#124 – Five Family Meals Around Five Dollars Each: budget-friendly, ancestral peasant food

Everybody always wants to know – is a nourishing diet an elitist, privileged ideal, inaccessible to people without a huge budget, and only for the super wealthy? In this episode we are going to share five complete meals. Each meal serves a family of five, and each complete meal can be made for about $5USD (£3.71GBP).

Balancing these inexpensive meals against the more expensive meals that can turn up in an ancestral menu is one way you can bring the overall annual food budget down. You can make all five of these menus, combined, for less than it would cost to take your family of five out one time for the cheapest option at McDonald’s – and that’s not even accounting for the life-giving, health-sustaining benefits of your nourishing meals.

Each of these menus has an option for gluten-free and dairy-free, if they aren’t already, and they can also be made ahead, prepped ahead, or even frozen or canned for absolutely speedy preparation. We’ve shared a few books rich in ideas at the end of the episode, and supporters can find our notes for this rather note-heavy episode in a download available at ancestralkitchenpodcast.com.

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What We Cover:

• What we ate
• Review from Heather
• The cost of food today
• Nine ancestral principles for cutting down a food budget
• Happy Meal costs! The expense of eating out and Alison’s shock at the cost
• The ideas behind the food: Seasonality, Availability, Fasting or Feasting, Preference and Abundance
• Meals 1 – 5 and cost for each, and each component
• Alison’s chicken carcass aside – should we do an entire episode on this!?
• A few inexpensive treats and beverages
• Books chock-full of ideas
• Discord discussion on what we can be growing and raising vs buying and bartering
• INCLUDED Aftershow: The kombucha experiment and extra savings!

Resources:

• Alison’s Gluten-Free Millet Sourdough Starter
• Episode 103 – 10 Nourishing Traditions Dishes – Cheaper Than Supermarkets!
• Meals at the Ancestral Hearth Cookbook
• Episode 116 – Leftovers and Scraps in a Frugal Ancestral Kitchen
• Naturally-Fermented Staffordshire Oatcakes Recipes
• Cheesy Pinto Bean Recipe
• Simple Apple Crisp

Extra Recipes

• Pressure-Canned Beans
• One-Pot Pinto Beans and Rice
• Pinto Bean Soup with Greens
• Cream of Corn Soup
• Andrea’s Kombucha Recipe

Books

• Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese
• Twelve Months of Monastery Soups by Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette
• A Cabin Full of Food by Marie Beausoleil (Amazon link)
• Pressure Canning for Beginners by Angie Schneider

Further Reading

• The Nella Last diaries give an intimate, day-by-day picture into life with war-time and post-war rationing in England
• 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff; this isn’t a book about food, but it gives surprising insight into the depth of the rationing and the effect it had, and how preciously the food was used that could be had
• Looking up Wartime Recipes produces tons of amazing and interesting results for cookbooks and websites! Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen, The Homefront Cookbook, and others have intriguing and creative recipes. Similarly, looking of Great Depression books can give a glimpse into many recipes and ways of eating during extremely lean times in the US.

 

Transcript:

Alison:
Hello Andrea.

Andrea:
Hello Alison, how are you and happy new year?

Alison:
Yeah, happy new year to you too. I’m okay, thank you. I’m ready to be informed and entertained probably by you, which is nice, nice thing to look forward to for an hour and a bit. Have you eaten yet today?

Andrea:
Well, other than tea and cream, no. Okay, what did you have last night? I had a delightful a little lunch of leftovers yesterday. And then we kind of had little bits and pieces throughout the day of leftovers of things. And then we went up to the sauna and I just don’t tend to be hungry after sauna. So yeah, didn’t eat after that. But I had very simple mashed potatoes, leftover, and ham leftover and i had broth on the stove so i kind of poured broth over it and that was really good and then did you go on a long cold walk no this was actually from my sister so she got it from a place up north of here there’s a farm that’s kind of famous for doing hams and they do like a holiday situation so she had bought she buys a ham every year from them and it’s really good so that was a special treat because she gave us a package of it so i.

Alison:
Was thinking this year that i kind of missed ham we didn’t have any ham we didn’t have anything kind of usual but i thought oh maybe maybe next year i’d like to.

Andrea:
Have some ham we’ll see every once in a while i suddenly realized that I haven’t had ham in ages. But it is fun to have. Did you eat already before we got on? I hope.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
We had… No passing out on air.

Alison:
No, we had sausages, which is very, it’s always a kind of a highlight in the week if we have sausages for Gable, but also for us, because it’s usually easy to cook, you know. So I had a red cabbage. And an onion in the fridge. So we chopped up the red cabbage and the onion, put it in the instant pot with half a cup of water and some caraway seeds. Plunked the sausages on top. Sausages were, they’re from our farmer who’s called Albert, and he makes the best sausages. They’re just the meat with some salt and pepper. And it’s just there.

Andrea:
What do you mean?

Alison:
They’re just so simple and so good. And those were on top of the cabbage and the onion. Put it on to high pressure for minutes. So the cabbage goes kind of squidgy like, you know, cabbage in a soup would if you’re cooking a soup for a long time. But I really like it. The juice, the sausage goes through the cabbage into the liquid and the caraway seeds mulled around with it with all those beautiful flavours. So you get kind of a soupy, cabbagey flavor. Um sausage on top in a bowl and then um we made three breads yesterday oh my gosh it was like some bakery yes i know we’re not i’m not doing that again a very long time was it for a recipe test or just no it was because um i’m gonna i decided to eat gluten-free again for a little while so i wanted to make myself um a gluten-free loaf and rob really wanted a rye loaf because he loves his rye so much and gable’s like i want a spelt loaf so i was like okay i think you guys are getting pretty.

Andrea:
High maintenance over.

Alison:
There i decided that’s not happening again after that after yesterday i was like right we’ve got to figure this out a different way but um so today rob had rye bread with his which i fried in tallow gable had spelt bread with some butter and i had the gluten-free loaf which i made which was millet buckwheat olive oil a millet starter The instructions for that are on my blog. And an egg to bind because I’m the only one eating it. I don’t need to worry about Gabriel not having eggs. So I just put an egg in it to glue it together. And I had that. So we had three different breads, but the same sausages. Very nice.

Andrea:
That sounds good. And if, I mean, realistically, if only one person is eating each loaf, could you slice and freeze them and kind of divide them up? Like the making you know make rye on monday and.

Alison:
I’m i froze a third of the rye bread and half of the spelt bread um okay this morning i left mine out because mine was smaller um but i think rob and gable are just gonna have to fight it out i think we might make you know a spelt one week a rye the next week and then maybe a spelt on rye the third week and kind of rotate them and then you know they’re not going to be happy all of the time but one is going to be happy some at the time. That’s enough for me.

Andrea:
At least one will be happy or both will be half happy.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
Well, that’s a good solution. Yeah, it’s interesting with, going gluten-free but you know you and i both have.

Alison:
Significant stores.

Andrea:
Of our other grains and the other family members if they’re not having issue with them it doesn’t make much sense to not utilize them so.

Alison:
Yeah exactly i’ve been doing what you’re doing which.

Andrea:
Is making you know more.

Alison:
Than i don’t mind that at all you know it’s second nature because we make them all the time and Rob’s well-trained so if I’m kind of otherwise engaged he can usually be relied on to you know just stick to the schedule and use his eyes and nose to judge them so um but not three in one day I’m not doing that again no.

Andrea:
I wasn’t gonna say through is kind of a lot.

Alison:
Yeah exactly yeah through the crowd I have a review which um came into my inbox actually some people I know can’t review on Apple because either they don’t listen on Apple or they’re listening on our website perhaps. And often we get lovely communications in our inboxes. And this is one that came through to me from a lady called Heather Alexander who lives in San Diego. And I would like to read it out, Andrea.

Andrea:
I love that.

Alison:
So she says, I discovered your podcast at the recommendation of a good friend when I told her that I was struggling to keep up with cooking for my family. So many of the titles appealed to me, I didn’t know where to start. I jumped about a bit before deciding to start at the beginning and listen to them all. So many people do that, don’t they? I’m re-inspired to go back to soaking my oats overnight and starting up kombucha and kefir again, all practices I’ve had in the past but have fallen by the wayside with different moves across the country and overseas. My husband is in the Navy and we move every one to three years. I find your podcast encouraging. It’s calling me back to things like sauerkraut that I’ve made in the past and reminding me why I loved doing those things. I’ve carefully moved my sourdough starter with me on the past several moves and now I’m planning to try spelt for the first time. If all goes well, at some point I may get a meal too. I’m working hard now to get out of grocery stores completely since our most recent move a month ago. Thank you for the inspiration. Well, thank you for the lovely words, Heather.

Andrea:
That is, I actually feel like that’s kind of me when we, I mean, I completely understand her when she’s saying that. That they moved. And I feel like her story is how I felt like I was doing things and then we’d move and then you’re like, I got to buy this somewhere right now. We don’t have any tonight. And then a year later, you’re like, wait a minute, what happened? And so I very much get that. It is tough because the military movers won’t move food. And so, you know, if you’ve got, you know, pounds of this and pounds of that and, you know, , jars of things, they won’t move it.

Alison:
That happened with us too, though, when we moved from Italy back to this country. They were like, no, no food, no food in storage.

Andrea:
No food. So everything has to be eaten. Think about the maggots and things that they’d run into. They just had to draw the line somewhere. I’m not saying I blame them, but it is hard because it does assume that you live in an instant food culture and that you can just start from scratch constantly, which guess what? That adds up. And then we talk a lot, and we will in this episode too, about how a big part of our budget is relationships. And when you are moving constantly, it is hard to settle into those relationships. And by one to three years, you’re getting the longevity where you kind of get to the stage of bartering and swapping and exchanging, as I know we’ll talk about in here. And it is tough because then you’re moving right when everybody’s like show up and take our extras after market you know and then you leave you know so i’m very sympathetic to this situation and, and um all all the mad props to you heather for what you’re doing because that is that that it’s just an extra layer of complication it’s not impossible and you are doing totally agree um but i do recognize and applaud the extra effort that it takes so amen good for you that’s that’s not easy and i i’m just loving that you’re working on getting out of the grocery stores i think that’s that that is the the linchpin of everything.

Alison:
Yes, absolutely.

Andrea:
When you pull up the grocery stores and the whole debt house of cards comes tumbling down.

Alison:
Oh, please, let’s do it.

Andrea:
Allison’s over here beating on it with an hammer. So, Allison, actually, a lot of this is what kind of inspired this episode. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with a lot of moms lately. And Gary and I had gone to do a little Christmas shopping for the kids. And we went to our co-op because I really wanted to get them each chocolate for Christmas. And so, you know, we walked around and looked at all kinds of things, and I saw broth sold in pint containers, and each pint was $., which is, what, like.

Alison:
$..

Andrea:
Or something in pints? Or pounds, sorry.

Alison:
$., maybe $.. I’ve seen broth that expensive, too, so I’m not surprised by that.

Andrea:
So I pretty much just gagged when I saw that, because we go through gallons of broth each week, and… Gary takes like a quart to work every day, and then I use it to make meals multiple times a week. And then, you know, we just kind of drink it as well. So I was just thinking, I said, hey, Gary, look, in broth, we’re millionaires. And there’s this joke that goes around. I’ve seen where the people say, I’m investing in stocks. I’m going to be a bullionaire.

Andrea:
But it’s true that, you know, when you can make your own food, then you can save some money right there. And it’s always a good time to talk about our favorite meals to make on a tight budget. And if you… Were just to go to the internet and look up cheap meals or inexpensive meals. I actually thought, after I wrote this episode, I thought, well, what does the internet have to offer? Let me see what the internet has to offer. Let me just see. And I typed in like cheap meals. I couldn’t make any of them because they all rely on these industrial products that are only cheap because they’re industrialized. But the versions that we would have to buy would be ridiculously expensive. Like i’m i’m sorry to say it but a meal that heavily features chicken breast isn’t going to be a cheap meal under you know farmer’s market standards if you’re getting you know yellowed chicken that’s like discounted at a store somewhere and was produced in a factory then yeah it might be cheap but um what i wanted to offer was what if there was a category of meals that you can make that were really cheap, but still followed the tenets that you and I abide by.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And with that in mind, I put together this episode. And it won’t involve a lot of prohibitively expensive shop-bought products like organic sourdough pasta, as much as I enjoy the convenience of that. That’s pretty expensive. yeah so this also turned out to be kind of notes and numbers heavy allison i wasn’t going to make a download with it but then after i put the whole episode together i realized it might be helpful so for supporters of the podcast just log in to where we put your downloads on the website and you’ll you got credentials for logging and emailed to you when you came on board as a supporter so just check your email for that sometimes it gets dropped in spam but i’ll put this in as a post and a PDF. So you could just read it or you could just download the PDF, kind of whichever is more convenient for you. So with that in mind, Alison, let’s take a quick ad break and come right back.

Andrea:
So, Allison, in this episode, what my goal was was to present five complete meals. They could be breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It doesn’t matter where you put them in the day. But five complete meals for a family of five. And I wanted to keep the price under $ for the meal. And the logic there is when I looked at our menu overall over the week, I saw that we kind of had these peaks and dips of meals that were kind of more expensive, but they’re offset by meals that are extremely, extremely cheap to make. And so I realized that’s why it didn’t feel like overall the food budget was, you know, just, overtaking.

Alison:
That’s what happens in our house as well. You know, I said today we have sausages and sausages are one of our more expensive meals, you know, because someone else has made those sausages. But very often we’re having meals that are half the price of that. And that means that I’m okay with having those sausages and we can have those sausages, you know, once a week or once every two weeks maybe because the rest of the time the meals are more inexpensive. So exactly the same And it washes out.

Andrea:
I’ll be referencing several other episodes as we’re going to hit on a couple things that we covered in detail in other episodes, and we won’t necessarily belabor every point here. But this is going to be an episode where I’m going to draw together a number of the principles that we’ve talked about scattered throughout different episodes. So you might have heard us discuss aspects of some of these things before, but I wanted to pull it all together into one picture and then show how I use that to assemble some meals. And with that in mind, Alison, I wanted to start out with just dropping down a few basic foundational principles for carving down a food budget within the ancestral food world, because we’re not going to start with, you know, buy pasta when Walmart puts it on sale. Like that’s not going to be part of like that. That’s I mean, I’ve been in that space, right? Like, that’s a valid strategy if you’re just talking, like, get calories cheaper. But that’s not part of this conversation today. So it’s kind of like we have to relearn, like, what does cheap mean and what is, you know what I mean, what is an inexpensive food within the ancestral paradigm.

Andrea:
So the first one is simplifying your food and your ingredients. So just a few broad ingredients can be shaped into a wide variety of dishes by working on your skills. So a good example of this, Allison, is your pantry in the Meals at the Ancestral Hearth cookbook, which I will link in the show notes below. People can buy that on our website. But in that book, you actually listed, we both listed our pantries. And mine is like scattered and wide. And it is actually narrowed significantly since that time. Yours is extremely refined list. And I told you when I read your pantry list, I was like, surely this isn’t all she has in her pantry. But then I started going through everything I’ve ever heard us talk about you making. And I was like, no, you can make all of that off of this list. So it’s kind of like saying, you know, Leonardo da Vinci had the same… Paint colours available as you have, but he painted the Last Supper and what have you done with your life?

Alison:
Well, thank you for comparing me to one of the greatest artists and scientists of all time, Andrea. I take that as a compliment. I really think that you.

Andrea:
Alison, the generic you that our English language doesn’t have.

Alison:
I really think that having a smaller pantry serves us very, very well.

Alison:
You know, because you can buy those things in bulk, which we do. You know, the spelt on the ride that I was talking about earlier we bought kilograms of those just before Christmas each and that’s substantially cheaper than buying a kilo you know we bought the berries and we’re grinding them in the mock meal and also I feel like you know if you have all these bags of things in your in your cupboards in your pantry there’s always the thing that you never really get to because it’s kind of at the back and then by the time you get to it it’s a year out of date and you think oh should i shouldn’t i and it’s gonna taste you can’t you can’t keep those things within your head on a weekly daily basis but if you have some staples that you really like and you really enjoy you’d be totally surprised how creative you can be with just those staples you know you said you thought of all the foods that i’ve ever mentioned you know our last meals and all of them come from the same staples because you know you have rice and you look at what you can make with just one grain rice i mean a ridiculous amount of foods and then you take four or five grains and you’ve got enough variety that to keep you going for years and years and it just it makes my brain personally more streamlined and cleaner to just know what’s in my pantry and and be able to create from that rather than feeling like i need all these bags of everything that i can’t I can’t keep track of and it costs less so yeah it’s a good point yeah.

Andrea:
I have a smaller pantry like it’s a closet in my kitchen and then.

Alison:
We keep.

Andrea:
The bulk sort of restock if you will out in our.

Alison:
Garage and.

Andrea:
And periodically, I just go through the pantry and I say, what have I not, like, what have I not even picked up in the last while? And then I even look closer and I say, what am I using weekly? And it’s kind of surprising how many things I’ll just pull out. And I don’t get rid of them, but then I’ll just kind of use them up and not replace. or I’ll say, is there a reason why? You know, maybe I should be incorporating this, but I haven’t been paying attention to it. And I do agree that it gets, I think it’s chaotic and confusing when I have lots and lots of different things. I actually like having fewer. All right, that’s number one, simplifying the food ingredients. Number two is focusing hard on seasonal availability.

Andrea:
And this is a good one, Alison, because you and I have both benefited from this. Are farmers trying to offload something specific? You know, there’s tons and tons of apples in season or something that they’re trying to get rid of. Is there a discount on bumper crops for things or, you know, at the, you know, oftentimes I’ve seen tomatoes. There’s the really good premium select tomatoes kind of being sold at full price. And then they say, well, here’s the ones that all kind of had a bruise or a bug bite or something. And you can get this box for a little less. Or are you paying extra to have something that you think you absolutely have to have? And I feel like a lot of times fruit can fall into this category for people where you think, but we have to have this fruit on hand, but it’s coming from really far away and you could actually economize and try just maintaining yourself with a local fruit instead. So we tend to have a lot of apples because fruit, we are in apple country. Everybody has apple trees. Everybody offers to let you come and pick their trees. And if you’re willing to can and freeze and dry, and then we also have a bin, you know, at this late date, still on our deck of fresh apples that I can slice up that we haven’t gone through all yet, but they’re storing type. And all of those were for free that we were just offered to pick up off the ground or off local trees.

Alison:
Yeah, that happens here as well. the same thing and because we’re on a similar similar um kind of part of the world temperature wise to you it’s apples again and usually just outside houses people just put buckets of free apples you know because they’ve just got so many yeah you’ll see that in town seriously we we we’ve gone weeks and weeks and weeks without having to buy any fruit because we’re just picking those apples we’re coming back from somewhere like the market and that there’s three or four houses that are offering their apples and so we’ve got a ton of apples we bring them home and you know there may be there are a few bad bits and we cut them out and we can cook them up and freeze them and we don’t do canning but we do freezing and in the past i’ve dehydrated them um and then that’s enough fruit for gable and rob to eat you know we don’t go out and buy any fruit that’s not in season from the store there’s just this absolute just heavenly bounty of free apples it’s amazing It is amazing.

Andrea:
And you could be spending a lot on, and these aren’t intrinsically bad or good things, but you could be buying oranges and mangoes and grapes. And of course, there’s different things people might have or want at different seasons. And, And that’s all to be considered. But by and large, we try to focus or we do focus on what is seasonally available. And if the kids sometimes say, could you buy this kind of fruit? I’m like, well, we do have jars of applesauce. Let’s start with that. Let’s get through that. If we run out of that, then we can talk about these other things. Also thinking about things like having venison or mutton.

Alison:
Yes.

Andrea:
Versus beef.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I don’t remember if I made that note or you made that note, but thinking of what kind of meat is available and accessible to you, you know, if somebody says, oh, we hunted a deer, do you want some of it? I mean, the answer is yes. Please. And that’s going to offset some of your beef expenses. And then, of course… You know, you’ve got some delicious wild game. Number three is, what is a bargain in one place won’t be in another.

Andrea:
What I mean by that is, I might say some things, or Allison might say some things that are really inexpensive for us. For instance, I’ll say apples. I grew up in apple country. When we moved across the nation to the other ocean, and I went to continue my habit of having apples, I realized they were extremely expensive. And I couldn’t just make the vast quantities of cheap applesauce that I was accustomed to. It was, in fact, now an extremely high dollar product. But do you know what I could get access to? And I got buckets of for, you know, cheap or free was kiwi. Well, kiwi over here is like a million dollars. So there’s no chance of me having kiwi much. Well, actually, you can grow kiwi here, but there isn’t really anybody growing on the scale that I saw there. And so it wouldn’t really make sense for me to focus, but I was dehydrating kiwi.

Andrea:
And that’s just something I wouldn’t be doing here. So unfollow as many rules as possible. What is eaten at home? What is good? What is traditional for you? What is in a recipe or what is your staple needs to bend to what you have available, not the other way around. Do you have an abundance of lard in your freezer? As I do. But all the recipes are calling for butter, which is expensive. Well, guess what? Now lard works in the recipe. So that is.

Andrea:
Very important aspect, which is, you know, I might say something and I’m not saying it’s objectively cheap, but it might be for me and for you, it could be different.

Andrea:
You’ve already touched on this, Allison, but I will say. Number four is bulk buys, especially for dry staples. So there are many places to buy bulk, including some refill type stores, sometimes co-ops, sometimes directly from the grower. There’s different places online in the U.S. that sell bulk. There’s ancient grains that sells bulk, obviously, grains. Larger packaging means less packages overall. So you think about the savings to them on that end. and more economical per pound pricing. And when I have gone through and priced bulk things versus in the half or one pound sizes, sometimes the bulk prices per pound are half or even less than half the cost of smaller packets of food. So it is worthwhile if you are simplifying your food and your ingredients and you now know instead of having a little bit of this and a little bit of and a little bit of this, we need a lot of spelt, then guess what? Now you can buy a lot of spelt in bulk at possibly half the price. And episode …

Andrea:
Which is titled Nourishing Traditions Dishes, Cheaper Than Supermarkets. In that episode, I gave some very specific price breakdowns on a few bulk versus smaller priced things. Number five is reducing sweets. This pretty much carves a food budget down. When we did that episode number , Alison, the desserts, which are at the very end, were the most expensive items there. I mean, exceeding even the meat. So even just having less sweetener in a sweet treat can cut the price of that treat in half. So I think everybody in here has probably looked at a recipe and thought, two cups of sugar.

Andrea:
So even just start by cutting it in half. And if you’re already eating really homemade food, the sweetness is already even, even if you haven’t gotten to the, you know, highly reducing sweets in your life type thing, once you’re away from corn syrup, you can cut every recipe sweetener in half just out of the gate. And you will immediately, I don’t even think you would say, well, this isn’t sweet anymore. Because you’re no longer tuned to the frequency of corn syrup, which is extremely sweet. And so your sensitivity will already be increasing. Also, Caitlin shared, she’s a friend who shared that she has two copies of the same cookbook. I’ll say Better Homes and Gardens or something. I don’t remember what book it was. She has a very old copy and she has a new copy. And she found the same recipe in there and she said, oh my goodness, the sugar had doubled or tripled in the new one.

Alison:
Gosh.

Andrea:
Yeah. It’s the same item. them. I don’t remember what it was, a muffin or a loaf or something. And she said, well, that just tells me something right there. Because, you know, sometimes people say, well, I’m baking. I can’t adjust it. That will ruin it. Well, in some cases, you know, maybe you need a little finesse. But I would say on the broad sweep, just cut that sugar in half. And then after that.

Alison:
You can go. It does make a difference sometimes. You know, sometimes cookies will be less crunchy if you put less sugar in it. But it’s just a different cookie. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong or bad. And it just takes a bit of experimentation, you know, to get to the level that you’re happy with, then your family’s happy with. I also think that, you know, there are some sweeteners that are more expensive than others. So for us here, molasses is a lot cheaper, for example, than honey or one of the coconut sugar. You know, that’s the most expensive one. And so, you know, you could sub half molasses in a sweet that would go well with molasses, you know, that would go with that rich flavor, like a gingerbread, rather than just putting honey or coconut sugar in it. Also, if you’ve got all those apples that you’ve canned over the summer, you can use those as well.

Andrea:
You can use applesauce to sweeten it.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Honey, maple syrup, sucanut, dates, date sugar, coconut sugar, raw sugar. These are all very expensive sweeteners. There’s molasses. I mean, I still kind of put molasses in the expensive category when you think about it up. I mean, it’s just it’s more expensive per pound than other things, you know. Yes. So if you’re just putting it up against rice, it’s expensive. But if you only need half or less than what a recipe calls for, that adds up. And then when you’re eating less sweets overall, just because you’re not feeling the desperate need for them as badly. Maybe you’ve also been able to tune some of the bacteria in your gut so they’re not calling for it quite as much. Then that will save you, too. So it’s, you know, it’s subtle, but it’s there. Okay. The next one is traditional feasting and fasting. And this is something that I would say is perhaps less discussed, but we did touch on it. If you’re a supporter and you listened to the after show in November, no, not November. It wasn’t an after show. It was the KTC in November.

Alison:
The KTC. That’s right.

Andrea:
I know what you’re going to talk about. Yeah, we talked with some different moms who come out of different traditions in the Christian faith. I think Orthodox. I don’t think there’s any Catholics in the conversation at the moment, but they would know what this is, too. So look to the traditional calendar for food guidance and rhythm. And remember, the church calendar and the agrarian calendar, they’re mingled for a reason, because people were always kind of doing both things together. So if you’re in a church tradition, the liturgical calendar often dictates certain days for fasting, not necessarily fasting all food, but fasting types of food. Yeah.

Andrea:
And then certain days for feasting, rather than our modern mentality, which is one feast day after another. So, Alison, thinking of you making the rye bread, the spelt bread, and the gluten-free bread, that feels like a feasting. But if you were just buying those at the store, it’s just money coming out of your pocket, and you wouldn’t be thinking, oh, this is so much effort. But if you have to go to the effort of making all the food, you’re very conscious of when you’re feasting. Yes, definitely. What we’ve been told is that you and Rob and Gabe can all buy a different slice and have completely different things instead of saying, okay, we need to figure out, are we freezing this? Are we all going to just suck it up and eat a rye loaf? Like, what’s going to happen, you know? So Lent and Advent are traditionally times of fasting, certain types of things. Depending on the tradition you’re in, what that is might change. It’s often animal products to some degree, red meat, poultry.

Andrea:
If you think about it, you know, it does tend to make sense. You know, you want to dry up your cow in the winter. You know, you don’t want to butcher in spring when everybody’s pregnant and things like that. So in some traditions, a certain day per week meant fasting from certain foods. And the Orthodox and Catholic traditions definitely have strong, strong traditions with that. And while I and I know you, Allison, we both endorse animal products wholeheartedly, there’s no reason, and gluten for that matter, there’s no reason why there can’t be short days or windows of time without them, which can be as helpful to your budget as to your body.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:
And then make sure you come back in and get that saturated fat for your brain food. But a rest is as good as a change or whatever they say. All right, we have two more principles. The penultimate is look at historical solutions for lean times. So in recent history, Alison, you over there in England, I’m sure that your parents and grandparents and everybody has alluded to and everybody knows from the books, the rations on butter, eggs, meat, other luxurious animal products during the war. What a lot of people in the U.S. don’t realize is those, what did you call them? It wasn’t, rations. Rations, yeah. Those rations lasted all the way into .

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely. Long time after the war ended.

Andrea:
They went on for quite a long time. Yeah. Everybody had to develop those pigs or whatever you talked about in the book.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Andrea:
In the U.S. during the s, the Great Depression meant many families couldn’t afford luxuries, So extra animal products or a thing I notably remember from Beverly Cleary’s autobiography is that her mother couldn’t buy vanilla. And she talks about how her mother had this one bottle of, I think, almond extract that she used, you know, over the span of the entire Great Depression. And I think Ms. Cleary said she could never stand to eat it again after that. From both of these times, the Great Depression and the rationing eras, Very creative and inventive recipes can be found. There’s even some cookbooks specific to the food people are making during those times. And Allison, some of them are terrible. Some of them are literally awful, but others are very useful and we can learn from them. You know, if you have to eat dairy and egg-free, well, look to rationing. They did too.

Alison:
That’s what we did with the Christmas pudding episode. When I made a Christmas pudding for that, we made literally a wartime Christmas pudding recipe because Gabriel can’t eat eggs. And so you can take recipes like that and use them and benefit from them, benefit from what everyone learned and the creativity they had to pull in in those times to get food that tasted good.

Andrea:
Yeah, absolutely. Because they had their limited list and they said, we’re still going to celebrate Christmas and feast. And how will we make that happen? But even if we aren’t looking at the specific recipes, just looking at the stories of the struggles and the determination that people had to still celebrate and still have joy and to still feast during all of that we can still learn that economic depressions and the hardships to find food it is a reoccurring through line in history it is the dominant through line in history we are facing nothing new if you’re pinching your budget and you’re tightening the belt and you’re thinking about how you can lean out your food supply. This is not new. We don’t have it harder than people did before us. And we can be inventive, we can be creative, and we can still be joyful even in our lack. And maybe especially in our lack. It is our attitude going into this that will determine our success.

Alison:
Yes.

Andrea:
%. The last point. No, we have two more points. I have. I asked one sneakily.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I forgot about that. I will say, are you throwing away food? And I won’t go in depth into this, but you will definitely find during the rationing eras, you know, very little food waste. But go to episode in our back catalog, and it is all about scraps and trash, things that are normally thrown away, and how those can be turned into amazing meals. And then, Alison, share with me this last principle that you had, because this is really good, and I wish that I had remembered to put it on the list.

Alison:
Yeah, so I think your principles are amazing, and they’re ones that, you know, we definitely abide by in our kitchen and our routines. The one I wanted to add was just make friends, you know, get to know the people in your community, get to know the farmers, talk to people, talk to people who care about food. And the example I really wanted to give of that was when we moved to Penzance in Cornwall in the UK when Gable was one and a half. We were always on a very tight budget. We’re on a very tight budget now. We were on a very, very, very tight budget then. And yet, at the beginning of that time, we were doing gaps together. And for two years, we did gaps. And then we carried on. You know, buying food, when you’re doing gaps, you are focusing really on meat and produce that could be expensive.

Andrea:
You’re not relying on grains.

Alison:
Exactly. And we had a farmer there called Ian, who farmed on the north coast of Cornwall. And we just, we got to know him because we just turned up at the market every week and we chatted to him and we went to visit the farm and etc, etc. And what would happen with him was, He’d take his produce to the market and then the stuff that he didn’t sell, he’d take home and freeze and then he’d have to do something with it. And we were like, we’ll take that frozen food. And so occasionally we’d get like three kilograms of frozen pig liver, for example, for literally next to nothing. And then we’d defrost it and I’d cook it and I’d make a pate out of it. And then we’d have pate for the next two months, you know. Um there were always things that he had that he hadn’t managed to sell that we would just take frozen and he wouldn’t sell that to anyone else on the stall um because it because it’d been frozen and it just it was absolutely a godsend for us you know because we were paying hardly anything for and getting really high quality food that he’d you know grown and cared for on his farm and and it didn’t you know we didn’t go oh give us that food it just kind of.

Alison:
Happened from talking to him yeah it’s been the same here since we’ve been in in Stroud and with your venison example earlier you know we’ve just we’ve made some friends with people who tend to have kind of similar values to us because you know that you gravitate towards people who do and we’ve had venison from two people one who was involved in a kind of a venison day where they went and shot and then cooked it and he was like do you want all this venison yes please um and one from a friend who whose husband found um a deer and took it home and butchered it and um oh absolutely like fillet steak i mean we did we never eat fillet steak ever and gabriel was like this is amazing and it cost us nothing you know so i feel like that kind of just being part of a community and slowly those those things those opportunities are available for you you know just like the apples you they get they go further and further and you’ll see more and more opportunity the deeper you get kind of connected with people that’s what I wanted to add.

Andrea:
That is beautiful, and I love it. With those principles in mind, Allison, let’s take an ad break and come back and talk about Happy Meals. Okay, Jacob saw me writing these notes. And he was like, are you talking about Happy Meals from McDonald’s? What? So, yes. Great budget hack, Happy Meals. I’m just kidding. So, I, we have in the U.S. Happy Meals from this fast food place. And Jacob told me that he’s like, I bet other places have Happy Meals.

Alison:
Too.

Andrea:
I don’t know. I think it’s just a McDonald’s thing.

Alison:
But we have the McDonald’s over here, for sure. Well, they did. We did when I was young. I haven’t been anywhere near any McDonald’s stuff or seen any adverts for them for many years. But I’m sure they still exist.

Andrea:
Yeah. How are you happy then, Alison?

Alison:
Exactly. I’m obviously sad, aren’t I? And Jack Gable’s really sad all the time.

Andrea:
Yeah, I can tell whenever he jumps on cameras flailing around showing me all the things he just made. No. So, I did a little bit of research because I wanted to know how much it costs to take your family to McDonald’s. And I came up with a range. So, let me share those with you. But what I wanted to share was five meals that you can make.

Alison:
Yep.

Andrea:
And I was trying to see if I could beat the Happy Meal price. Apparently, I did.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
But if you went to McDonald’s, here’s a range. I also asked some people who do eat out. And one option is there’s these $ meals that you can get at McDonald’s. So if you had a family of five, conceivably, you could get each person a $ meal that adds up to $. And then in our state, you have retail sales tax at .%. So tack on a couple extra bucks.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So we’re looking at, you know, $, to $.. Another option that it seemed like the internet was saying was also fairly common is there’s a variety of things and drinks you could get. So for an adult, each person would be $, and then a child’s meal totaled $., and then you add on retail sales tax at .%. And for a family where I used our family as example, we have two adults, our oldest son would count as an adult. And then two kids that need to eat food and the baby wouldn’t really count. Then that added up to $ for a family. And I was just wondering, Alison. $.

Alison:
$ is like pounds, maybe pounds, which I would not, oh my gosh, to spend that on one meal would be like the event of a lifetime almost. We don’t eat out very often. We do sometimes. We do eat out sometimes when we can find a restaurant that doesn’t make us feel ill afterwards. There’s the rub exactly um but pounds pounds i mean we spend we some weeks we don’t spend twice that on our entire meat vegetables eggs dairy at the market on a saturday you know our entire kind of saturday two great big rucksacks full of food that we schlep back to the house we usually spend about pounds every week in the market so that’s more than half of the staple foods that feed our family for a week, which just astounds me. I mean, it’s at McDonald’s.

Andrea:
Well, and it’s one meal. That’s the thing, too. It’s not like, oh, that was a week’s worth of food.

Alison:
It’s just gone.

Andrea:
Yeah. And I know when you buy things at the market, because I’m… Even though I’m not shopping at a market right now, I know how it goes. You know, you bought this, you know, chicken for now, but it’s kind of going to probably turn up for the next two weeks.

Alison:
Yeah, you’re right.

Andrea:
In your meals. So it’s hard to quantify exactly.

Alison:
Because even if we ate all the chicken, the broth is going to be in my freezer for longer than that week for sure. You know, so it always, it’s never cut and dry. You know, often that pound will last a lot longer than a week.

Andrea:
That is part of the trouble that i had adding this up was there’s so many things like that that i couldn’t that i some of these things actually i even make for cheaper than i put down here because for instance everybody knows the way i eat and it has now happened multiple times friends who eat similarly to us have moved a la heather moving across the country and, And they don’t want to throw out their good food. They also know that I’ll value it. And they give it to me. You know? And so I’ve got buckets of things that people have given me. Like, that’s how I got all my rye berries. A friend was moving and she gave them to me. And I said, yes, thank you. What a gift. And she was happy to know that they weren’t going to waste. And I was happy to take them for her.

Alison:
Yeah, definitely.

Andrea:
So a reminder as we go through this listing, because I’m about to now share the five meals, and a reminder is that you will see a lot of similar things pop up in the food. They’ll be moved around. They’ll kind of…

Andrea:
Change their shape or form as they appear in different places. And this is, remember, one good way to cut down on your budget because you can buy bulk of that one thing. And just look for ways or things that you can repeat throughout. Like there’s a couple different carb options that I pop up here, but if you wanted to, you could just make every single carb be millet or rice, you know, whatever floats your boat or whatever is easiest for you. And seemingly paradoxically as you streamline your pantry also look for simple ways to increase your variation so Allison one way that you fool us all into thinking you’re eating , different things is because every time you turn up you’re like well we had this random herb and this random spice and then we picked this thing and then we got this stock somewhere else you know yeah yeah So you can have, you know, red and green lentils in your pantry, or maybe you could have, you know, a couple lentils and a couple beans just to mix things up. But then you can also just change their costume every time you put them out on stage. You know, we’ve all seen the Shakespeare play where one person plays seven characters. Yeah. So each of these menus is a palette for variations on a theme, and that’s all based on seasonality, availability, fasting or feasting, preference and abundance. You ready?

Alison:
Yeah, I’m ready.

Andrea:
All right. Number one, simple meal, tortillas, refried pinto beans and cooked greens or kraut or cortito, whichever one you have the most of. So the first thing on the list is the tortillas. A batch of eight organic sourdough tortillas cost me less than $ to make. They’re organic, they’re sourdough, and there are no seed oils in them. The same pre-made, if I was to buy…

Andrea:
Organic pack of eight tortillas is $.. Or if I get the biggest case of frozen organic tortillas, it’s as low as $. for a package. But bear in mind, these are made with sunflower seed oil, not lard, and they are not sourdough, so they might not be digestible for each person. And that’s not always an acceptable shift for everybody. These are a second best option. I definitely bought a case of these when I was pregnant and actually loved having those on hand. It’s not something that I would say I would never stock. Periodically, I have these on hand in the freezer and then I don’t. It just kind of depends on how heavy the schedule or physical toll is that I’m going through at the time. The logic that I apply is I’m paying somebody to make them for me, and sometimes that’s worth it for me. But today we’re focusing on what we can do to bring down the overall cost of dollars going out the door. So that makes sense to then bring the labor in-house. And this can involve a culture shift So that isn’t something that I mentioned in the principles, Allison But it is something that you and I have alluded to before Which is.

Andrea:
It takes a lot longer. And it takes effort out of your body in order to make tortillas. You have to stand and roll them out. That’s the only way it’s going to happen. This can be a project with, I mean, how much would Gabriel love rolling out tortillas?

Alison:
I think so.

Andrea:
This isn’t drudgery until we teach people that it’s drudgery. But this can be a part of school. This can be a part of home ec or part of afternoon activities. This can be a routine. It doesn’t have to be, well, where am I going to cram this task in? And it’s like, no, parts of our life actually need to fall away in order that we spend more time preparing better food. And that is a valid aspect of ancestral food.

Alison:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think for those of us who work a lot, I just wanted to add, who are on screens or offices, that time rolling those tortillas in a kitchen is just so valuable to be in there using your body, not using your head, not squinting at a screen. Maybe putting us on or putting some music on and just making them. And it’s really just, it’s not something that’s complicated. You’re just rolling them out. So it’s repetitive and it’s kind of turns into a meditation. So, you know, whether you’ve got kids at home and you want to get them involved because that’s your situation or you’re out working and you’re coming home and wanting to just decompress, it applies to both of those situations.

Andrea:
Yeah. I think it’s because this is one of those things you do that you where you’re fully embodied, or you can be, you know, you could be disassociating while you did this. But this is a place where you can inhabit your body and your hands and your muscles fully. And… A lot of our culture is very heady, very kind of outside of your body. So very much, you know, being, you know, entertainment piped in or stimulation piped in somehow and somebody else doing the thinking. And then maybe you just have to show up and turn over the money. But this is one of those places where you can steal back some of that embodiment.

Andrea:
Beans. You got your refried pinto beans here. They cost % per pint to make. See episode for my price breakdown on that. And I’m putting two pints of that on here because that’s how much we use when we make a dinner. Cooked greens. If you grow your own, then the cost is negligible. I’m not saying it’s invisible because there are still sometimes expenses associated with gardening, but you can, you know, the more you grow, the more you bring that price down. If I buy it from our neighbors, it’s $ for a bunched clump of organic greens. If I’m using kraut as greens, that costs about $ a pound. Again, see episode for my price breakdown on that. Yep. So our total cost here is tortillas, cents, beans, $., greens, zero to $. So it’s costing as high as $. or as low as $..

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
For the meal for five. And if you add in a scrambled egg, if you add in some cooked ground meat or some of that liver you talked about that you got, the frozen liver, or some heart, you could add in cracklins left over from rendering lard to your refried beans. You could add in shredded cheese that you bought in bulk. you could add in crushed garlic you grew at home. These are things that can increase the cost, but they, you know, the value may exist, or you may have leftover bits of things you can throw in.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And this is another note, Allison. If you see that when you plan your menus, or when you think through your meals, what you like to eat, that greens show up multiple times a week, that might be the thing to prioritize growing, you know, if you just got the one garden box or something, as you can bring your cost for the things like greens and garlic down to pretty much nothing. I was just given by a friend who listens to the podcast. Actually, she gave me a huge bag of giant garlic and she grows them herself. She said, years ago, I bought starter garlic from Baker Creek and I’ve never bought garlic again. And she was telling me how much she has. She’s like, I have hundreds of garlic.

Alison:
And elephant garlic is so nice because it’s such a delicate flavor. It’s lovely.

Andrea:
Yeah. And she said, I don’t even know what breed these are anymore because she just keeps, they kind of merge and then she’s, but they now are a hearty garlic that grows very well in our environment because she’s over years been selecting the biggest and best. If I was to buy garlic, it would be $ to $ per head from the little farm stand down the road. So when she gave me a gallon bag, Of maybe, you know, heads of garlic. You do the math.

Alison:
Yep.

Andrea:
So, and she’s telling me, look, you… And she gave them to me to plant. We planted almost all of them. And what we couldn’t fit, then we just put in honey and fermented. So, and gave her back a jar of fermented honey, garlic. Because what an amazing gift. You know, a lifetime supply of garlic, basically.

Andrea:
All right, number two is oat cake with… Topping of beef heart slash rillette slash carcass scraps after broth, kraut, and shredded cheese. So your recipe in the cookbook, Meals at the Ancestral Hearth, also I linked it below because it’s on your website as well. That recipe for oat cakes, I have to at least double it for our family. So that makes eight cakes. It uses almost grams shy of one pound of oats. So it costs $ for all the oat cakes. I did not factor in the tablespoon of starter. I have no idea what the cost on that is. For beef heart we ask our dairy farmers slash butchers slash anyone who’s butchering a cow if they’re going to keep their heart and we just are happy to take it off their hands yep so the cost for that was zero wow or and and again ellen um who’s the listener we mentioned who uses your spelt book so she yes bought a heart in town and it was expensive okay so for not everybody would this be the cheap option yeah.

Alison:
It’s like you were saying earlier you know it’s what’s cheap where you are and you know there’s a big difference here between our experience in Italy and our experience here.

Andrea:
Yeah in.

Alison:
That some offal cuts are particularly prized in Italy.

Andrea:
And they.

Alison:
Cost just as much as muscle meat costs and.

Andrea:
Yet you come.

Alison:
Back to this country and they don’t And that can change from farmer to farmer, let alone country to country. And so it’s about finding what you can for that particular thing. And those oat cakes, they can be stuffed with anything. They’re delicious with anything. So if you don’t have beef heart, you could use kidneys, you could use liver, you could use any of the other. You could use scraps that you’ve taken, like you said, off a broth that you’ve made. whatever it is you can get hold of that is more economical for you.

Andrea:
This is actually a particularly good place to use scraps after making a broth because you can layer in the spices, the seasonings, whatever it is you want. And then the oat cake just does the heavy lifting.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So if you think, oh, it’s going to be a little soft, the meat texture, it doesn’t really matter. Once you pack it into an oat cake, everybody’s happy. And I put in riette because that, I’ll link the episode where we talked about that in detail too. But this is where we took pork bones and we’ve done it with beef too but we took those big huge bones after we did a butchering and we cooked them into broth and then we shredded all that meat whatever little tiny scraps I mean tiny scraps into a giant bowl and seasoned it and added some lemon juice to it and then packed it in jars under fat and then stored it in the freezer I mean every single one of the jars and jars every single one of those jars was full of, something that would have been considered trash. And, you know, marrow gets scraped in there, all kinds of good stuff goes in there. So you can thaw out, as I actually did this past week, you can thaw out a little jar of that and spread it like deviled ham in a sandwich or put it on an oat cake. And then you dress that bad boy up with kraut and shredded cheese, which is my favorite. I’m factoring in $. for a pint of kraut.

Andrea:
Cheese, I get a case of raw cheddar on Azure. We also have an episode, making cheese yourself isn’t necessarily always the most economical, but if you have sour milk, there are some cheeses you can make rather than throwing away that sour milk. And I’ll link the milk episode in here.

Alison:
Oh, great. Thank you.

Andrea:
But you can get, you know, cheese is probably the most expensive idea that’s going to turn up definitely meals i think everybody would agree with that so i get the pound case and it’s seven dollars and cents for a pound and then i factored in a quarter pound for this meal okay, if you don’t eat cheese if you’re dairy free i would pull that protein out and maybe put in some cooked beans or lentils instead to top this just for that extra little protein boost yeah yeah but that’s $. for that quarter pound. So any and all scraps can be collected for putting on oat cakes. This is my favorite part about the oat cake is that you have a tablespoon of scrambled eggs left. Well, guess what?

Alison:
Put them in.

Andrea:
As soon as you pile that on an oat cake, it looks like you did something really special. So bits of sauce, scraps of gravy. My mom always says, you know, people put a pan in the sink and they put water in it. But if they took a spatula and And then through it, they’d have a whole other bowl of soup.

Alison:
If you open our fridge, you see all these strange containers full of bits.

Andrea:
I eat jars.

Alison:
Bits of stuff, you know. Just like then we just eat all the bits one day. And often we do put the oat cakes.

Andrea:
Yes, you make oat cakes. Exactly what you do. That’s what I do. And sometimes there’s only enough, you know, for me to make myself a breakfast. And guess what I do? I make myself a breakfast of oat cake. Because you can also make this batch of oat cake batter and keep it in the fridge for, you know, a week. and just keep making one in the morning, which is, especially if you’re a nursing mom, that is saving grace right there. Yep. So leftover fermented pepper, scrambled eggs, breakfast meat, little bits of leftover potatoes, scraps of greens or cabbage. Each stuffed oat cake can be completely different. And I would also say, I would like to try this someday. One of our listeners, Katie, she grew a specific type of soybean. And she said, everybody said it couldn’t be used to make tofu. But guess what? She made her own tofu out of it. You know, all traditionally fermented and strained. And it is beautiful. And I thought, oh, I never thought I’d be lured back into tofu. But here I am looking at this picture thinking how good that would be fried.

Alison:
Yeah I am I saw that post and that was luring me back in too because I thought oh gosh yeah I remember I do like I do like the taste of fried tofu but you know obviously I’ve avoided the shop stuff for many many years so but seeing Katie doing it I thought oh that would be nice if.

Andrea:
Anything is gonna bring me back it’s.

Alison:
Gonna be.

Andrea:
Homegrown home fermented tofu all right so the The total for that meal is $..

Alison:
Wow. Well under the foe.

Andrea:
So it’s not too bad. And that’s eight oat cakes, which, I mean, honestly, I don’t know how many. They’re pretty big, so that might be too much. But, hey, we know we love a leftover. All right. Next meal is… I’m actually going to go slightly over our budget, but since the meal I just gave you was almost a dollar under budget, we’re okay. This meal is another recipe of yours from Meals at the Ancestor Hearth. Again, we put stuff in the book that we use a lot.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
That’s why it keeps turning up. It’s not like I’m trying to advertise the book. It’s just that we literally put in the recipes we use all the time.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So, your spicy lentils, and then the carb is either chapati or naan, millet or rice, and then kefir. Because I love putting some kefir on top, like a swirl of kefir on top of my spicy lentils.

Alison:
Okay, I didn’t know that. Once I fix my bowl.

Andrea:
Yeah, it’s really good. I think you could traditionally see a sour cream or even a cheese. So lentils, a half a cup dry per person. That’s about grams total for our family of five. So it’s a bit over a pound. And we get a pound of dried lentils for $., except that one time that they sent me a -pound bag of dried lentils that I didn’t order, and they said just keep it. So there’s that. But local prices will vary. And if lentils are going to feature in your diet frequently, do ask about bulk prices. Um, and then fat, I just saved the drippings, the onion. If I buy an onion nearest, it’s about a dollar. Remember my friend who grew the garlic, she also told me how she does that with her scallions. And yeah, I think it was the scallions that she said. So she said, well, I bought scallions years ago and I just keep planting them every year. So you could have a lifetime supply of those for free. And then leftover liquids and cooking spices, as you say in the recipe. So I don’t know, we’ll say cents for that. And so we’re talking $. for this pot of lentils for everybody.

Alison:
Wow.

Andrea:
Alison, I wanted to ask you here, you said to me before we started that you had thought about making an episode entirely about chicken carcasses, but you weren’t sure if the title was a little too macabre. But can you tell me, what do you do with a chicken carcass before I move too fast past the cooking liquids and the leftover broth section.

Alison:
Yeah. So ostensibly chicken carcasses are to make broth, aren’t they? And very often that broth will end up in these spicy lentils, you know, because I will cook the lentils in the broth. And I would say though, that I don’t buy the chicken carcasses just to make broth or in order to make broth. Obviously I want the broth and I enjoy that, but we do exactly what you did with the oat cakes with the chicken carcasses so, price wise I haven’t priced a whole meal up but two chicken carcasses organic here are three pound so the one pound fifty each which is like what one dollar ninety each right, And then I cook two of them up together in a massive kettle, saucepan, and I get the broth from it, which is a meat broth because there’s quite a lot of meat still left. Like you said, that’s just waste, but it’s not waste, is it? Hey-ho. And then I am an expert at picking chicken carcasses when they’re cooled down.

Andrea:
I want to see you pick a carcass one.

Alison:
Literally. I mean, there is not one bit of meat that I know that someone will eat that gets left on that carcass. And generally then that day we will eat the meat from one of the carcasses for our lunch with some veg and a slice of bread or some veg and some rice um so you know for the three of us one pound fifty for the chicken carcass that’s the meat if you add on the bulk buy of the of the bread and the vegetables it’s going to be way under five dollars um but then I’ve got another.

Alison:
Chicken carcass which is already cooked and I’ve already picked it off and it just goes in the fridge the meat that’s left and then the next day I will make something different usually if I’ve got enough time if not we’ll just eat it again like we did before maybe in smoked cakes or something, but generally I will try to make something different with that chicken meat and that’s where I said you know because I do an episode seven things to do with a chicken carcass because I’ve just come up with kind of Italian-inspired recipes, Japanese-inspired recipes, Chinese-inspired recipes, kind of all mixtures of all different things. We’ve got at least three or four recipes. Some of them I’ve got. Sesame seeds and a bit of soy sauce in it some of them i’ve got grated swede in you know whatever the vegetable is and then just that decoration on the top like you were talking about you know the herbs or the spices just play with them to make it kind of a bit different and and also i get the broth which then i can use to cook those lentils in to give us even more protein in those lentils and even more flavor um and yeah so maybe we will get to doing the kind of seven things to do with the chicken carcass episode later in the year.

Andrea:
Tell us if you guys want to hear it.

Alison:
Yeah. I’m trying to send us an email. I try and scribble the recipes down because I was like, that was really nice. I try and remember what I did, you know, afterwards.

Andrea:
You’re so busy starting the next meal.

Alison:
Exactly. I think I’ve got two of them written down, but I’m sure, you know, I’m literally, I’m doing it tomorrow. I got two chicken carcasses out of the fridge just now before we started recording. And so tomorrow I will be cooking that and doing something with that chicken, maybe a risotto this time, I think.

Andrea:
You know, Alison, Gary keeps telling me every day, when are you all going to write this cookbook, like a real cookbook, like publish a cookbook? And I keep saying, well, there’s so many cookbooks out there, you know, do I need to write another one? But you know what? Every time I look at a cookbook, you know, nourishing or healthy or ancestral or whatever you want to say along those vibes, they all still use, you know, pieces of things like, yeah, do you know what I’m saying?

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Like, here’s a pasture raised chicken thigh recipe. Okay. Well, I never end up using those recipes because that’s just not how our family operates. That’s not how our brain works. We could have a recipe book oh it would be so appealing all about carcasses and scraps and.

Alison:
Bits but really and the food would be good and the food would be good you know these chicken i fed the chicken carcass meals to other people who are not ancestral minded like you know someone who came to live in the cabin in our last house just for a few months the day he came we happened to be eating one of these chicken carcass meals and he was like well that was nice you know it’s like a you know a normal a normal bloke and.

Andrea:
You’re like well it’s complicated because first you have to shred most of the meat off of a chicken.

Alison:
And you have to.

Andrea:
Cook the chicken for hours so it does take a long time.

Alison:
Yeah exactly um so yeah i just i think maybe if people want the chicken carcass episode that will be maybe you could do it for halloween that like you said That would be really good.

Andrea:
Yeah, I want it.

Alison:
Yeah, so that’s a slight aside. That’s my chicken carcass bit that I wanted to add in.

Andrea:
That is a worthy aside.

Alison:
Thank you.

Andrea:
For the carb to go with your lentils.

Alison:
So back to the lentils.

Andrea:
Yeah, or for the grain, I should say. Then you can either make chapati, which is I use more or less my same tortilla recipe, but I roll them thicker and I butter them when I take them off. And you don’t have to do that, but you can. But it’s a dollar for eight medium to small ones. Or you could do millet, which is a dollar twenty six a pound if you buy it bulk. Or rice, which is a dollar eighty eight a pound. Okay. Kefir, it’s $. to make a pint for me at our $ a gallon milk prices, but prices will vary from place to place. That’s extremely high for some places, and it’s less than half of what people in Northern California are paying. And so your total meal here of a pot of spicy lentils, a pile of flatbreads, and a jar of kefir to pour over the top of each bowl is $.. So we came in just a little over our $ target. Meal number four is chicken scrap homemade noodle soup. Possibly the most appealing name on this entire list. So you and I are like, hmm, that sounds good. So there are lots of scraps in this soup, I’m just going to say. So first of all, there’s the eggless pasta, which I only learned about recently, but actually is really easy to make. And you had said, oh, yeah, we make this because Gabriel can.

Alison:
Yeah, Connie eggs.

Andrea:
And I wanted to ask you, and you said you haven’t yet made this with fresh milled spelt. So I don’t know how well that would hold up. No, I think it would be a while. I priced it with just a regular organic milled flour.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
So toy around with what works for you. This is just water, lard or drippings, a couple tablespoons of that, and a pound of flour. Almost a pound of flour. And a blob of sourdough from your jar. Could be the millet sourdough, could be any sourdough. Combine these things into a very, very stiff dough. Let it ferment all day or overnight. And then roll it out to the thickness and cut to the shape that you like. And you could mix in herbs. You could mix in salt. You could make it more expensive if you wanted to, is what I’m saying.

Alison:
Well, you could get herbs in the garden. I went outside our front door. Listeners who’ve been listening know that we’ve just moved into a new house. I went outside our front door and cut back some lavender a few weeks ago. And I found thyme, oregano, mint underneath it. I was like, result, just there. So I go out the front door and get some herbs.

Andrea:
Well, that’s literally incredible because we all know how much fresh herbs cost.

Alison:
The thyme spelt amazing.

Andrea:
Oh, I bet it did. It probably transported you back. to Italy.

Alison:
Yeah, it did.

Andrea:
It’s fresh herbs. So then you want your broth from the carcass or bones or whatever you made broth from, in which you can also use your leftover veggie scraps and butts and peels and skins and things like that, simmered overnight and salted. So you’ve got this broth that was made out of trash, basically. And then take your broth and you can, diced veggies, little bits of things, leftover scrap meat that you picked off. If you’ve got trim off of offal, heart, liver, whatever, riette, you know, you’ve got like almost a jar is gone, not enough to make a sandwich left. You can scrape that in. Of course, we know sauerkraut is so good tossed into soup or any bits of veggie ferments. You can use a sourdough discard tempered in hot broth, which you taught me that technique, Allison and I love it. It’s in your sourdough discard soup. If I have leftovers from like, say you went to an event and you brought a veggie platter, use those leftover kind of semi-dehydrating vegetables. Dice those up and those always go into a simmered soup for me at the end of any kind of event.

Alison:
Yeah, sounds delicious this one.

Andrea:
And then you roll out your noodles and throw them into the broth to cook and you serve that soup hot and it cost you about a dollar and then whatever your scraps were but it’s hard it’s hard to quantify scraps put.

Alison:
Some really nice.

Andrea:
Salt on it.

Alison:
And then maybe a few spices and it just oh it.

Andrea:
Sounds lovely oh it is and oh cold day it’s raining yeah yeah and i like in in the winter especially i like a really brothy soup like i want to be drinking a lot of broth and having and you you can put in excuse me you’ve got a you know from your spicy lentils or something you’ve got like a cup of millet left or a cup of rice left. You can go ahead and put a spoonful in each bowl before you serve it in. So there you go. All right. The fifth and final meal is cheesy pinto beans on rice or millet. I really like this meal. So I’ve linked the recipe such as it is, to the cheesy pinto beans.

Alison:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
Because it kind of is a recipe, but, you know.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Is anybody going to follow it? Probably not. But you need two pint jars of your pinto beans, which we already know was cents each. So that’s $.. And then you’ve got garlic and jalapeno. So, again, prices vary on this. You just need a couple pieces of the garlic. You don’t need the whole bulb. So even for the expensive garlic that we buy, it’s still just going to be a couple cents off the bulb. And then if you, I like putting in jalapeno, prices vary. We buy bulk in the season when people are trying to offload it. And you can throw those whole jalapenos, just take that bag of jalapenos and just throw the whole thing straight in the freezer. And then come wintertime, you’ve got a little bit more brain space about you. Take them out. I thaw them on the counter for just a little bit so that they’re not dangerous to cut. And then I just cut them in half, put them under brine and let them ferment for a couple of days or a week.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Take out your weight, whatever you had in the jar to keep the jalapenos under brine and then just shove the immersion blender down in there and chop those bad boys up.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
And then you’ve got a spicy jalapeno sauce for, or you can make it a sauce but i actually leave it chunky and i you can use it for whatever you want what do you know what brine you use do you know.

Alison:
What the measurements of your brine are.

Andrea:
I use um yeah sand or cats is which is a tablespoon per quart okay tablespoon of salt a quart of water that’s it i just i use warm water so that i can really dissolve the salt yeah you know as you do and then pour it in over the jalapenos i mean that is the easiest thing ever for me because then i can And kind of do it at my leisure and just take out a quart or so of frozen jalapenos as I just kind of tore a hole in the top of the bag. And I just reach in there and grab out a jar full and yeah, and then ferment them. I like to throw in garlic if I have it. While they ferment, sometimes I have like a half a carrot and I throw that in there.

Andrea:
Stubs of turmeric or ginger, throw that in there. So I end up with this seasoning that I don’t really even know what to call it, but you can put it on anything or in, I mix it into sauerkraut or do whatever the heck you want with it. So anyways, we will be utilizing a tablespoon of that for this. You’ve got drippings, you’ve got paprika, cumin, pepper, hot sauce. All of that, we’ll say, is going to cost about cents total. Because I don’t know how to price that out. Not much. And then the cheddar, we’ve got a quarter pound, so we’ll say $. for this bulk raw cheddar. And then you’re going to serve it on millet or rice which is going to cost $. or $. per pound depending on if you do the millet which is cheaper or the rice which tends to be a little bit more expensive and your total price for this meal for five of cheesy seasoned beans on rice is $. so for the total allison if you’re going to make all five of these meals which each meal serves five people.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Or five, a family of five. The total cost to make all of them is $..

Alison:
Oh my gosh. Compared to that McDonald’s price.

Andrea:
So you’re making a week of dinners for less than one meal at the cheapest option at McDonald’s.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I just want that to sink in. It’s a week of dinners for five. That costs less than one meal at McDonald’s for five. I just don’t want to hear people tell me that this is the elite and privileged way to eat. I am so tired of being told, well, it’s only for the wealthy. It’s like, no. This is the food for the common man. This is the peasant food. This is this is these are the staples that we can sprinkle in around our more expensive you know sausage cooked under cabbage yeah or ham and potatoes yeah feast day menus and a couple other ideas of menus that fall fall in the same price range but that i’m not going to detail here is, dirty rice made with rice liver herbs broth yeah and kraut that is a full meal right there, A Mexican rice, which is seasoned with tomatoes and garlic, served with some cheese and cortito, Or curry chickpeas, which I love curry chickpeas, cooked in tomato sauce and served on rice Or with a chapati or a naan bread, Those all fall in about the same price category So you could really fill out, you know, that’s five, six, seven, eight meals right there Okay.

Andrea:
And I just want to note also, when it comes to making all these things, the fermented foods are almost always cheaper to make than to buy. Some things, you know, like we said, you know, maybe it’s better to, you know, pick the apples, buy the wheat. But fermented foods are almost always cheaper to make. Sauerkraut, kombucha, kefir, tipikos, kimchi, kvass, boza. If you go way back to the beginning and look at episode number four, we did a price breakdown of some of these things specifically. Exactly. And in episode number , we had some specific drinks you can make and supporters also got an e-book.

Alison:
Episode number is really popular.

Andrea:
Yeah, that is one of our top episodes.

Alison:
If you haven’t listened to that, do go back. It’s about fermented drinks. Do go back and have a listen to that because it’s a good one.

Andrea:
Yeah. And I need to pull something up real quick. I just thought of that I want to have a number for. So, Alison, let’s take a quick ad break and then come back.

So after we finished recording this entire episode, Allison and I were just chatting when I suddenly realized I never shared with her my weird experiment and the little kombucha hack that I had. So I am here to record it on my own. And I’m sorry, Allison, you’ll just have to wait for the episode to come out to hear that little experiment. So we talked in episode , the nourishing traditions dishes, cheaper than supermarkets, that we talked about making kombucha and it’s $. to make a half gallon of organic kombucha with organic loose leaf tea and organic sugar. And the sugar is the most expensive part in this beverage, but the loose leaf tea is not inconsequential. So when I have making kombucha the last time, I steeped the leaves a second time, as suggested by Megan Francis, who we interviewed during the summer about tea in her tea shop.

And what I found was that that second batch of kombucha or that second batch of tea that I steeped was, I mean, I drank a cup of it. It was absolutely delicious. I tried steeping the leaves a third time, and that liquid was so insipid that I didn’t think it would qualify for making kombucha. I did add sugar to it. I added a scoby and some starter tea as I would normally, and the jar still molded. So I think that the third steep isn’t quite sufficient. In the tannins and things that the scoby wants to be eating. But that second batch of tea was delicious. And when I tasted the final product kombucha, they both were equally vivid and full bodied in flavor. But here’s the interesting accidental experiment. The scobies, the new fresh white scobies. You know how those new scobies grow on the second steep kombucha were three times as thick as the scobies on the first brew kombucha.

I thought that was really interesting. I don’t know if anybody listening has a theory on that. I thought, well, maybe the scoby had to work harder. It had to build more structure, or maybe it’s happy, or maybe it got something out of that second steep that it wasn’t getting the first steep. I honestly have no idea, but I am curious if anybody has any thoughts. But there’s another little budget hack. You want to drop the price of your kombucha just a little bit more. You can make twice as much tea off of the leaves by steeping them two times. The third time may not be worth the effort, but then the chickens get the finished leaves and nothing really goes to waste at all.

Andrea:
I’m going to share with you a funny kombucha price hack and a mysterious accidental science experiment that I did not on purpose that I wanted to tell you about. Okay, so I’m going to also share some further reading and just an inexpensive little treat that you can have. But let me go. I’m actually on our website. I don’t know if people know this, but we have transcripts on our website to all these podcasts. So if you want to go back, they’re not typed by us. So sometimes they’re a little bit funny to read. But you can get most everything that we said. So I just need to pull this one up and have the notes for it.

Alison:
Yeah, you can go back and look. And so if you hear us say something and you kind of think, oh, I missed that, you can just go onto our site and go to the episodes page, find the episode, and then search using your browser. And it will find whatever words you’re looking for to get the information.

Andrea:
Or if you just want to know how many times we talked about sand or cats or something, just word search that and it’ll come up in all our transcripts. Okay. The half a gallon. Okay. The tea and the organic sugar. Okay. That was what I wanted to find. Okay. So you remember I said in one of our previous episodes, my theory, that the reason why everybody wants carbonated drinks is because we’re actually creating probiotic beverages.

Alison:
I remember that one. Yes.

Andrea:
And I said that we oftentimes have carbonated beverages on hand because we stock them for campers, and there’s a whole other category of licensing required if I wanted to make them beverages, so I’m not going down that rabbit trail.

Alison:
Oh, I see. Okay.

Andrea:
And then, if people don’t drink them, we ended up drinking them. Yeah. And then we kind of got used to having them around. And then Gary and I went on this kick where we’ve just been eating, making, instead of just having fermented foods turn up where they turn up, we’ve made a concerted effort to have them at least six times throughout the day. Just a bite of something, not like a basin of sauerkraut, but just making sure that you’re getting a spoon of it here and there. And just being very intentional about it. We both noticed that ever since we started doing that, we haven’t even thought about going and buying any of those carbonated beverages. It’s water that’s carbonated basically, and then you can combine it with things. We haven’t even wanted it.

Andrea:
And we both thought that was interesting because it does confirm my theory because sometimes you think oh you know what sounds really good it’s like a nice cold bubbly water you know put in some apple juice or something yeah but we haven’t even wanted it gosh so i’m just gonna say if you want to save water on your beverages or you want to save money on your beverages just ease our crowd every meal and i was gonna also say ginger beer is a really special beverage that you can make and you just need sugar and ginger to start the bug and then you can make infinite bottles so if you’re saying i can’t get my hands on a scoby i can’t get enough milk to maintain milk kefir well guess what ginger is here for you you can buy dry like not dried but like um storage sort of it looks dried, how do i say this if you get fresh ginger like it’s so wet that the skins fall off like you can peel the skins off of your fingers. But if you get like fresh ginger at the store, it does look kind of dried and you can’t really peel it that easy. So I don’t mean it’s dehydrated, but I mean it’s not fresh, fresh.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
You can buy that ginger and use it to start this and you can often get it shipped, you know, if you… Know where you can buy it but you can also grow ginger so yeah.

Alison:
I’ve never tried.

Andrea:
That is a thought but i’ve seen it being.

Alison:
Done and thought oh i’d like to do that.

Andrea:
Yeah so so the farm down the road from us is growing ginger and turmeric both and then they’re kind of doing what your, your guy um leo now i forgot his name um ian did yeah where whatever they had left at the end of the season, they froze it.

Alison:
I see.

Andrea:
And let me tell you who rolled up and bought a ton of that. That would be me because we have a ginger in a lot of things. So that’s a handy and inexpensive beverage to maintain because you also don’t, you don’t have to feed your bug constantly. I just feed it when I remember, to be completely honest.

Alison:
Yeah. So do we. I mean, it’s just at the back of the fridge and it stays there. Really?

Andrea:
Yeah. Mine’s on the counter because our kitchen’s not that warm so okay okay an easy snack to make a little dessert that isn’t going to be too expensive i’ll link this in the show notes but it’s the fruit and oatmeal cake from the book a cabin full of food and she uses scraps and leftovers and bits of things she still tends to make things far sweeter than what i’m accustomed to so you know tone that down um but she uses leftover cooked oats to make this cake it’s really good uh yeah it’s really good and you can dice on top bits of fruit or what have you.

Andrea:
Or you can make it into muffins if you wanted to. And then I was also going to say on the apple note, I’m going to link an apple crisp recipe below that’s really tasty, but it is gluten-free and the filling is just sliced apples. So that’s easy. And then the topping can be as sweet or unsweet as you like. I make it lightly sweetened with oats. And it is probably the best apple crisp I’ve ever had because it’s just so, I don’t know, the apple just shines through because you’re not drowning it in salmon and sugar. But again, it’s more inexpensive because you’re just slicing the apples. You’re not getting out a bunch of spices and a bunch of butter and all kinds of expensive things to fill the filling with.

Andrea:
A couple books that i wanted to make note of this book a friend loaned to me when i told her i was putting this episode together and i thought this is definitely a worthy one for anybody who’s on here thinking budget and all of that she loaned me this book which i never knew such a specific and wonderful book existed it’s called make the bread buy the butter what you should and shouldn’t Cook from Scratch, Over Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods by Jennifer Reese. And she is author of thetipsybaker.com. I will link this in the show notes for our shop. But in this book, she’s kind of humorous. Actually, she’s pretty funny.

Andrea:
And, you know, some things, different priorities may apply for you. And again, like we already said, the other principles may apply. Certain things may or may not be more accessible or less accessible. And not every ingredient in here is going to be something that you’re going to feel like is going to be part of your family’s montage of meals. But her principles and the way that she’s teaching you to think is exactly the thing that i’m always meditating on which is okay it like that is actually an exact conclusion i had made you know when it comes to butter i can actually buy very high quality butter better than or at a better price than trying to make equal product i can make yeah by making it at home now if you have a cow okay but you’re making the butter just get to it but if you don’t have a cow then you have to buy milk, take the cream off the top, and then make the butter. And then you get a very small amount of butter from that gallon. And so, you know, at a certain point, it’s more economical to buy a high quality butter.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
But bread, let me tell you, you will always save money by making bread at home. So this book is really helpful in just learning ways to think. And I enjoyed seeing her price breakdowns on things. Another book I want to recommend is from a listener and supporter of ours, Angie Schneider, pressure canning for beginners because she teaches you how to make those cans of beans that I’m constantly alluding to that are so delicious and can save you so much money because there is…

Andrea:
Yes, I know that we need to spend more time in the kitchen making food, and that’s part of the ancestral lifestyle, but also sometimes we do need food to happen quickly. And having cans of beans is a literal lifesaver for me. And it’s a budget saver, too, because you don’t know what to do. Well, bring in two or three jars of beans, and before you know it, you have a meal. Like the meal makes itself they’ve already been soaked overnight according to you know nourishing traditions they’ve been soaked with whey or lemon juice they’ve already been strained boiled fermented not fermented um cooked canned ready to go um also months of monastery soups and i’ll link all these books below so you don’t have to try to write them down right now okay, But Months of Monastery Soups is also amazing because, remember, he’s the monk who goes season by season. So it’s one month at a time and all the different soups. Rarely do I ever follow one exactly. Sometimes I follow it exactly the first time and then I see where I want to change. You know, I want to see what he was thinking when he put the recipe together.

Andrea:
But it’s such a good book for just learning, hey, here’s a few simple, maybe five or six things that I’m putting together. You know, his borscht is just so simple. The first time I made it, I was like, what? Water, beets, and potatoes? Like, are we done? This is it? You know, like he makes the simplest things, but they’re so good. And then I also would say that book, A Cabin Full of Food by Marie Beausoleil, because she has so many scraps and bits and she talks about, well, you know, you can start with, you know, store-bought tomato sauce or store-bought ketchup, but over time, like, let’s see what is more economical. for you to make at home. So those books all illustrate good ways of thinking, and that is what I like about them, even more so than the recipes. But the recipes are also obviously incredible.

Andrea:
And anybody who’s a supporter, come on over to Discord, or if you’re not a supporter yet, you are welcome to jump in as a supporter and join us on Discord, because we are having kind of ongoing conversation about what is making more sense for me, where I’m at to grow, for you where you’re at to grow what can we raise what’s going to save us some money or maybe improve some nutrition it’s all all kinds of ways to be looking at it and that’s a conversation that is just ongoing forever and we have so many uh you know katie’s in there growing edamame and fermenting it into tofu everyone’s doing different things on there off grid in the woods butchering goats on her deck. There’s all kinds of great conversations happening in really good minds.

Andrea:
And then just to close the conversation, I wanted to just emphasize, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk to the farms around you. Ask if they do bulk buys. Some do and some don’t. You know, it’s worth asking. Talk to your butcher about offal and bones. Can you get offal and bones from him from other animals that he’s butchering, from people who don’t want them? We are, as you know, attempting to grow garlic this year. What can you grow? Sprouts and herbs. those are really really expensive to buy i mean sprouts i don’t know if you’ve ever bought sprouts allison but they are expensive to buy i’ve.

Alison:
Seen them in the shop but i never bought them.

Andrea:
Yeah pennies to grow less than pennies and herbs um if you’re allison you just step outside the porch and magically discover the entire herb garden hidden underneath your feet so there’s that and what else can you grow how can we be like peasants on their small holdings producing what we can from within our home, even if it just means cooking beans from dried. Now, how can we deny that false reality we’ve been sold that nutritious food is only for the elite and we, the impoverished, have to make do with just the industrial scraps that fall from the table that is not good enough for them to eat? I reject that notion entirely. I say that we can have the best and the most delicious food and we can make it ourselves, by golly. Anything you want to add, Alison?

Alison:
No, thank you ever so much for doing all the research and the figures and coming up with those five wonderful meals. I think they’re such good staples that people can just turn back to again and again. So thank you ever so much for the episode. It’s been great.

Andrea:
Well, wonderful. Then off we go into our new year. And until next time, Alison, I shall be seeing you on the Discord.

Alison:
Indeed. Bye for now.

Andrea:
Bye.