I could find. I mean, it almost covers two burners on my stove. It’s pretty big. And, you know, it takes three children to lift it type thing.

Andrea:
Is exactly what you were saying I’d have like three little pans bubbling and I was still slopping stuff over the edge and I thought you know what um acknowledge the life you’re living now and adapt to it so um things that are easy not easy okay things that are reasonable and straightforward to make in larger batches when you’re already trashing your kitchen for one thing is big batches of tortilla or flatbread dough so you can make the dough and pack it and cook it or you can even roll them out and cook them although I don’t usually do that, or roll them out and cook them and freeze them I mean you can also roll them out and cook them raw or freeze them raw wow Allison hold on let me get my brain right together okay we’re here um canning beans is a great thing to do ahead batch cooking beans cooking a big batch of rice that you could eat over the next day or two again like Allison you said beware of histamine concerns um canning broth, rendering and freezing batches of fat. Those are a couple things that I would say almost exclusively I make multi-batches of and pack away at a time.

Andrea:
Allison, one of the things that I’ve noticed about myself is that sometimes, and maybe if I was journaling thoughts and feelings and what I did today, then I would realize that some days I just don’t feel like I have the presence of mind or the mental capacity to work in the kitchen much. And then there’s other days that i walk in and i’m like what are we tearing up today just like get out of my way i’m making dishes so on those days i intentionally say well you know what i’m in the flow while i’m here let’s just chop a couple onions and throw them in the freezer while i’m here while this is out you know or if i’ve got like my sister comes over and i’m like you know what while we’re talking can we go shred a bunch of carrots or something, and um or i’ll tell people just come sit by the kitchen and entertain me i’m gonna i’m gonna be dicing this while you talk um.

Andrea:
Or if there’s something, if there’s a friend I haven’t seen in a while, I find myself thinking, is there anything she and I could can so that we can get together? Yeah, it’s a good way to see somebody. Let’s do a little kitchen work. The top casseroles that I make in Freeze, Allison, I’m going to put a link in the show notes because if you look in my, you know, you can go to, like, people can go visit my Plan to Eat app, even if they’re not, like, members of the app. or whatever. It’s just a website. And I have like a tag. So if you are in the app, then you can just copy my recipes. But I have a tag for my top frozen casseroles, which are just the ones that are kind of easier for me to make two or three. Well, so the one we make for dinner is already probably 2x what most people would make for a pan. And then I take that and I 2 or 4x that so that I can freeze some, but it would be Swedish meatballs and gravy on noodles or rice, spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna meat or vegetable lasagna, enchilada casseroles of a variety of types. Tortillas, bean and rice fillings, meatloafs, meatballs, shepherd’s pie, tuna casserole, gaps type stews and soups. I really like freezing those.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And for me to freeze them, I pretty much have to freeze a complete meal because when I need a meal in a pinch, I need a meal in a pinch. Like I will not be in the kitchen at all. And then I would say the top items I just like to have frozen would be pate i know you do this too and make you know that you gotta get a blender out i’m blending it i’m making it you’re gonna wash all the bits up afterwards you know yeah, um fruit crisp topping and fillings i freeze them separately and then you have a quick dessert which is what we made for one of the kids birthdays recently um tortillas and tortilla dough like i said cooked shredded or minced meat so like my mom and i before the baby came we roasted a couple turkeys and then we just sat there and shredded the meat yeah and bagged it and then we cooked the broth and canned it um cookies and then the dairy kefir whey and butter i like having those frozen on hand.

Alison:
So hearing your list makes me realize you know i’ve got pate in the freezer i’ve got we cooked a chicken at the weekend and then.

Andrea:
Probably two-thirds.

Alison:
Of it went into the freezer.

Andrea:
You don’t even know you’re prepping but yeah i don’t know i’m doing it and and.

Alison:
I it made me also think you know i do the bolognese quite a lot i do the um cast iron ground meat which is in meals at the ancestral hearth quite a lot and i also make curry quite a lot with with chicken um you know with a big roast that i’ve saved so those are probably my top three kind of.

Andrea:
Repeatable dishes if you’re if somebody’s thinking like i don’t know what to prep if you go to a grocery store sorry that’s the last time you’ll ever hear us say this on the podcast um go to a grocery store allison hold yourself together and like go walk into the refrigerator section or something and just look and see what they’ve prepped because grocery stores will sell things like diced fruit or diced and peeled um.

Alison:
Like vegetables or squash.

Andrea:
Um they’ll have cooked shredded meat or cubed meat and just go look and see what they’re finding okay people don’t have time and this they’ll buy this they’ll pay twice as much for chicken if it’s already cooked and shredded you know.

Alison:
So go.

Andrea:
Do that and then you can um.

Alison:
Come out and breathe consider when you get outside yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah come out and like go stare at a candle until the.

Alison:
Fluorescent spots leave your eyes yeah the other thing you can do um if you’re interested in meals is you can as we’ve already stated um go look at our cookbook meals at the ancestral hearth which if you join um as a supporter you get um from the companionship level up that’s got examples of a lot of the recipes that we’ve talked about and other things that you can batch cook you know those are recipes that we make all the time in our kitchens everything.

Andrea:
In there we’ve batch cooked.

Alison:
And i’m just thinking of.

Andrea:
It like the biscuits the like.

Alison:
Everything in there it’s got sauerkraut in there it’s got the staffordshire oat cakes in there it’s got your um bird roasting recipe which i use the biscuits actually.

Andrea:
Came from a prep ahead recipe that i had read where they were saying make these biscuits and i’m pretty sure i put this in the instructions.

Alison:
And you.

Andrea:
You can literally freeze them raw and then you can take a bag of those raw frozen biscuits right out of the freezer and put them straight into the.

Alison:
Oven and bake them yeah okay and do also listen to the other episode that we’ve talked about seven meals in one day because that is just a treasure trove of baking ahead lots and lots of ideas okay um what i also wanted to say is a lot of these things don’t necessarily take time but they do take planning. And it’s interesting because Brianna, who’s a member of our community, you know, says that she often hears people say, oh, I just don’t have the time to cook like that. It’s all right for you. You’ve got the time. I don’t have the time to do it. And.

Alison:
She wants them to understand that a lot of ancestral food is about planning this batch cooking in advance. You know, it doesn’t take long to make sauerkraut. It doesn’t take long to roast a chicken and then pull all the meat off the carcass at the end. It doesn’t take long to make broth. Your intervention in those procedures is kind of minimal, but you do have to plan you know you have to know right well that pan is going to be used for the next 24 hours to cook broth you have to have the bones you know you have to make time to make that sauerkraut that’s going to last you the next you know two months and it’s that planning that you know you need the headspace to be able to do it rather than necessarily being tied to the kitchen all day I’m not tied to the kitchen all day so I feel like that planning is very important and you know if you’re in a situation where you want more time in the kitchen and you want to be more efficient in your time in the kitchen, find a way to get that planning into your life.

Alison:
Now, it might be actual meal planning. You know, Andrea talked about her plan to eat app. I don’t meal plan. I have a smaller family, but I really think even if I had a bigger family, I sat and talked to Rob about this. I don’t think I’ll meal plan. It’s my person, my kind of personality doesn’t could work well with that but but I am kind of meal planning at times during the day in my head you know I kind of watch myself and we’ll have a moment where dinner’s going down we’re sitting around the table playing cards and and I’m kind of planning the meal a little bit or we’ll have a time when um you know I’ll wake up and I think right okay what are we doing tomorrow and so I am kind of meal planning in the background um so some form of meal planning whatever works for you try one way if it doesn’t work try another way there’s many ways of meal planning.

Alison:
Having a routine can really help with planning so I have a blog post about my kitchen routines which I will link in the show notes which just talks about how often I do all the different things I do to have the staples of an ancestral kitchen having a routine can help because it’s a bit like meal planning it takes the sort of headspace off you you know you know at a certain time that you’re going to be doing this that once a week you’re going to be doing this once every two weeks you’re going to be doing this you can write it in your diary so i find that having a routine helps as andrea said earlier get a buddy you know find someone who wants to cam with you or who wants to make bread with you or who wants to make sauerkraut with you and you know if you if you want to have some time together with a friend like like andrew talked about it’s perfect think about something you can do together which will then give you both things to take home and and have in your own kitchen you know or actually go and you know find someone approach one of your friends and say look do you want to do these things together.

Alison:
The other way that we put that planning into our life is that it’s part of the homeschooling routine that we do with Gabriel. So every morning Gabriel does some schooling with us. But part of that schooling is he goes into the kitchen and he does what’s necessary for that day to move our food forward. So that might just be chopping some mushrooms or helping with the washing up or mixing a bread. Just something that is part of his life and our life and we do that because we want him to understand that a real life is one where you are preparing your food every day but also we want him to get better at the skills and techniques and we want him to contribute to the house so I feel like you know making it part of his life at an early age has been a very important step for us practically and you know philosophically can you talk about planning Andrea and how you do at your end.

Andrea:
Yeah like you said the plan to eat app has helped me um I don’t think it’s something everybody needs to do like you said a friend was looking at some things I had written down she goes you and I are not the same I don’t write these things down yeah and there’s just different that’s you know different things work for different people and there is a time in my life when i think writing it down would have sent me into a panic um and it wouldn’t have worked for me but right now i’m in a stage where i’m finding everything i can take outside of my brain and put it down somewhere else is relieving pressure somehow i don’t know if it’s an executive a functioning issue or just trying to carry too many systems and thoughts all at once.

Andrea:
But it could be something very simple. Lexi, if you’re on the private podcast, there’s an episode way back in the beginning where my friend Lexi and then Alice and you and I, we talked about the way we plan our meals and I wasn’t doing any planning at all. And at that time, that was causing me basically great strain because I was ending up, you know, close to mealtime was still unsure what we were going to eat exactly because of my brain was being so full of other things at the time. And so, I just found that I needed a system. And then we do have an episode where Rebecca Zipp and I got together and talked about meal planning as well. And that was where she was kind of teaching me about this plan to eat app for the first time.

Andrea:
That has been very helpful for me and the stage that I’m in right now. But what Lexi does is the night before she jots down on a note card what she’s going to make for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Andrea:
At that time, she could take something out of the freezer if she needs to. But then at least once she starts her day, she’s not having to think, what was I going to do for dinner again? She calls it a brain dump, too, where she just sits and writes down kind of everything that she needs to get off of her mind for the day.

Alison:
Yeah, I think that’s something that I do quite often in the evening. I’ll sit and I’ll write what’s happening tomorrow. we have two whiteboards in the kitchen which I will often use to remind myself that something needs getting out the freezer the night before or to to often to leave instructions for Robin Gable so they know exactly what they need to do for lunch the next day so I although I don’t plan I do use that kind of technique that Lexi uses of kind of in those moments using you know note taking to dump what’s in my brain.

Andrea:
Yeah, and I’ll actually say that that worked really well for me up until a certain point. I don’t know if it’s size of family or the other competing tasks that started pressing in on me. And then another aspect was I needed to, I know you and Rob do this too, I needed to be able to pass off a certain quantity of what I was doing. So, a list could say something like, you just, you know, Rob or Jacob dice two onions, please. Because then I know when I, I’m not going to get in here until 4.30. And if the onion’s already diced, I’m throwing it right into the pan and getting going. And I know I can get the meal done in time. So one thing that I use the Plan to Eat app to help me in that regard is as I make meals over and over out of there, or dishes, I should say, you can have tasks in it that pop up on your little calendar the day before that say something like, you know, put five beans in to soak for the soup tomorrow. So then the next day I don’t get up and go, oh, I didn’t soak beans. I guess we’re not having soup today.

Andrea:
So those are handy because I can also say to Jacob, go look and see what’s on the tasks and he can see it. And I’ve started building into our day, into our homeschool day, a portion of time where we just do the tasks that would be for the day ahead. So, with ancestral food, it’s kind of like Brianna was saying, it doesn’t really take that long, but you do have to start it early.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Which anybody who’s tried to make something out of nourishing traditions to eat right now has figured out.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, so if you can’t plan far ahead, just plan the day before, just that alone. And I feel like that brings the cost of meals down 50%. Because if you plan the day before, you can use dried beans you soaked, or you can get an obscure piece of meat out of the freezer. If you are trying to make it the day of, you might not be able to get your meat thawed in time, you might end up having to use canned beans from the store. You know, you just get more desperate the closer you get. And if you don’t know what to do, thaw any piece of meat. Make any type of dough to ferment overnight or soak any bean. And then the next day you can see what you’ll do with that. I’ve done that before. I just got to the freeze and I’m like, I’ll take the first three pieces of meat that my hand touches and see what it turns out to be. And any carb, I can build a meal around so it’s handy to have a quick flatbread recipe that you like um i wonder allison as you were saying i wonder if emma would work well for a good flatbread i feel like that’s a traditional, we had flatbreads yesterday we had flatbreads.

Alison:
With the bolognese yesterday gabriel and i did.

Andrea:
But it’s.

Alison:
Really again it’s really interesting because it’s a bit like it reminded me of soaking chia seeds in water you know it goes.

Andrea:
Kind of loopy like.

Alison:
Jelly it did that gabriel was like what’s happening to this this batter it’s all funny um.

Andrea:
Yeah and.

Alison:
But it worked and it tasted really nice so yes.

Andrea:
Well that gel must be almost like a pre-gliadin type yeah like it makes your dough together yeah exactly yeah um i would also just throw in allison i know we talked about this before in an episode all about saving money what was that episode called uh like nourishing traditions or ancestral food cheaper than cheaper than the supermarket or something yes this year it’s.

Alison:
Up there definitely.

Andrea:
Yeah so um bulk buying so that you aren’t always shopping for staples and you just always have staples so that, periodically the things were the things we buy more frequent are veg and dairy things that you know it’s like how much how much milk do you want to buy ahead really but um that way you aren’t just constantly having to go buy a cup of beans or grains i don’t know why i’m focusing on beans so much which i feel like everybody’s gonna think we eat beans seven times a week but um i don’t know why they’re popping up so much in my conversation today but and then routinize everything you can You know, if you can routinely make dough on a Sunday afternoon, or if you can routinely, Wednesday morning, bake a pan of muffins, I’m just saying things that I do. If you can routinely make a big batch of pizza dough on Friday night, so that on Saturday you have pizza ready to go, easy, fast dinner if you’re working outside. And then Sunday you have leftover pizza to eat after church. And then on Monday, you already have a pre-made raw pizza dough you.

Alison:
Can roll out.

Andrea:
For a quick school lunch you just like look like the coolest mom.

Alison:
Ever, it’s interesting to hear you know kind of when you buy things and it’s made me think about we know when we buy things because we buy grains in really big bulk in advance you know we’ve got a cover with all the grains in so we’re only buying those once every three months maybe and but i buy meat and veg meat and veg once a week you know we go to the market every saturday and that’s when we get.

Alison:
95 percent of our meat and veg um and so the way that i work around that is that i you know i see what’s left in the freezer before i go and then i go there and i buy what is there and feels right and looks right and is a good price and then i know what i’ve got for that week and i you know maybe on the way back from the market i’m kind of thinking oh i could use that for that and that for that or maybe i’ve got an idea in advance you know sometimes i have an idea in advance when i went this.

Alison:
Last saturday i didn’t and that heart was there and i thought oh i’ll have that and then on the way back i’d already worked out that when i got home i was going to mince it and mix it with the with the beef and make a bolognese with it and then have some left in the freezer and some raw left in the freezer as well so sometimes i have that idea in advance sometimes i don’t, with um bread and starters those are just routine now in my kitchen you know if you have a starter and it’s taking up too much of your time you don’t have to have it take up your time don’t leave it on the counter put it on the fridge put it in the fridge um keep it high hydration, sorry low hydration all the way around so it’s really thick and pasty and it can stay in the fridge and I leave my starter in the fridge for a whole week and then I bake with it um just from the from the fridge and my breads are lovely and you don’t need to pay attention to your starter the same you know with with fermenting like I said earlier I space those fermentation processes out so I’m making like every.

Alison:
Two months, three months, and then those ferments are lasting us that time.

Alison:
So it’s kind of similar, a bit different to you. It’s nice to hear that, you know, our two different size families and our two different ways of looking at it, but there’s a thread that runs through it that is just the same. Yeah.

Andrea:
And I think this is probably the same for you, Alison, and I think this is one reason why I always struggled with grocery store shopping, because this is how my mind has always worked, is I don’t necessarily so much go looking for food with an idea of I need to find this specific thing to make this specific thing I more so go with the mindset of let me see what there is and then based on that then I’ll make something decide what to do and I I don’t know if that might be partly influenced because I think I told you before that start when I started cooking for our family i was just you know like 12 or 13 and there was seven six kids at that time i think and then they you know we got up to eight kids and i never did the grocery shopping i just used whatever was in the house so i was already just being like okay what is there and you’re a master to make, so i think that’s just how my mind works but it works well with ancestral food definitely because you do tend to want to just show up see what’s seasonal walk out to the garden see what’s happening yeah and then be like i guess we’re doing squash tonight yeah what can i do with squash yeah.

Alison:
Absolutely okay one more thing i want to say before we go to a break which is do work out what is essential and what is nice or what can wait so those two things up against each other because we’ve all got things we want to do, and that we could do in the future but we also all have things that are essential and there’s a big difference between those things and so often I’ve been in the kitchen doing things that are nice and that could have waited um and then I’m getting panic over the essential things exactly um because you.

Andrea:
Cut your radishes into roses or something.

Alison:
I think you know our culture kind of encourages us to have a big list and want to tick off everything and i know until, i listened to rob for most of the time before i met rob um i was like well why do one thing when you can do seven like literally i would have the space available and i would have in my head a list of all these things i’d be like i can do these seven things this morning but actually i couldn’t i just couldn’t and i just end up getting in a state and not doing anything properly and getting and burned out so rob has helped me to understand that you know out of those seven things what’s essential and what is nice and what can wait put off those things that are nice and that can wait and don’t think that you’ll never get to them because you know if they’re important then you will get to them what’s important what’s more important than that long list of things that are nice is that you have headspace to do what you need to do for yourself and your family that’s important so just always weigh up or is this something that I kind of want to do because it’s nice or is this something I need to do okay um is that good Andrew do you want to add anything to that before we move on I’ll.

Andrea:
Just I’ll just um throw on top of that pile of what you just said that in the world of ancestral food this is where saint days or feast days came in.

Alison:
So

Andrea:
Everybody knows in America, on Thanksgiving, you kind of work a little harder than usual, and you make some special foods for this, you know, special feast. And you’re more tired than usual, but you’re okay with it because it was just once a year. And so, my sister and I have started getting together once a Sunday, one Sunday a month, and making kind of a special lunch with our families.

Alison:
And so.

Andrea:
Every once in a while we see oh this would be really fun to make and we just say well we’ll put it on one of those sundays because you know this isn’t something we normally have time to but we’ll make time for it on that special time so having a time where you have reserved for, that food that takes a little bit more effort and is a little bit more.

Alison:
Laborious.

Andrea:
I think is I think it’s a good thing.

Alison:
Yeah I agree with that definitely okay um we’re going to talk about how to make more time to get into the kitchen next let’s go to an ad break first, okay let’s talk about making more time to actually get into the kitchen and there’s several things I want to start this out with which is we have often we’ve often talked about this in terms of budget and I feel like time in the kitchen is about priorities very often just like having enough money for food can often be about priorities you know it’s about well how important is it that you’re in the kitchen how important is it that you’re providing this for your family and how are you prioritizing and valuing that you know we often when we talk about budget say you know.

Alison:
If you go back 60 or 70 years, you will find that people spent far more of their budget on food than they do now, like double or triple of their budget. And I feel like it’s the same with kitchen time. Food does take time to cook. And for our ancestors, it ruled their lives. And preparing food should take up time, just like we should be spending more of our budget on it than as a society we are at the moment. And you think back to you know when the industrial revolution happened in the uk workers went from being at home to being in textile mills and they became the operators that generated that industrial revolution and that’s when the foods like white bread jam and tea became their diet because they no longer had time to be in the kitchen um for us now you know it’s really hard when we’re interfacing with a with a normal nine-to-five life, if that’s, you know, how you or your partner or your family are earning the living. Because doing a nine-to-five, you come home and you’re tired and you’re fed up with your boss, you know, you’ve had a bad day, you want to rest and you want to zone out. And I understand that, I know, because I spent a lot of my life working a nine-to-five.

Alison:
The point I feel is that as a society and as communities, we are not supposed to be living that way, you know. And we are supposed to be working together in home domestic economies and spending our time and our resources on creating really health giving food rather than going and being part of a kind of a cog to keep our world that exists now going.

Alison:
Um i think it’s easy you know if you if you are still doing the nine to five and you you know you know you might want to get out of it or maybe it’s serving your family it’s easy to look at andrew and i say well you know you’re at home but we’ve both spent many many years working on making being at home our lifestyle you know i walked away from a big monthly paycheck and many perks to try and find a different way because i didn’t want to live that way and you know along with rob 20 years later we’re still trying to find that way and and I have him now thankfully but it’s I don’t feel like we found that way at all I still feel like we’re battling with certain things time and budget being a huge part of that by being out of that equation um but it’s it’s not something that that happens overnight it’s something that we pointed ourselves towards and said this is important to both of us and we’re still moving to a position where we feel like we can give the kitchen and the um and farming and food the attention that we want to, i was kind of a bit garbled andrea do you want to say anything about it.

Andrea:
Well i think it was great our food always gets us existential doesn’t it.

Alison:
Yeah well exactly yeah The.

Andrea:
Thought that I had when we were first… Discussing this episode and you were talking about this idea. And when Leah was here in January, she shared with me this talk by Cindy Rollins that we listened to together and it was really, really good. Cindy Rollins was saying that the difference between the work of the freeborn person and the work of the slave is the ideas. You know, we’re thinking in like ancient Roman days the slave on the farm was farming but the but a farmer even if he’s working dawn to dusk it’s his farm and his ideas right and the the liberal education word comes from the latin liberalis which is an adjective that means you know relating to a free person and free people, have time or they, you know, can choose to make time to, you know, learn to read or read something or, you know, go listen to a Greek play or whatever people did in the ancient days, you know.

Andrea:
And I think about that idea often, you know, like I said, yesterday we came in late and I was so tired. I couldn’t even eat dinner. I just took a shower and went to bed and, but I was happy, right because i was happy with the idea of what i was doing and i think about that in the kitchen you know i’m doing some i i it’s like a liberal education in the kitchen you know it’s it’s, something that i choose to do because i am free to make the choice that i wish to choose i choose to soak my beans and i choose to cook them and that’s my choice and and it it is a form of freedom And I’m doing it out of a love and an interest and, you know, the strength of the ideas. I’m saying I believe that it is better to cook my own oat cakes than to eat a box of crackers. You know, I believe that. That idea is in my mind. And so I choose to spend this time. I’m a free person choosing this work. And it does hit differently. when you think about it.

Alison:
I feel like you know even if it if even if you only have a few moments to do that in your day or your week when you choose to do that with that mentality it changes your situation you know I feel like at the very beginnings of this journey you know before I even met Rob I, There were times when I could have just, you know, given up and sat on the sofa and it was hard, but I chose in those moments to do the thing that I felt was the right thing to do and was the joyful thing to do and was the creative thing to do. And the more that you, for me, the more that I’ve actually pushed in those moments to take them and do something real and alive with them, the more that kind of sets my direction.

Alison:
The more of that will come to me. You know it’s a slow process and you know if if people listening don’t have enough time to be in the kitchen literally I and are trying to change that I would say that patience is so hard for me it feels like it’s been 15 years and I’m still fighting for enough time to be in the kitchen and still trying to change it up so I can spend more of my budget on food and give it to the farmers that I know are making a difference in the world but I do what I can when I can I take that time in the kitchen when I can I spend my money in the right way where and when I can and and that creates change you know when I was out still working then there are holidays and there are times that I could spend learning and building and I know that a lot of people who are supporting the podcast are still you know are saying i want to have land and i want to have a place where that where i can just be there all day and and homeschool my kids but they’re they’re not there yet but they’re spending their precious free time learning stuff and coming being part of the community and building and building up those skills we’ve talked about this before so that slowly as things start to move they’re in a position to be able to capitalize on as much as I can.

Alison:
So, yeah, thank you.

Andrea:
Absolutely.

Alison:
I do want to talk about time use. And I looked up some stats, which are pretty scary, for the average American. Now, our listeners are very much not the average American. But I’m just going to tell you the stats anyway. The average American spends 2.6 hours of their time per day watching television. They spend 4 hours 37 minutes on their telephone.

Alison:
And then they spend 67 minutes a day inside the room that’s called the kitchen so that time includes cleaning up in the kitchen you know making tea in the kitchen and emptying bins in the kitchen I think sometimes cleaning up making drinks and emptying bins takes me more than 67 minutes a day let alone the cooking that’s what it feels like um so I know that most people listening here will not have those figures as part of their life but I think it’s really very useful to do an audit on your time a bit like we were talking about you know journaling changes when you consciously look at what you’re spending your time on then sometimes that can shock you, I feel like the phone is the obvious one there which which kind of upsets me that you know four hours 37 minutes a day on your telephone and it’s easy to just have a kitchen timer and figure out how long you’re spending on your phone use an app that that can track it obviously i’m gonna say forget the apps just get rid of the phone um we did an episode long way back called number number 12 called um why i gave away my iphone which um sort of starts talking about why um aged i think gable was now 11 he was age one and a half i gave away my iphone um.

Alison:
It might seem like an extreme option, but the world completely changes when you do not have an iPhone. Everything changes. And a lot of people say to me, oh, but I need my phone. I can’t get rid of it. I need it for work. Well, maybe you do need it for calls and texts. You can get other phones that also call and text that don’t have all the whiz bells and everything. Even if you do need the iPhone, you do not need all of the apps that come on it. you do not need to know breaking news you do not need to know all the stuff the world tells you that you need to know you do not need to know it breaking.

Andrea:
News this just in you don’t need to know.

Alison:
Yeah you don’t need to know all that stuff seriously you just don’t need to know your life will be better if you don’t know it um it’s an interesting story here because you know like maybe four years ago we recorded that while i gave away my iphone and for those four years most of the time i had a nokia 3310 which was the original nokia 3310 with the really old slow screen i can’t remember what year it was like maybe i don’t know 1997 model or something um and then about six months ago my nokia just stopped working and we tried to replace it with another phone and that phone couldn’t text very well you know it had that old predictive text and it the texts weren’t sending they were only sending certain phones not other phones took me a while to work that out, so in the end I was just like I can’t use this other phone I can’t use the knocker anymore what am I going to do and then I needed to have the phone to be able to call Rob because I was going out for the day and in the bottom of one of my drawers was an old iPhone that my dad gave me about.

Alison:
Six or seven years ago, I think, which I’d been keeping to use the camera because there’s a good camera on it. And I thought, well, I’ve just, I’ve got this old iPhone. It’s the same iPhone that I got rid of in whatever year I got rid of it in 2015, I think. And I remember I bought that iPhone before I had Gable. So it’s a 2013 model. And I just thought, look, I’ve got this iPhone. and I can just, I could just use it for now. So I put my SIM card in the iPhone. So now I actually do have a 13 year old iPhone, which has got my dad’s details on it. So I can’t download anything, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, because I don’t know what his password is for the iStore or whatever it’s called. And all I do on it is send text messages occasionally and phone people. So if Rob wants to phone me, he rings me on it if I want to phone him, basically um and if i’m going to meet someone somewhere i’ll take it with me and i can and phone them but because i’ve been away from an iphone for like a decade i just i don’t care about those apps at all i wouldn’t even want the apps on there if i could get the apps it’s just a device for me to receive and send texts and do calls and i think you know whatever relationship you have with your iphone um.

Alison:
Yet to meet many people who say they have a positive relationship with their phone most people would say they have a negative relationship with their phone and when i hear that sort of thing in my life i just go well if i’ve got a negative relationship with it i’ve got to sort this out that’s not good so do if you if you’re not brave enough to get rid of it or you can’t get rid of it try getting rid of all the apps try turning it off and leaving it in a drawer try living without it for a few days do a time audit and get yourself to realize how much you’re using it because that time not only takes away your time but it takes away your headspace and we’ve talked so much about how you need headspace in order to be able to be creative but also in order to be able to plan for your meals three days three times a day seven days a week so um yeah i think long-term listeners know how I feel about phones um well have you have you have you done a time audit ever to kind of figure out how much time you’re spending on different things has that helped you or have you not done one yeah.

Andrea:
I was gonna say after after I had seen your notes or you were making notes on the time audits then.

Alison:
I was.

Andrea:
Thinking to myself that timing myself doing things is one of my favorite One of.

Alison:
My favorite pastimes.

Andrea:
And I would say the top five things to time yourself doing are making your bed. And for those, my, my friends with ADHD, time yourself and anybody with trouble or difficulty with transitions, time yourself getting dressed. I know it sounds really weird. Cleaning the table, unloading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher, or just doing the dishes. The reason I say that is because those are things that we can inflate in our minds and be like I don’t I don’t have time to you know do this that or the other thing but if you can time yourself doing it and then you know okay I actually reasonably can do this in you know like I the first time I timed myself doing the dishwasher I was like all right I don’t know 15 minutes or something I timed myself it was four and a half minutes I was like okay I have time for this complain about this no more yeah and then it made me realize you know if you say if kind of like, everybody’s ready to go and one more person is finishing something and I’m standing here well I can unload it in the four minutes that I have standing here you could also chip away at those four hours and 37 minutes you’re trying to get on your phone and just spend those four minutes texting really quick.

Andrea:
I’m just saying like, like the four hours and 37 minutes, I get that people aren’t sitting for a four hour, four and a half hour block and doing it. But what I’m trying to say is those little two and three minute gaps are where I run and just really quickly do something. You know, if you’re waiting out, somebody’s in the bathroom and you’re waiting for the bathroom, well, go make your bed then. Okay. You have two minutes. You’ve got time. And, you know, those are just things that I think of to try and add time to my day where it doesn’t exist. Because I know, like you said, we do compare money and time, but actually they’re not the same. You can always make more money. You don’t get more time. You only get as much time as you have. And we don’t actually even know how much that is. So, let’s be wise with what we have. And when you said 67 minutes a day in the kitchen Alison I started thinking okay I could work with that I could give you an ancestral menu that you could do and clean up in under 67 minutes a day that’s got to be another episode it’s not going to be real fancy it ain’t going to be your Pinterest menu but it actually would be delicious and simple and you’d even be making your own dairy so I think we could work with that.

Alison:
Wow 67 minutes in the kitchen.

Andrea:
That’s that’s going to be.

Alison:
A I’ll hold you to that that’ll be another.

Andrea:
Episode and if somebody’s and I know that Allison because I time myself doing everything I time myself making tortillas because I’m like I want to know how long this takes if I say to Camille can you hold the baby I’m going to go make tortillas I can tell her I’ll be gone and I’ll tell her like I’ll be gone for 22 minutes like I know how long it will be because I it’s because I’m highly distractible and I will go into the kitchen and I’ll like the other day we were having that conversation Brittany and and Leah and a couple of us were talking about how long does it take to make a smoothie and I was like I think it takes me half an hour to make a smoothie and I’m, That’s half those 67 minutes. And then I made a smoothie and I was like, oh, yeah, it’s because I’m straining the kefir. I’m washing the jar. I’m refilling. Like, I’m adding a whole bunch of stuff. Other tasks. Yeah, I wasn’t actually just making a smoothie. But then I’m like, well, I’m at the sink. I guess I’ll wash the rest of the dishes. Yeah, absolutely. You know, so I can get easily distracted. So I sometimes just have to time myself to keep on focus. But when you talked about the phone, Allison, and I know that a lot of people listen to us when they’re in the kitchen. But if you need to not listen to us, that’s okay. Like, if that helps you, like, don’t listen to us.

Andrea:
Because if you need your phone just away from your body, which sometimes I think you just need it away from you to be able to think clearly, that is completely. Yeah. And this idea has been knocking around in my head in the week leading up to this episode. So, Allison, I’ve, you know, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the birthing world. So, reading about birth, attending births, having my own births.

Andrea:
And there is this concept that, and they call it a natural birth. So people will say oh a natural birth is one without drugs and then there’s these people who say well you know you can’t really have a natural birth in the hospital because you still get disturbed by they’re gonna come in and ask you a question in the middle of your meditation or they’re gonna try to put a monitor on you you know so you know that this is just the concept some people say you you know i i don’t really care if you i don’t have a dog in this fight but um, they call it now instead of saying natural birth to try to distinguish between a birth without medication and a birth maybe in in a in a more natural environment they now there’s this term called the undisturbed birth and they say oh you know a lot of doctors have never seen an undisturbed birth where nobody’s interrupted mom and said hey have you ever thought about doing jumping jacks, you know. And they say, oh, these doctors just don’t know what a woman’s timeline could really look like because they’ve only ever seen a birth where, oh, if she hasn’t progressed by this hour, then you do this or…

Andrea:
And then a lot of women have themselves, this is what they say, never been able to experience that. They don’t know how they would respond because they’ve never birthed in the absence of those interruptions. So, where this thought was taking me was I thought, how many of us have ever had an undisturbed day? What do you look like in an undisturbed day? And at first I was thinking, you know, a day with not full of interruptions, leaving and going to appointments and things like that. you know, those days that just flow where everything goes at home. But then I started thinking, well, really an undisturbed day would be a day without the phone, where you didn’t have these little hiccups constantly abbreviating your breath and shifting your brain pattern for just a moment. So, we could say the natural day is the day where you don’t have to leave the house and go do a bunch of appointments and all your work is centered around your family at home. But then we could say the undisturbed day was the day where you also didn’t have to keep getting online or your mind wasn’t in an online space thinking about what is that email going to say or should I respond to this person and I just wondered what what we even look like in the absence of those things those days those.

Alison:
Days when they happen at my end are just incredible, You know, perfect. I don’t have the binging going off because I don’t have, you know, any any notifications on things. Yeah. But I do have the computer and I do think about that, you know, running an online business from home.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
I do think about that a lot. And the days when I put the computer away and say I’m not going to touch it at all is just it’s it’s absolutely amazing. And it engenders a different headspace just like not having an iphone engenders a different headspace not having any on you know disturbs disturbations um engenders a different headspace um and and that’s that’s a headspace from which we can be different people we can create things that we never can create when we’re disturbed we can do things in a more efficient and our brains Our brain kind of makes connections, electrical connections in a different way. And it’s a state that I would aim for as often as possible in my own life. That would be wonderful.

Andrea:
I agree. And if somebody’s hearing me talk about the Plan to Eat app and they’re thinking, but you just talked about app. Then I will also say for those that can’t and don’t choose to be on the phone, then what Rebecca, the one who taught me about it, she doesn’t actually use it on her phone at all. She just uses it on their website. So it, you know, it’s like a calendar basically, and she can plan things out.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So she, and you can house all your recipes in it. So all the recipes you find online on websites or like Alison’s blog and things like that, you can plug them into your app so that then you don’t kind of have to go dig through a bunch of bookmarks to find the thing.

Alison:
To find them all.

Andrea:
Yeah. And then you can also, from the app, what she does is she, she plans out all her meals for the month and then… You can actually print out the recipes off of it and it prints them quite cleanly. You know, where if you try to print off a blog, sometimes there’s ads and things that print off. But it prints them off for you and then she just keeps those collected together. So she kind of knows where she’s going with each thing. And then she has them kind of customized to her family. You know, some of her kids don’t eat egg whites or they don’t eat any gluten and things like that. So she’s adapted things to suit their diet.

Alison:
There are ways of getting around things even if they’re delivered to you in an IT based package I mean I know that because of of me having a different way of working with computers you know with an e-ink screen and there are ways of getting around it okay um let’s carry on with um finding more time to be in the kitchen I wanted to also talk about making it part of your life.

Alison:
So the kitchen and the philosophy that that we have in our home around food it is part of our life you know we go to that market every Saturday and it’s it’s a walk all three of us go every single Saturday it’s our time to be together it’s our time where we you know we get up and we know we’re going to the market that day and we go into town it’s our community you know the people that we’re getting to know there having been astral for like nearly a year it feels like meeting friends you know every week it’s part of our lives and as i talked about before chopping and food prep is is part of gable’s homeschooling that’s part of our life time for me in the kitchen um happens with music or with podcasts that’s part of my life i’m doing i’m listening to something and i’m in the kitchen or it’s part of my creativity you know part of developing the recipes for my oat book it it’s me making that kitchen time creativity so it sort of extends into all these different parts of our life and when it becomes part of your life it’s more routine it’s more it’s just who you are it’s what you do it’s not something you have to kind of make special time for um is that the same i mean i know that’s the same for you andrew but is there something specific you want to talk about around that.

Andrea:
No i would just agree with you on that.

Alison:
Yeah make it part of your life yeah okay and you know then when it’s part of your life it it’s who you are and then you’re getting to know people and you get to the situation where you might be able to say oh you know want to come over and do some canning or do you want to come over and make some bread you end up involving your friends your family everyone around you and as we’ve talked about through this episode when you join together you can get so much more done oh yeah okay we’ve got one more section to go let’s go to an ad break first.

Alison:
OK, so this last kind of section for finding enough time to be in the kitchen are just some things that we haven’t quite touched on and some tips and advice that we’ve got. So the first thing I wanted to start with was don’t feel guilty for outsourcing some of the stuff that you’re eating. You cannot do it all. And as an individual, you were never meant to do it all. You know, our ancestors worked in community. They did things together. They had families extended families bigger bigger situations they live together they work together they harvested together they cook together they ate together and we are you know in this society we are these little individual families in our four walls and we were never meant to be able to do it all that way so if you need to outsource some of it by you know going and finding some dairy somewhere else someone else making your cheese if you need to be able to go and and get sourdough bread from someone else then don’t feel guilty about that choose what you can do in the kitchen and what you enjoy in the kitchen and what your current situation allows you to do and let go of the rest andrea you have something you want to say here i think.

Andrea:
Yeah well i i’d agree with that completely and that is that’s very ancestral you know there was a cheesemonger there was a butcher there was a baker there’s people who did the different specialized tasks I know the reason a lot of us do it ourself is because sometimes it’s really hard to find good options for these things but but do the best you can and you know we all do the best we can within what we have access to yeah you made some.

Alison:
Notes about the phone do you.

Andrea:
Think you’ve.

Alison:
Talked about that already before or do you want to mention that again here.

Andrea:
No I think I think we pretty much covered it and I’ll just I’ll just kind of say in the sense of where you’re where you’re addressing this final kind of point that a friend of mine who used to smoke a lot of weed I remember her describing to me when she stopped smoking a lot and she doesn’t really have a problem with people smoking it she just felt like it was impeding her creativity, and she said when she stopped she felt like she could think more coherently and she could have like ideas and put things together in her mind better and I told her I feel like that when I get away from the phone and I it just made me look at my phone differently like what in the world is it doing to my mind that has the effect of like a drug that made me feel like I couldn’t get clear quiet thoughts so kind of like you were saying Allison if you just feel like you’re having a hard time, just try getting rid of it for a while. It seems like those little moments shouldn’t cause as much disruption as they do, but they definitely do something to our.

Alison:
Brain patterns so yeah good i was talking to um liz who’s a supporter of the podcast yesterday and she was talking about how in the evening she wants to spend time doing kind of research and reading and how she’s finding it hard sometimes to focus on the reading what she’s learning and how she’s kind of made a connection between how much time she’s spending on her phone and the evenings when she then goes to try to take things in she can’t do it and she’s wondering if there’s a link between those two things so that’s kind of similar to what you’re saying there yeah definitely okay um i we have talked you talked a little bit earlier andrew about kind of going with your energy sometimes you know we get up and we feel great and we’re like bring it on come in the kitchen and we’re doing as much but other times we just think oh i haven’t got it in many i can’t do this and you know if our body’s saying that to us.

Alison:
We should listen to it we can rest and if you do rest in those moments when you your body’s saying to you i can’t do this even if your mind’s going no but i need to do this i need to do this if you do rest that attention to your body will pay you back you will find you have more energy than you had and you can come back and then when you you know when the wind gets you again and and you’ve recovered then then go for it you know you’re a dynamo in the kitchen so do go with your energy You don’t feel like every day should be the same and you should be able to do this, you know, every single day at this time.

Alison:
Some days we can do a lot more than others.

Alison:
I would also say, don’t forget to do the things you love. This whole thing about, you know, keep the essentials as quick and efficient as possible. In my book is so that I can spend more time in the kitchen doing the things that I love. And if I don’t have that kind of pottering time in the kitchen or the the odd meal where I think oh I just want to let’s see what I can make with this or let’s I feel really feel like I want to make some kind of special oat cake dish today if I don’t do that I miss it so much because following my creative whim in the kitchen creative whims in the kitchen is so part so much part of what feeds me. So don’t forget to do the things you love. And then the last thing that I wanted to say was to be kind to yourself. I feel like there is never enough time to do the things we want to do both in and out of the kitchen.

Alison:
Um, but there is always enough time for it to be okay, you know, for it to be okay. And being okay is important. It’s far more important than losing it and being overwhelmed all the time because we feel like we haven’t got enough time. So just be kind and gentle with yourself and understand that frankly, what you’re doing is enough and you’re not always going to be in the situation you are now things change okay is there anything you’d like to add andrea before we close oh.

Andrea:
That was beautiful allison i loved it.

Alison:
Thank you okay well we finally um tackled this topic hopefully listeners will get um some benefit from it and i will see you again next time all right allison bye.

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