Kitchen Table Chats #51 – Is Pork Healthy & All The Types of Yeast (Plus Andrea’s Mum!)

What we talked about:

• Alison’s love of nigella
• Andrea’s sausage casserole
• Is pork healthy?
• Do you need to soak it in ACV to kill parasites?
• How legit is the WAPF study on pork and blood?
• Yeast: What are all the different kinds used for in baking?
• Can we use yeast or is sourdough the only way to go?
• What does food have to do with our sense of place?
• DID AI RIP OFF one of our episodes for a YouTube video!?
• The Pork Book!
• From Rebecca: I’d love to hear a little bit more about Andrea’s mum. Was she the first in her family to step outside the norm or was she continuing in the same vein as her own upbringing?
• The Christmas Hamper!
• Is it printable?

Resources Mentioned:

• Weston A Price Foundation article about pork
• Beyond Bacon screenshots on pork and blood (thanks to Hannah!): First page, Second page, Third page
• Article about yeast, including the conversion chart

Transcript:

Alison:
Hello andrea hello.

Andrea:
Allison how are you today.

Alison:
I’m good thank you i’m good thank you um it’s been, a chaos day here we had someone come to paint the spare room which we is a room that we haven’t been able to use for two and a half months despite having four people in the house now we’ve been living in a one and a half bedroom house which has been difficult is the polite way to put it um also anyway paying extra exactly room yeah that’s the fun part someone has repainted it today and the early signs are good because yesterday rob went in there to clear it ready for the painting and he couldn’t be in there for more than minutes and he was just in agony, and yet he’s been in there since the painting was only done like an hour ago and um that is he says it’s much better so i think already better what.

Andrea:
Did they use to paint it.

Alison:
I think the guy who came this morning said he could well have used a paint that’s illegal now, so i think that the see this guy didn’t do it before he’s the contractor for the agency i think the landlord actually did it before and maybe he just had a pot of paint that had been in his shed for like years and he just thought i’ll slap this on, Anyway, so that was going on and we had to move all the things around out of the room so there’s nowhere to put it and just chaos going on. Anyway, yes, I am in one piece.

Andrea:
Barely. Despite chaos, you still got to eat. So did you eat lunch?

Alison:
Yeah, we did. Yeah, and Gabriel made half of it actually. I said to him that we needed help this morning. um and because it’s a friday we’re recording it’s our kind of day before the market so it’s just use up whatever’s in the fridge really um so he did in um he used two cast iron pans which was.

Alison:
Extravagant when i would have only used one yeah um he fried some onion and some sliced up bacon and some mushrooms and a big bunch of chard and then he put some herbs in and half a tin of chopped tomatoes and he was doing all that downstairs I could smell it upstairs it was lovely then this morning after breakfast I put some buckwheat into a bowl with some salt and some nigella seeds and a little bit of instant yeast and some water and the end of some goat’s yogurt i bought some goat’s yogurt from the market last week um but then had some and just still i’m still having problems with probiotics is it the probiotics that i mean i’m not sleeping i don’t know i keep trying to have some probiotics and then i kind of don’t sleep for quite an extended period of time and then I have to ease back off the probiotics and you know you just you can never isolate things from your life from all the other things you’re eating from the, So I just don’t know. But I just thought I don’t really want to have the rest of this yogurt raw. So I put it in the batter, the pancakes, because then I still get the kind of the good things from it. But it’s not raw anymore.

Andrea:
Exactly.

Alison:
Power-free probiotics, post-biotics and all that. So, yeah, then I came down and fried up some pancakes from that batter. And we had them with the kind of all the mix that Gable had made inside, wrapped around.

Andrea:
Really delicious oh that does sound good yeah i like it and you you always have nigella seeds going on i have a small container but i never i never really think to use them so i need to uh i put them in everything no not everything.

Alison:
But virtually everything i just i love them i think the flavor they impart is so delicious and also the fact that the little black specks.

Andrea:
You know.

Alison:
They they’re they give an interest to the eye too.

Andrea:
Yeah they do you know we could go back and word search all of our yeah transcripts how many times you said you ate nigella seeds have competitions to win something.

Alison:
How many times has.

Andrea:
Allison said nigella.

Alison:
In the last five.

Andrea:
Years guinness world record most times mentioned on a podcast how about you have you had.

Alison:
Some breakfast yet or was your last meal last night.

Andrea:
I did actually have breakfast but i because i got up really early because I wanted to run the power before we started. But I actually wanted to share about the dinner last night because it’s a recipe that I keep thinking I should type this up for the podcast somewhere. It’s just one of our kind of easiest, quickest sort of doing a lot of other things type day meals. And it’s based off of an industrial product that we used to eat when I was kid growing up, but we obviously don’t eat anymore. And I kind of recreated the idea of, So, there’s this product in the U.S. called Rice-A-Roni, and I don’t really know what it is other than, you know, like rice with, like, seasonings in it in a box or something.

Andrea:
And so, the way I make the dish that my mom used to make using that, then what I do is cook, like, a pack of bulk sausage, and I used our chorizo that we made for this. And then I just take the chorizo out and set it to the side and have all the grease in the pan. And then I put in, for our family, four cups of rice, and I toast the rice in there for a couple minutes until I kind of feel happy with it. Oh, and before I do that, I also threw in like six crushed and diced cloves of garlic. So there’s garlic going on, there’s chorizo, whatever spices you had in the pork, and then a toast of rice on that. Then I pour in my liquids. So I just use water and tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes or diced tomatoes or kind of whatever combination I either have on hand or am in the mood for. But I like to have some kind of tomato and the water to make enough of about, you know, for four cups of rice, at least six cups of liquid, maybe a little bit more. And then it’s all, you know, seasoning-y and smelling really good and like kind of spicy and herby. And I stir everything up really good. Then I put the lid on and I just let it simmer until it comes. So really, really low heat simmering. Yeah, it takes a heavy bottom pan so you don’t scorch the bottom.

Alison:
Burn it. Yeah.

Andrea:
And then once it cooks, I either shut it off or just turn the heat way, way low. And then I sliced up a bunch of the raw cheddar and just cover the top with raw cheddar. And then I put the lid back on and I just let it melt. And it’s hot enough that you don’t really need the heat on for that. But, you know, you can if you want to. And then my kids just love it. Everybody loves it. And Gary would really like that too oh he would oh he totally would and it’s such an easy thing and it kind of hits all the bases you’ve got protein and you’ve got fat and you’ve got carbs so it’s kind of like a one one and done meal and it’s so fast to make and and I I make it without sausage sometimes like just a kind of Mexican rice version of it yeah and then sometimes I would dice in onions but you know I have somebody who’s not loving onions right now so yeah yeah don’t put them in um but like you can kind of get as wild as you want i guess you put nigella seeds in it oh wow that.

Alison:
Would be wild.

Andrea:
Shouldn’t it for you anyway for me wild for you normal so you can get as interesting as you want with just kind of the idea of a casserole that’s baking on the stove with rice and um.

Alison:
It’s interesting because i got hold of a copy of um alice water’s the art of simple food after a.

Andrea:
Discussion that.

Alison:
I had with someone on discord about illustrations in books you know because I’ve been kind of.

Andrea:
Considering right I remember seeing that conversation about illustrations and I was eavesdropping it’s.

Alison:
A it’s an interesting book it’s very some of it’s very basic but it’s basic in a good way and she just kind of goes through step by step that some of the particular.

Andrea:
Food groups.

Alison:
Like you know the rices and the pastas and the vegetables and broths and and, in the rice section she talks about you know making a risotto and how that works and she gives some examples of you know quantities for risotto then she talks about pilafs and she says a pilaf is where you put fat in a pan and you fry the rice first and then you put it with the liquid and whatever and i was like oh that’s a pilaf is it i’ve been doing that for a long time no one.

Andrea:
Had a name.

Alison:
But just flicking through it you know it’s like seeing pictures of people’s food on discord you just you think oh I’ve done that for a while and so I’ve been doing that a bit recently just either like you frying some stuff off first maybe some onions with some turmeric and some nigella seeds and some cumin and then using that fat continuing and putting the rice in and frying the rice and then putting in either tomatoes or some some broth and then quite often And when I cook either a whole like rabbit or chicken or a carcass, I have bits that I’ve pulled off, you know, that sometimes I have too many and I freeze bags of just the bits. And then that’s the time to pull out a bag of, you know, random rabbit bits that I can just throw in with the rice and then some green vegetables.

Andrea:
A deer carcass, you know, whatever you have.

Alison:
Exactly. It’s a pilaf, amazingly. So, yeah, I think that’s a and the rice all seems to taste nicer. if you’ve fried it first. Yeah.

Andrea:
Well, I also made yesterday something that I thought I should also type this up for the podcast, but I made a gluten-free crust, which was not really made by me, but kind of, I just assembled it because that came from, there’s this organic gluten-free brand that we can buy on Azure, and I had a box of those and made a crust out of it. But then um i was just trying to come up with a cheesecake filling that i could make with what i had and i used kefir and a little bit of maple syrup and um it’s really tasty like i tasted it as i was mixing it it’s been chilling in the fridge overnight and the kids asked me so many times yesterday can i taste it ready i said i think it has to get cold overnight so we got to leave it in the fridge but um you know if it’s good it looks good then i will type it up for the podcast i.

Alison:
Think the um the pork recipe i mean that that could we’ve done the pork book now but that sounds.

Andrea:
Like a.

Alison:
Contender for the for the pork book which we i.

Andrea:
Think listeners.

Alison:
Already know about that now because that’s been and gone um but that sounds like something that could go in there just.

Andrea:
You know cheesecake or the or the pork the pork sausage recipe okay you just you know you do these.

Alison:
Recipes and you forget about them and you think oh actually that i did that at that time with this and that and that but it’s.

Andrea:
Easy to just.

Alison:
Forget what you’ve done i keep trying to remember to write things down in my kind of notebook.

Andrea:
In scribbles but it’s hard enough the number of times i’ve stood in the kitchen and said to gary you know i should probably type this i think it’s actually a recipe like sometimes i have a hard time distinguishing what I’m making that’s a recipe.

Alison:
Like, you don’t know until you’ve tasted it sometimes.

Andrea:
Well, also, some things you make and you don’t, you’re like, this isn’t like the sausage thing. I always thought, this isn’t a recipe.

Alison:
No, but it is.

Andrea:
This is just something that I make. And then I was like, well, if I had to describe it to somebody, I could tell them how to make it. Like, you know.

Alison:
I think it is a recipe.

Andrea:
Because I make it so different every time that I thought, oh, I couldn’t write it down. But then I thought, well, just pick one method and write it down and then tell them you can do whatever you want.

Alison:
At the end, say these are the variations. I always think that you know I never know oh until I sit and eat it you know is it gonna it’s really good and they’re like oh yeah I should write this up as a recipe then it literally I say to I say to Rob but I can’t remember did I put a cup of that in or did I put cumin seeds in I just don’t remember I just threw it in so it’s it’s a thing is unique like.

Andrea:
That because if you were fiddling around with music and you didn’t know if you’re going to come up with a melody you liked you could have a recorder running the whole.

Alison:
Time and.

Andrea:
Record it or if you were like writing and jotting things down everything you’d written is there on the page you know and.

Alison:
It’s hard to mess with it but cooking.

Andrea:
It’s so ephemeral.

Alison:
Like it it’s.

Andrea:
There one moment and then it’s gone.

Alison:
It’s been it’s been a huge discipline for me to try and do that for the oats stuff that I’m doing you know it’s not just that final recipe but sometimes like you know the throdkin I made of them before I come up with the right throdkin and it’s just everyone you’ve got to write down and i sometimes i make it and then i make it that that’s that’s a lot of eating poem.

Andrea:
Or a children’s book that i’d read.

Alison:
Um i make it and i sit down i think oh after i finished i must get up and write down what i did and then of course i do something else and the next one i’m like oh i didn’t write down can i remember what it tasted like and and it just that only kicks you in the bottom so many times for you’re like, I have to do this, you know, I have to write this down.

Andrea:
This is something that I’ve pondered, Alison, because you know how you and I looking for and looking for, information on how people in ye olde days were making things. It’s very difficult to find. You know, you’ll have somebody say, oh, we went to a feast and they served a pheasant with an apple on top. But you’d really, there’s no information, you know, the cook wasn’t a human, the cook was a non-human. There’s no information. We don’t want to talk to the cook. There’s no information about how it was done. It’s so hard, I mean, you’ve got to pick us, but like, that’s that’s rare and sometimes I wonder if it’s because everybody was making things in the same way that you’re making things or I’m making things in the kitchen or we don’t really think about it’s not like you’re looking at a piece of paper typically it’s not like you think about writing it down and if you wanted to be a cook you would just be apprenticing under a cook they wouldn’t be writing it down they’d be like watch me yeah and then you’ll know how to do it and then you You can go do it when you work for somebody else or whatever. And if you live just, you know, in your peasant hovel, then you’re cooking or observing whatever your mother or grandmother or whatever is making, and then you’d be making it. You wouldn’t have it written down. You probably couldn’t read anyways. So…

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
I feel like… At some point in that chain, in all of those recipes that have been lost, there was the last person. And I always feel a kind of a sadness for that last person. So much of the kind of research I’ve been doing for the book, particularly on the newspaper archives, is people looking back saying, it used to be done this way. Why do we not do it this way anymore? Did your grandmother teach you how to make this she used to do this and I remember my grandmother doing this and and it’s almost seeing it all over and over again and all the articles just feels like someone’s parading in front of me all the last times that people loved this thing and did this thing and passed it on to their daughter and then there’s that last grandmother who didn’t pass it on to her child because the child was out of work or the child was not existing you know there was no child or the child was more interested in something else and then you know she’s just this old lady with this repository of information and then she’s gone and it’s gone you know yeah it feels really sad to me that.

Andrea:
I think i’ve told you before that somebody told me, You know, one day you pick up your child for the last time, but you don’t know it’s the last time, you know, because the change comes upon us so gradually. And I think about that with this, you know, the grandmother, she may, or the mother, whoever it is, they may not have known they were the end of the line. They may have assumed there was somebody they were going to teach, and then at some point, you know, you realize you didn’t or it didn’t happen. And I kind of feel a little bit like that feeling of learning from somebody, you know, at their elbow is, that’s kind of, I think, why video courses have become so popular. Because we can write things down and, you know, with the advent of writing and literacy, it became much more common to write things down and, you know, even think about like Charlemagne and writing down music for the first time. Like, nobody was writing down music.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And I think there’s just, like, it’s maybe a very human way is to learn from a person. And I mean, obviously the ideal would be for us to be learning the way Gabriel’s learning, just in the kitchen with you constantly. You probably don’t want us all in your kitchen all the time.

Alison:
Not at the same time, not until I get a big enough kitchen.

Andrea:
So the video courses are great in the stead of that. But still, I think it is just a human way to want to learn, like to see it. And people say to me all the time, well, I don’t like reading the recipe off the page. I’m a visual learner. Once I see it. Then I have a better understanding. I just think that’s how we all are. I think we really just, it’s just how we learn.

Alison:
Yeah, I think some people are aided by seeing it in a sort of a structured form on the page.

Andrea:
Definitely.

Alison:
You know, that they can’t necessarily take it in as well. They need to then maybe watch the video and then look at the piece of paper and go, okay, now I see how it all kind of fits together. Yeah. there’s so many things you know we’ve we’ve got questions to answer in this katie scene we will get to them at some point but i just want to say um there’s so many things in what you said which is, that it feels like you know with my video courses and what i’m doing with the book that i hope that those grannies who were the last.

Alison:
My book and my work kind of encourages people to bring it back to life and that’s what I want I want people making it again you know that’s why the book is about let’s make these work for now, let’s not just make this a historical curiosity because I look at right you know there are people doing wonderful work trying to document things before they’re lost like you know the lady who does the pastor granny’s channel on youtube but I wonder how many people are actually watching her videos and going you know what I’m gonna go in my kitchen and I’m gonna make this and I’m gonna make it part of my life and I’m gonna eat it every two weeks and serve it to my family you know it becomes just a curiosity whereas with the opportunity to actually make it and make it part of your life it becomes an entirely different thing altogether and I know we’re going to talk about Paul Kingsnorth much more next month probably because you know we’ll be talking about the read-along and that sort of thing and it’s still December in real time here but I feel like.

Alison:
His assertion that we’ve just lost our roots I feel that so strongly with myself in relation to this you know because the grandma teaching the daughter and the granddaughter that is roots in the kitchen in a particular landscape with particular food that comes from outside the door you know and those are the things that give us roots and and we all seem so dislocated and I feel dislocated because I know I don’t have that in my life and I kind of somehow I feel my body needs it and it feels to me like if we can we can never go back to how it was you know we can never go back to the place how it felt if we were born in that family in the croft in this landscape but But we can… Consciously choose things that would have come down to people of our generation and have been lost and then consciously make them bring them back to life again in our kitchens and through doing that consciously we are kind of remaking some kind of sort of post in the ground it might not be a root in the same way but it’s still a marker in the ground that that goes down that’s how I feel and gives me something to to connect me to that if that makes sense it.

Andrea:
Absolutely makes sense and it’s reminding me of that portion in against the machine that Leah was telling us about where the people in the Polynesian culture said oh this this tradition is outdated we’re going to get rid of.

Alison:
This.

Andrea:
And then it wasn’t until years later that they could see the ramifications of the tradition and what they lost. And I feel like we unearth that constantly. You know, if anybody’s ever weeded in a garden, you know how you like you pull up, start to pull up the plant and then you’re like, the root goes farther and farther. And it’s like, oh my goodness, how far does this thing go? And I feel like that’s sometimes how it feels when we say, oh, look, here’s this tradition and we kind of pull it up. And then you’re like, well, let’s keep following this route. And you’re like, oh my gosh, it goes all the way across the whole garden. I had no idea. And, and there’s all these, All these traditions that were mooring us down, and now everybody’s got this, you know, sense of being so unmoored. There is very little sense of place, and I do think a lot of it goes back to just kind of detaching ourselves from these traditions and saying, oh, they’re outdated. We have a factory to make that now. We have packets of oats. We don’t need Thradkin. And therefore, we don’t need the grandmother who’s going to put it in the oven and stand and wait for it to bake.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
Lots of things there.

Alison:
So much, so much to talk about.

Andrea:
I feel like, I mean, this even comes back to something that I feel, I mean, I feel this is very important to talk about in the world of ancestral cooking is that ancestral cooking doesn’t, it does not come to us without the pre-industrial lifestyle as well. Like, there are, you know, when people say, oh, how do I make ancestral food fit with my industrial lifestyle? And there’s things that we can strategize, you know, well, you could start this this day and then take it off that day and you could do this on Sunday when you’re home or, you know. But the reality is, is that the industrial lifestyle is also killing us as fast as the industrial food.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And the real thing that I think sometimes ancestral food teaches us this and sometimes the ancestral lifestyle teaches us about the food, but the real thing is starting to realize, wow, the food literally fits with a slower lifestyle and actually the lifestyle itself was part of the healing. Yeah you and rob had a good episode on that too when you talked about your um you know the ancestral lifestyle episode yeah yeah kind of yeah peaking.

Alison:
A p it was a while ago a peek into our ancestral lifestyle or something wasn’t it way back.

Andrea:
Yeah yeah in the annals i almost feel like it’s too much of a shock to say out in the public square and social food doesn’t fit with an industrial lifestyle because then people will say well i guess that’s not for me then i’m stuck with But the real truth is, is that I think pretty much most of us, if not all of us, are coming to ancestral food while in an industrial lifestyle. And we have to… Use the food as kind of the impetus to start slowly unraveling bit by bit. You know, as soon as somebody says to me, oh, I can’t go that thing tonight. I’m waiting for my bread to rise. And then I’m going to put it in the oven. I’m like, there you go. That’s probably right where you need to be. You know, the food is, is keeping you there for a purpose in the same way, like, you know, milking a cow keeps you at home most of the time. So yeah, yeah, that, that’d be a fun thread to tease sometime but i also know that you have some really good stuff to talk about regarding pork that we did.

Alison:
Well we have some questions yeah yeah we have some questions so, listeners probably have listened to the pork episode which is our first episode of and strangely enough andrea and i kind of listened to it as well because we recorded it last week but then the technology gremlins got in um because andrea has a wonderful new computer but you know when you get new things you’re kind of like flailing around a little bit and you think you’ve got it all set up and you haven’t and so we can’t use the recording that we recorded last week so we’re going to be doing like a groundhog day and recording the pork episode again next week yeah so we kind of have come.

Andrea:
Out even better the second time.

Alison:
We have recorded it but we haven’t recorded it so we will continue this discussion in advance and also after i mean what’s.

Andrea:
His name the guy with the cat.

Alison:
Schrodinger’s episode is it it is.

Andrea:
Recorded but it isn’t.

Alison:
So i had a kind of a two-part comment from laura when um laura kemp when i talked about potentially doing a pork episode and one of the things she said we actually read out on the main podcast um this is a really good.

Andrea:
Question to bring up.

Alison:
Another question andrew do you have it in front of you do you want to read it Mm-hmm. Thanks.

Andrea:
I do. Laura asked, or Laura said, Quite a while ago, I heard it suggested that you should soak uncured pork overnight in a – mix of apple cider vinegar and water, then drain and soak in plain water until ready to cook. Have you heard of this? If so, why would this be? I have never heard it since, and I can’t remember where I heard it from. I did it for a while, when I would remember the night before, but stopped once we found a good source for pork, hoping it wasn’t really needed when the pigs were raised properly. That’s a lot of apple cider vinegar.

Alison:
It is, yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
And then you, did you provide this article link?

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, okay.

Alison:
I did, yeah. So, all right. I think Laura’s… Question kind of um states a general thing that i’ve heard quite a lot from people which is the idea that pork isn’t as healthy as other meats um i’m not sure we should be eating it with abandon like we should be grass-fed beef um and i think that the particular practice that she is talking about probably came from a western price article which is kind of infamous in um you know ancestral circles for anyone who’s done any digging into pork um which is where they um did an experiment to show that pork had an effect on the blood and the article actually doesn’t just talk about the blood it talks about parasites as well and other health concerns with pork so we will link that article in the show notes so if you want to go and look at it you can um and the practice of soaking uncured pork in an acidic medium i believe comes from what is suggested in this article.

Alison:
Um and we had a discussion on discord about this article with quite a few people weighing in um and i felt like the general consensus was similar to what i feel which is i’m i’ve read that pork article which has been up there at least a decade i think and we all know that there’s no pork in nourishing traditions maybe we don’t all know that like we do now there’s no pork in nourishing traditions even though western price is very behind west sorry the western price foundation is very behind lard they do not talk about.

Alison:
In that book or sally doesn’t um so in this um article online the western a price foundation did an experiment on i think three people and took their blood after they’d eaten various types of pork including some cured pork and some uncured pork when you look at the study and And when you expose that study to people who are used to doing studies, you find that really the study was quite flawed. I don’t think anyone scientific would call it a study. And I myself am very sceptical about it. I feel like if you look back at traditional cultures, there are some who’ve done the marinating curing that the Weston A. Price recommend you do with all uncured pork. But there are also many cultures who’ve just eaten pork meat. And there’s many cultures who’ve marinated cured some pork because obviously if you call your pig once a year the pork doesn’t keep for a year unless you cure it before freezes um but those same traditions also ate the pork fresh at the gill um so i from an ancestral point of view i don’t think you can say that all cultures marinated and cured their porks um ancestrally.

Alison:
There’s also a reference in that article to um.

Alison:
Parasites and although sally does say you should do this for for for parasite reasons if you actually read the article in detail it says in quotes they may kill parasites so she doesn’t actually say that marinating or curing pork kills parasites but if you cook pork as i said in the main feed episode to fahrenheit it does kill parasites so really if you’re worried about parasites just cook your pork um the blood studies that were done in there a few several people have asked scientists about it and they’ve said the study’s flawed because there are only three people i mean any study that’s in a medical journal is not done on three people and also when you’re taking blood like that and put it on slides there’s apparently a large possibility that it could become sticky in quotes which is what this kind of effect on the blood is called just by the fact of putting it on a slide so what I’ve actually done is I remembered a book called Beyond Bacon that I read over a decade ago and I remember it had something about the science of pork health and it particularly looked at this kind of blood claim thing.

Alison:
And then on discord lovely hannah who has a copy of beyond bacon that she got second hand because i gave my copy away um took some screenshots for me and i have uploaded those to the podcast website so if anyone wants to have a read of a kind of a debunking of um that particular assertion in that article but also some reassurance around pork as a meat in general then go to the show notes there are three screenshots from that book which you can just literally click on and you will see the page and you can have a look at you know what what that book has to say in regards to that, i feel like um.

Alison:
Grass-fed beef gets a lot of press and grass-fed beef is wonderful and it gives you certain things, but other foodstuffs give you other things. You know, seafood will give you something that chicken doesn’t. Chicken will give you something that pork doesn’t. And variety is, for me, very important in my family’s diet. And I see no reason why, if I am getting my pork from a good source, I see no reason why I wouldn’t eat well-cooked pork. As we stressed in the pork episode, it’s the sourcing. It feels so, so important to me. And I feel like, you know, Laura gets that by saying what she said at the end. You know i’ve stopped doing this since we’ve sourced our pork well um i i won’t buy pork that is not from a source that i feel completely confident with i’d rather not eat pork so, yeah i i mean personally if someone asks me about that article i’m gonna say take it with a pinch of salt i don’t really think that the what it says is you know it’s not something that i’m paying attention to i don’t think it’s a it’s a valid study i’m skeptical it’s how i feel yeah would you like to add anything to that andrea and tell us your opinion no.

Andrea:
I think i i don’t really have an opinion on this other than that.

Alison:
I guess.

Andrea:
An observation i’ve never done it i’ve never done the soaking in apple cider vinegar.

Alison:
Okay and.

Andrea:
I i like you i i do cook pork thoroughly i think the, a recipe that wasn’t thoroughly cooked was that recipe you and I both commented on in the Piper’s Farm book where she had a rare heart or something.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And we were like, wait, what? Don’t you want to cook that all the way? Yeah. But other than that, you know, I just always cook it.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. So I hope that answers your question, Laura.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
I feel like.

Andrea:
And I think Laura’s on it, like you said, with the sourcing. Yeah, exactly you know get good pork if you feel tired after you eat your pork or something you know like I don’t know that’s not normal.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, should we move on to the next question? Because there are a lot. Shall I read this one?

Andrea:
Oh, and I wanted to say, per our last KTC, do you remember when we had two questions from Hannah and I said, is it the same Hannah and we didn’t know? It was not the same Hannah. It was two different Hannahs. We have a lot of Hannahs. Other Hannah, I want you to know that I see you. And I know you weren’t the other Hannah.

Alison:
We have a lot of Hannah’s and a lot of Katie’s and a lot of, I don’t know. It’s good that we’re getting double names, you know.

Andrea:
Ancestral names. There we go. Yes.

Alison:
Should I read Laura’s question about yeast? Should I read it?

Andrea:
Is it Laura Kemp or a different Laura?

Alison:
Yes, it’s the same Laura.

Andrea:
Okay.

Alison:
It’s the same Laura.

Andrea:
Yeah, you read this one.

Alison:
Okay. Okay. So she has a question about yeast, which is very interesting. And she says I know sourdough with no yeast used is best but can store-bought yeast be used what are the differences between the yeast labels this all came up because I bought a still in the box unused Emile Henry pizza stone at a garage sale for next to nothing and it came with a pizza dough recipe that called for baker’s yeast only Whole Foods didn’t have anything called baker’s yeast I bought one called fast-acting yeast but haven’t tried it yet I’ve never made anything with yeast because I thought it was something to avoid but I’m wondering if that was an overreaction I don’t have sourdough starter because I actually have a really good source to buy sourdough bread products so I’m using my available time on developing other gardening, preserving, cooking skills before trying sourdough When making pizza before getting this stone I’ve used the yogurt dough pizza recipe in Nourishing Traditions which is excellent but uses a pie dish instead of a stone okay um andrew do you want to speak to that.

Andrea:
I guess I will say that in the reading of this conversation, I didn’t know there was so many kinds of yeast. There are so many names.

Alison:
Nor did I.

Andrea:
And I think it’s kind of like the treacle conversation. I was like, what is happening? It’s like this, all these things have been in front of me and I’ve never realized that there was differences or paid attention to them or if there are things I don’t really use sometimes. I’m just not aware.

Alison:
Yeah and.

Andrea:
So yeah we’ve all been reading websites and trying to figure this out with her so there’s a whole conversation going on but yeah you you do tell us I suppose what um what.

Alison:
You found so far or do you want me to well no I would first of all say no don’t be scared of yeast absolutely not you know every skill that you’re requiring is beneficial and you know if you’re drawn to other skills or there’s the facility to learn other skills first then go do it you know there’s plenty of skills that i haven’t learned um in my kind of sourdough world over here um so i i do use yeast sometimes i used it for my buckwheat pancakes at lunch um and so there’s nothing to be scared of if you’re using yeast you know that it creates lovely bread products and if you’re using really good flour and you’re making these things at home it it can make a really nice product so no don’t be scared um we will link a article which actually you found andrea in the show notes which talks about what baker’s yeast is and.

Alison:
It gives a really good overview, but the reason why I particularly wanted to link it was because at the bottom of the article, there is like a conversion section where it says, OK, so you need cake yeast or baker’s yeast. This is how much of this type of dry yeast to use. This is how much of this type of dry yeast to use. Because as you alluded to, Andrea, there are lots of different dry yeast. It’s not just, oh, there’s fresh yeast and there’s dry yeast. there’s all these different names for all the different types of yeasts and so you bought fast acting yeast Laura and there is a conversion chart at the end of that article which will tell you how much of that you need to use if you come across the recipe for cake yeast so cake yeast is basically wet yeast you know it’s it’s a crumbly thing and it’s the same thing as baker’s yeast that was the original baker’s yeast you know when yeast was first isolated by lou pasteur and yeast was then commercialized it was sold as an alive wet product you know that you had to keep in the fridge and only lasted a little while and that’s why in subsequent decades more convenient yeasts have been made because we don’t like things that go off in a week and we have to put them in the fridge.

Alison:
And we want things we can put in the cupboard and leave there for several years so um yeah so back to that we did have a discussion on discord um and baker’s yeast or cake yeast as it’s sometimes known is generally a fresh yeast or was originally but now we have dry versions which can also be called baker’s yeast because they’re still the same type of yeast they’re still the same strain of yeast but they are much easier to handle some of them need.

Alison:
Putting with hot water to activate them some of them you can put straight in your dry ingredients some of them are super quick straight in dry ingredients there’s a whole different array of them um leah marie on discord said to us she had an old family recipe that needed bakers or cake yeast and that her aunt substitutes dry active yeast and her dad says yes it works but the recipe tastes different with a different form of yeast which is interesting.

Alison:
I’ve not done enough experimentation with different yeasts to know whether the flavor is different i know when i’ve bought different yeasts with different names they’ve smelled different in the packet and i’ve been quite surprised um leah actually also said cake yeast is only available about the holidays thanksgiving and christmas season i think in the u.s the main if not the only brand that sells it here says that cake yeast is more an upper midwest and northeastern us thing which obviously goes way above my head um you can buy fresh yeast here in the uk i don’t know where from but i know i have had some in the past but you know dry yeast is anywhere um leah then went on to say to any form of yeast use for baking would be considered baker’s yeast so cake yeast instant yeast and dry active yeast are all forms of baker’s yeast cake yeast is a fresh yeast it can also be called wet crumbled or compressed yeast oh my gosh how many words for yeast like you said um so i’d say.

Alison:
Use the yeast that you can find, Laura, and perhaps check the article that’s in the show notes or just do a quick Google on it and establish how much you might use of that compared to your potential recipe, which may be written for fresh yeast and have fun and see how you get on. You know, I’m sure that even if it doesn’t rise as much as you might like it to, it will taste absolutely delicious if you’re using good flour. And then the next time you’ll learn and make it better and better going forward. That’s how I feel. Andrea, could you add something to this yeast kind of cloud that we’ve got over here?

Andrea:
The only thing I guess that I’ll add on to that, Alison, is that I bought a bag of yeast from Azure years ago, and I’m still working my way through it. There’s a tiny bit left in a jar in my fridge right now. But I don’t know now. I don’t know if it’s active yeast, dry active yeast, or I mean, it’s not wet. So I guess I don’t know which one it is.

Alison:
It was, say it. Well, did you not keep the packet? You just.

Andrea:
Well, yeah, I put it into jars when I bought the bag.

Alison:
Ah, I see.

Andrea:
So, I don’t even know. But I guess I could go back and look in old orders. But yeah, yeah. So, I do remember you telling us about, no, somebody posted a video. Was it Tilsha? Like two years ago or something about how sourdough, the way we think of it, is a pretty recent thing. And the sourdough starter. and that yeast or leavening often came from you know whoever well you you and I know whoever was brewing beer so when we did it when people have done and when you and I have read about research from you know the Fertile Crescent or whatever everybody says bread and beer we don’t really we can’t really tell which one came first they were but around the same time they seem to have come about and, The bread is, I mean, very likely is just a byproduct of beer. I mean, to my mind, that makes the most logical sense is that the beer probably came first.

Alison:
It’s so hard to tell. You know, the beer historians tell you it’s beer and the bread historians tell you it’s bread that caused us to go.

Andrea:
It’s hard to know. It’s hard to know. And it’s probably also one of those things where, you know, grain and then doing things with grain was out in the zeitgeist. And multiple things could have been being invented in multiple places at the same time. That seems to happen around the world. It’s really weird. But, you know, have you read about that in archaeology where, like, around the same time on the North American continent and on the African continent, they were discovering these things, but there was no communication, presumably. Aliens, I guess.

Andrea:
But, anyways, so, bread is a byproduct of beer. That feels good. And people were using the spent grains to, you know, make their bread, and that would have been leavening it kind of by default. And then when beer was, you know, people were in towns and the civilization was springing up more, then you’ve seen some documentation or talked about how people would get spent grains from the brewers and use it for yeast. And then…, What this video that had been shared in our Discord was arguing was that then when people were really moving out like pioneering type things, then they needed a way, they weren’t going to be by a brewer anymore, and they needed ways to take their leavening with them, and that was sourdough starter. her. But Anya Eckert, I think was the name of the gala who was on the fermentation summit that Holly did. And she’s German. And she said, I don’t remember ever learning sourdough. It was just everybody was making sourdough. My mother was making sourdough. And I have no distinct memory of learning it. We just all kind of knew.

Andrea:
And she said, historically, what she has found is that people didn’t obviously have a refrigerator to keep sourdough starter in so they would make their you know you have your loaf of bread and then you pinch back off a chunk of it yeah and then you she mixes it very very heavily with flour so it’s quite quite stiff and then she covers it in flour and keeps it in a container yeah that makes complete sense and I think.

Alison:
That that’s what people did the old dough.

Andrea:
Method it’s called you know and if you.

Alison:
Make it really stiff then it’s not going to ferment fast because we know that more water.

Andrea:
Equals faster fermentation.

Alison:
And it just, I think, you know, if people were making bread regularly, maybe they didn’t even need to pack it in flour. They just leave it on the side and then they use it for the bread in two days time or something, you know. And it works.

Andrea:
I am guessing, I’m guessing that a lot of the time bread was not being made daily. It’s possible from some of what we’ve seen you know in towns people would take their bread to a baker and have it baked because he had an oven and an oven that was running it’s a lot of energy, to heat an oven and keep it heated long enough and have enough space and then I have a book on my shelf of the kind of the memoirs of a friend of mine and her, grandmother grew up in England and her job every week was to collect the rushes and then they would put them all in the oven all week long. And then once a week, her mother would fire up the oven and they’d burn all the rushes and bake everything that they were going to eat for the week. So, I mean, people, there was no flipping on the switch and turning on the oven. So, that’s… Something to consider wouldn’t we why am i talking about this she asked.

Alison:
About yeast yeah no i think that you’re right that that really yeast is it’s easy for us to think that these things are kind of some science that we need to understand and it’s complicated but people have been making yeast out of anything you know like bits of old dough yeah yeast water if you put kefir if you put exactly kefir if you put you know raisins in some water and leave them yeah you know it’ll ferment you can use that you can make yeast water bread i’ve done that fruit peels you can make them from yeast on them potatoes you know you can use the swats from suins as a yeast it’s just about kind of knowing how your yeast works you know so swats works differently from yeast water works differently from packet yeast works differently from sourdough and you just play with it.

Andrea:
It’s going to taste different.

Alison:
And you understand it. You get to know it.

Andrea:
Like Leah was saying. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, again, we’re thinking, you know, when we think about ancestral food, we can’t separate the food from the way people’s lifestyle was. You know, like, oh, you have kids and the youngest two gather rushes and you have a giant oven that you only turn on once a week. You know, that’s a pattern of life that you can’t understand the food separate from that Because then you also have, was it Nicole who had shared about her grandparents and the bread, you know, the hard bread that they would make? Yeah, and they would put the bread up in the rafters and it would dry. And then they used basically this giant guillotine to cut the bread because it’s rock hard. And then they just soak it in their coffee to eat it. But that’s calories.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:
All right, Alison, before we move.

Alison:
Hopefully we might have an episode on that soon. I’m trying to persuade Nicole.

Andrea:
Oh, yes. Oh, please, Nicole, please.

Alison:
This is Andrew begging.

Andrea:
This is me begging. That picture has lived in my mind ever since. I’ll count how many people I’ve told about it. I’m like, listen, the brendes in the rafters.

Alison:
Should we read the next question?

Andrea:
Well, yeah, I just wanted to say something. Before we go on, this morning, i started listening to a video about medieval bread versus modern bread and i thought it looks a little bit clickbaity but you know if it might be a good summary of information a video.

Alison:
That’s clickbaity really.

Andrea:
Have you ever heard of that right off the bat i was like this seems a little bit weird and then i started thinking like this sounds like our episode that we did about bread it almost seemed like word for word quotes no way and then and then i looked in the comments and people said oh that you know this video is made by ai and that’s an ai reader and it’s probably just a summary of something and i was like i don’t know if they took our entire podcast episode and turned it into a video gosh i don’t actually know but wouldn’t that be creepy if they did you.

Alison:
Know it’s quite hard to do something about that as well just.

Andrea:
Oh yeah it’s um.

Alison:
I listened to a program on, or I came upstairs and I put the radio on and there was a program on, on Radio , BBC Radio , about some, apparently some bloke who’s famous, who does a podcast, I’ve never heard of him, and how he’s written a biography, an autobiography. And yet other people have made these biographies up of him using ai and put them for sale on amazon and it was really interesting because he was saying they’re quoting things that i’ve never said but it sounds like i might have said them they sound like me but i never said them that’s disturbing and their books are you know not very good and a bit short and if someone thinks that’s the biography that that you know the book that he’s written they’re going to be sorely disappointed to but there’s nothing he can do apart from tell amazon amazon have obviously an interest they’re making money amazon has an interest in there not being crap on their site but you know they’re not exactly gonna you know stretch it to to be taking them all down and filing lawsuits and you gotta prove it and everything exactly it it just it’s happening more and more i have a friend called um.

Alison:
Rebecca desnoz who is a natural dyer and she has written several books on dying with plants and has had several magazines that she’s self-published and like literally about four years ago four or five years ago someone just literally ripped off her book and put it for on amazon with exactly the same words just a different cover and a different title wow Wow. She’s bonkers.

Andrea:
That’s ridiculous. I think Leah had shared that within hours of Against the Machine being published, there was like summaries and stuff like that, books you could buy on Amazon, you know, like the short- Oh, it’s thrilling. Because it’s just garbage. Somebody was assassinated here in the U.S. a couple months ago, and within hours of that happening, there was, like, biographies and books about it and books about him on Amazon. And I was like, this is all just garbage, garbage, garbage, but people are probably clicking it and buying it.

Alison:
Oh, they are.

Andrea:
Just like people, like me, I clicked that video. Yeah. You know, which probably gave them money or something. Yeah, maybe. it could have been a podcast episode that we ourselves did all the work to to produce but they can just take the information and turn it into something free for themselves that they can make with all their you know ai machine their ai pictures their ai voice it’s just stupid.

Alison:
You just you just gotta.

Andrea:
Yeah console.

Alison:
Yourself with the fact that it’s gotta be a pretty rubbish life if you do that you know what.

Andrea:
Sort of satisfaction.

Alison:
Are you gonna have.

Andrea:
The lot that talk about a loss of place and feeling unmoored you know and they probably.

Alison:
Don’t even know why you know.

Andrea:
No no I’m sure they don’t um.

Alison:
Should I read the next question?

Andrea:
That reminds me that I should say that this month, Alison, sorry, yes, and then you can read Rebecca’s question. But I was going to say that this month we are together reading Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth.

Alison:
Yes.

Andrea:
And there’s a post about that up on AncestralKitchenPodcast.com. And we also talked about it in the KTC Live in December, so you can hear us discuss it there. And then I imagine it will be discussed again in this month’s KTC Live.

Alison:
Moms, KTC Live.

Andrea:
Yeah. all right let’s move on.

Alison:
Okay so I have a question from the very helpful Rebecca Lett who’s in Ireland yes who’s currently helping us with our drum roll new logo which is going to come out, and she says I’d love to hear a little more about Andrea’s mum was she the first in her family to step outside the norm or was she continuing in the same vein as her own upbringing thank you Rebecca for this question I am also interested in hearing what Andrea has to say about this because I think her mom is wonderful. And we have some wonderful cloths downstairs in our kitchen that she crocheted for us. And every time I use one, I think, oh, Andrea’s mom. So yes, do tell us about your mom, please.

Andrea:
You know, I called her the other day and she goes, I was just listening to you on your podcast. This is very confusing. She definitely did not continue things the same as she grew up. She, for instance, she doesn’t even remember having real milk until she was, I don’t know, she was older. She always had powdered milk growing up. They didn’t have a lot of money. And both of her parents worked. And there was a lot of, I think we’ve talked about this on our first Christmas episode, but there wasn’t a lot of, you know, abundance or gifts or family connection time or things like that when she was growing up. There was a lot of hardship and alcohol and things like that, that she decided weren’t going to be a part of her life continuing forward.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And my dad also and for that reason, both my parents don’t drink any form of alcohol at all. And they just they just have chosen for it not to be part of their culture because they had really bad experiences. So yeah, she went to school. And my mom is really smart. And so it was probably pretty boring for her. And, She has, I know she has enjoyed homeschooling us a lot because she also is basically volunteers to teach things to my kids because she just enjoys it. And she enjoys.

Alison:
Wonderful.

Andrea:
I know. I know. And she enjoys, you know, sharing the books with us. I’ve inherited a lot of the books that we used growing up. And then she enjoys reading them with us or reading with the kids. And I remember her doing that whenever I had Kenton. she came over and my mom having had eight kids she knew I have the baby that’s fine I can handle myself the people who actually need attention is the kids and she sat on the couch and just like read books with them which was really good that’s just what they needed because then I didn’t have to sort of feel yeah I’m abandoning the other children while I sit and nurse this baby I feel like oh they’re getting like really good loving attention yeah um so that was a really nice gift It’s great having a mom who understands the food side of things and is very sympathetic, even if she doesn’t understand everything that I’m doing. But, you know, she’s listening to the podcast and she’s listening to other things as well and always sharing with me. And, you know, she’s baking einkorn bread at home for years now and, um, So she definitely understands that. And then she understands the side of having kids and homeschooling and the busyness.

Alison:
So what made her want to homeschool when she went to school herself? How did that change happen?

Andrea:
She said, so my older sister was, you know, pretty young. And my mom had kind of assumed, I suppose, that she would go to school. And then my older sister said she wanted to learn how to read. So my mom taught her how to read. And then she just figured, I guess we’ll just keep going with this. plus years later, she was still going. So, so that I’m, I should ask her more. I know that she worked outside of the home initially a bit, but then she, she didn’t after a while, she stayed home to stay with my older sister. And my parents have always lived on one income as long as I’ve ever been alive. And we just had a very, you know, sometimes I hear people say, oh, if people can live on one income, they must be so privileged. But, I mean, of course, there is an element of privilege to anybody who even has an income. But there was also, there’s also a lot of extreme economizing, as you know. You know, people say, oh, how lucky you and Rob get to stay home. And you just say, oh, okay.

Andrea:
Um like it there we’re willing to give up some things in order to have absolutely you know a certain type of lifestyle so that I definitely learned from my parents and they chose not to do things on credit and to you know remember they paid off their house when I was very young and they always um you know bought used old cars and worked on them and, so it’s just kind of the lifestyle that was it both of them together.

Alison:
Or was there.

Andrea:
Was your mum.

Alison:
Doing the pushing was your dad doing just as much of the impetus behind that.

Andrea:
I mean, I always saw a united front from them. So I don’t really know between the two of them. I know when they met, and were first getting, you know, together in a while they met like in high school, and they’re really young. But then they got married after high school. And, You know, as adults. But my dad had always said he wanted a big family, and my mom did too. And I think part of that was because they did feel that sense of like not having that unplaceness that we’ve talked about, you know, I wonder if that played a role because they both felt like, you know, we grew up without like the warmness of family and they wanted to have that.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah. And, I mean, my parents aren’t perfect. Shocker to everybody who thinks their parents are perfect. At some point you grow up and you become an adult and you’re like, wait a minute, you’re a human? What? But they, I think of how far they came from the childhood they had of, you know, packaged in industrial food, public school, alcoholism, divorce, rampant in both of their families. I don’t think there’s anybody in either of their family sides that I can think of who stayed married. And I think they’re the only people I know out of their families, except my mom’s siblings did not fall into alcoholism in any way. But other than my mom’s siblings, all the relatives, you know, were suffered under the effects of alcohol at some point during their life. And that was a big part of why my parents decided not to because they said it seems like there’s just something in our family where if like you get into it it’s really hard to get out it’s really.

Alison:
Interesting because you know it makes me think about the question of is there something genetic that moves us towards that kind of thing or is it a familial trait that.

Andrea:
The energy.

Alison:
Of the family carries it down and I don’t know the answer to that yeah.

Andrea:
But I just look at how far they came And then my mom feels like us kids as the next generation are able to kind of take it, another step, you know, they were able to, you know, my dad went to college and got his PE and was getting other, you know, degrees and things when I was a child. And so, they wanted us to have the opportunity, if we wanted, to be able to get degrees before we, you know, they knew how hard it was to get a degree and be working and also have children and all of that. And so, they worked really hard to make it available to us to have an education.

Andrea:
Um, you know, of our choice before we were all committed into family relationships and I abandoned university very quickly because I wanted to get married to Gary and that has still proven to be the right choice for me. But, um, then I think about how my mom, you know, I’ve talked about how she worked so hard to make Christmas for us and to make Christmas a magical and alive experience and how my parents both love history and seeing places where history happened. And, you know, they were dedicated to bringing all of us to my dad’s vision of taking all of us kids to all of the lower connected United States. And they did that several times, which is, again, when you imagine a family that’s living on a shoestring, like that’s pretty impressive and it’s not just one kid.

Alison:
You know there was a lot.

Andrea:
Of you to take that there’s a lot of us in one camper van as y’all call it and um you know in a way the budgeting definitely helped us because we didn’t eat at restaurants or fast food places along the way you know we just made all our food in the camper the same way we would make it at home so the, Yeah, so, yeah, they definitely brought our whole family forward from the history that it was. But when you asked, are we continuing in the same vein, Rebecca?

Andrea:
What is fascinating is sitting and talking with my grandma. My grandma, my mom’s mom, was raised by her grandmother. So, my grandmother was the fourth in the family, and she was born in Missouri. And her siblings were all, her three siblings were all much older than she was. I think like or years older than she was, at least for the youngest. So, it was a big gap. And the night she was born, there was a really big storm. And her mother, you know, she was born at home as it was natural. Then her mother had some problems and somebody rode out to get the doctor. The doctor was really drunk and didn’t want to come. And her mother ended up passing away that night. So, then the family came back to Washington State, which is where.

Andrea:
My grandmother’s mother was from. No, they came back to Idaho, sorry. And on the Idaho-Washington border, that’s where my grandma was raised by her grandmother. And I’ve actually driven out to see, the house is still there. I’ve actually driven out to see it. And my grandma has told me many stories of her growing up, which are fascinating and amazing, like how she would ride her horse buttons, you know, up and over the mountain to go see her aunt and uncle. And she said she remembers one time being followed by a panther or cougar the entire way. And she said, you know, I was really little, maybe like five. And she goes, you’re just letting me ride my horse over the mountain. It’s okay. But she was raised by my great-grandmother, no, great-great-grandmother, who…

Andrea:
They were farmers. And my grandma says, I remember she had a huge garden and she had like a big kitchen garden and then the huge canning garden and she processed everything like this. And then I remember she would take the washer, the clothes washer, and she would pull it up out of the basement every week and we would like wash the clothes. And my grandma said that they raised a, goats I think and geese and the chickens and you know they just did everything at home and on the farm and and she said oh grandmother made everything you know she made it all and it’s just I just sometimes wish I could just see into her memories and and see what that life was, but my grandma has told me sometimes you know oh your farm this is you know this is how I grew up Like, this is, you know, my family would have loved that you’re doing this. And that’s really special to me.

Alison:
Wow. Has she come to the farm and been with you? Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, she’s been out here.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea:
Okay. Which is really, really special for me. So, yeah. So, I sometimes think maybe I picked up the thread again. And like you talked about with the tradition, you know, there’s a big gap. But we’re starting to put it back together with my grandma’s memory and then my mom’s support. And then I’m doing what I can and then my children will be perhaps that much deeper into it and able to continue things.

Alison:
And your dad’s support too. I feel like it feels like as a couple, your mom and your dad were able to provide such a strong base to have their life the way they wanted it. And I’m sure without each other, they would have done what they could and done things with a slightly different flavor. But together, it sounds like they just created this amazing kind of family and space and experience for you all. And that’s just, it’s lovely when two people come together like that with the same kind of driving mission to support something more than just one person who’s trying to do it, perhaps against someone else who doesn’t quite feel the same. And that created a lovely space for you, I imagine.

Andrea:
Well, if we just think, how can we help the next generation go forward?

Andrea:
That, and even defining what we mean by go forward, like, there’s this idea of progress is good and progress meaning, you know, more and more machines or, you know, less and less work or something, but knowing what it means in your family culture to feel like you’re growing. And for my parents, that was remaining married and having family time, you know, featuring the piles of books of my childhood, books upon books, and interesting pursuits, and meeting interesting people, and going to places where interesting things happened, and having, you know, just, I guess, general, a different family culture than they grew up with, but one that they felt would be better. And then for me to be able to take that and say, okay, I love this. Now I’m going to polish this part off and I’m going to add this in. Like, it’s a little bit easier, you know, than if I was coming straight out of, you know, like they’ve just given me something that’s a little bit closer to what I want for my ideal. And then I’m hoping that my kids can you know shape whatever their ideal is that there will be elements from our life that may take forward of things they want yeah yeah so thank you Rebecca that was a beautiful question yeah.

Alison:
Indeed thanks Rebecca okay um.

Andrea:
Do you want to.

Alison:
Talk about your wonderful Christmas creation now.

Andrea:
Yeah Christmas creation hours well um yeah you did.

Alison:
You did the beautifying of it the making it beautiful.

Andrea:
Yeah, so the, I think it was our second Christmas, Allison, I wanted to send something out that was a gift for all the supporters, because we have wonderful supporters at various levels. And there are people who support us at our first tier, where they’re really just supporting the podcast and making sure that we can keep publishing and getting on the air. And they also have access to our discord. And then, you know, when we publish extra documents, it goes for the members who have invested a slightly higher level. And those members are also listening to this podcast episode. And we’re thankful for all our supporters at every level. And I wanted to send something out that could go to everybody because I just felt like, you know, everybody’s, they’re working hard to help support us. And I want to make something that can go to the whole group. and that was the Christmas hamper and it was seven pages our first year and then we had people sent in submissions Francine and others sent in submissions the second year got a little bit bigger and then it got bigger and then this past year it was like pages so it’s uh just a really fun document that is in a way showing you know kind of the evolution of the podcast over time too and it’s only available during that December month we send it out by email to everybody and then it, you know, you download it while you can and then it disappears.

Andrea:
Diana sent in a really lovely email and she said, what an exquisite gift to us. As I page through each of these offerings, I found all sorts of lovely, well thought through traditions and Christmas cheer. It truly gladdens my heart to see this beautiful collection you’ve created. While I haven’t thumbed through the whole book, I’ll definitely order some cocoa beans and get going on chocolates for this season. And yeah, I was really happy, Allison, to be able to put a whole page about chocolate in here because of your episode. I was like, we’re featuring chocolate because it’s Christmas.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
I mean, what better time to talk about chocolate? And Diana asked, can I print this out and bind it? And the answer is yes. It is formatted to be printed on ⁄ by or A paper. So, you should be able to print it on any printer. And I was telling Diana, I like to send it to Kinko’s and have them printed in color. There are pictures in the Christmas one. We don’t always have pictures in our books, but the Christmas one is just really kind of decadent and has pictures in it. And I told her I like to print it at Kinko’s and get it done in color and then I have them actually put like a spiral bind on it and a cover because my books in my kitchen just take such a beating yeah so um that’s really cool to hear that she enjoyed it and Megan also you heard Megan on the tea episode um Megan Francis spills the tea and she said this hamper is amazing I cannot wait to dig in thank you both so much for your hard work on it and this community and then i got a couple other emails um saying that they they were just really pleased and surprised and enjoying it which was just so fun to hear so i am happy that you all got to enjoy that and there should be another one this christmas i think it’s.

Alison:
Really nice to have a kind of alternative christmas inspiration because there’s so much out there.

Andrea:
In the um normal.

Alison:
World that isn’t that and just to have something to dip into that’s that’s sane is good so.

Andrea:
Yeah does that mean.

Alison:
That the pork book that we’ve created for this first episode in is also printable.

Andrea:
Yes, yes, it is formatted the same way. Because you can, as Diana was saying, it should be that you can read it in your computer if you want to. And if you want to print it, you can print it as well. The pork book also, there’s a few recipes in there that I tried to sort of select, like center the pictures towards the end of the pork book. But there are a few recipes, your recipes, Allison, that have process. Sorry. Well, they have really, really important process pictures, which is hard to understand kind of without them. And I didn’t want to leave those out. And I didn’t want to separate them because it just felt so integral. So those are in there. and so if you if you wanted to leave off the last couple pages of the pork book you could leave off the pictures at the end okay but um if you were getting it printed someplace then i guess it wouldn’t really matter so.

Alison:
Yeah so if you haven’t got your pork download book yet pastured pork ebook then do go to the downloads section of our website which on the menu i think it’s episodes downloads or you could just type in ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash downloads and you’ll see it there and you can download it to either your computer or do what andrew does and print it off and bind it because there’s some really wonderful recipes in there um and i was just oh there are no i thought oh let’s just put a call out on discord see if anyone wants to send in some recipes and i was really quite blown away by anybody all these recipes that came in and then i remembered that i actually have some recipes for pork and andrew has some recipes for pork too and it just before we even knew it it’s all there’s all these amazing recipes yeah so do do make use of that because even just thumbing through it you know and we’ll give you some inspiration as to what you might want to make next with your pork.

Andrea:
I was telling a friend, it feels like it’s coming out with no announcement because it was just going to be like a booklet.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
It’s going to be a couple recipes. And then all of a sudden, it just like exploded into this whole, it’s as, I think it’s as big as her other cookbook now.

Alison:
Wow.

Andrea:
So, it’s a whole thing. And if you’re listening to this way after the fact, Allison, I think people can go in and purchase it, if I’m not wrong.

Alison:
Yes.

Andrea:
In under just where our normal books are. So, if you’re listening in the moment, you should already have a, or have access to it. I don’t think that access will stay. You’ll be able to buy it if you’re listening to this, you know, months or years afterwards.

Alison:
Yes. Yeah, we will try. We haven’t done it yet. So this is why we’re saying maybe. But we will try to put the book up for sale on the website too, to go alongside the spelt book and our meals at the Ancestral Hearth. And so if you’ve had the book and you’re listening to this, then that’s because you’re our supporter now. If you’re listening to this in retrospect, then go have a look at our shop and you can get hold of a copy of the book.

Andrea:
You had mentioned, actually, I pointed it out, and then I think Rob pointed it out, that this book also, if somebody’s maybe very gluten-free or can’t eat grains much sometimes, this is a book unique among our offerings in that it’s very gluten-free. Yeah, absolutely. There are recipes in it with grains. But I think, are there any? I think your spelt recipe is the only one that isn’t actually gluten-free, if I’m remembering.

Alison:
Yeah, I don’t think.

Andrea:
Or my other recipes don’t.

Alison:
Have grain in them and you could.

Andrea:
Actually swap.

Alison:
Out my spelt pastry that’s in one.

Andrea:
Of my.

Alison:
Recipes for uh another pastry that was gluten-free for sure.

Andrea:
Yeah you’re totally good yeah there’s a lot of good stuff in that book it’s not a good idea to work what i was doing was working on it in the evening after oh no the baby was hungry after the baby was in bed And I was like, oh, this is a really bad idea because now my stomach is growling, but I don’t want to eat so late at night. It was really funny. But yeah, it’s definitely. And your pictures did not help, Alison. Your pictures never help.

Alison:
That’s a good thing, I think.

Andrea:
Juicy and crispy and flaky and all sorts of things. I don’t want to see it at that time of night.

Alison:
Should we finish there? Do you think we’re done for this very long, very chatty episode?

Andrea:
I’m astonished we got it all in yeah look at us yeah okay and we did it with without Gary being here to help with the baby which is a second miracle yes.

Alison:
Indeed thank you Kenton.

Andrea:
Yeah yep alright well happy new year everybody welcome to yeah.

Alison:
We will have lots more episodes and fun and good food for you this year definitely.

Andrea:
Yes we will thanks very much Andrea until next time thank you bye.