Kitchen Table Chats #54 – Alison’s at Nicole’s in Italy: So much cooking and lots of talk!

Alison went to visit Nicole, long-time podcast supporter, at her home in Italy. The day before saying goodbye they got to record this chat!

Listen in to hear:

• Why Alison loves Nicole’s kitchen
• Living ancestral, realistically. Why Nicole was scared to have Alison in her house!
• How compromise in what we’re doing is the key to staying whole
• All the wonderful things they’ve cooked together: Gluten-free bagels from The Art of Gluten-Free Bread by Aran Goyoaga (here in the US, here in the UK) and more gluten-free breads; offal sausages, lumpy tums; risotto in the Thermomix; rooster soup; gerty-milk
• The despatching of Nicole’s rooster, slaughtered and butchered in a Bangladesh style
• A dip into the local food of the region

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Transcript:

So, hello and welcome to a KTC. And the situation is a bit different today. Instead of being hidden in a bedroom somewhere, talking to Andrea over the marvel that is the internet, I’m sitting at a real kitchen table with a real person sitting next to me. Hello, Nicole. Hello. Thank you for coming on. I am at Nicole’s house and have been here all week. Nicole lives in a town with two names. Did I say it right? Yeah. Yeah, if you are speaking German, and Vilpiano, if you’re speaking Italian, because she lives in the region of South Tyrol, which in Italian is called Alto Adige, yeah? And it’s right at the top of Italy, getting close to Austria, above Bolsano. Maybe you’ve heard of Bolsano because of Christmas markets. and the reason there are two names is because it now belongs to Italy but in the past, before the war it actually belonged to Austria so there’s a mix of, um german speakers and italian speakers and when we’ve been out and about we went to a lovely restaurant and there’s all of the menu in italian and all of the menu in german as well.

Anyway and i’ve been here with nicole for a week cooking and doing wonderful things together and we actually have an hour now to sit down and chat so as usual the first thing i’m going to ask you What was the last thing you ate, Nicole? Right. Well, we happened to eat the same thing, you and I. The plan for what we were going to eat this morning, should I say? Yeah, yeah, I do. So we actually had thought that we were going to roast up some offal, which came from a rooster that we dispatched on yesterday? It was yesterday, on Wednesday. Yeah, the day before. There was, it’s just one heart and a liver and the testes. And we were both shocked to see the size of these balls. That one ball is larger even than the heart. I was astounded when I saw them just lying you know after the rooster kill had happened I saw them lying there I thought really they can’t be the balls they’re so big but we didn’t actually eat them did we? We haven’t eaten, no we didn’t eat them things were kind of we changed the plans and we ended up having so we made a.

Rooster stock out of the rooster and we had some of that this morning with some gluten free bread that we made together and a bit of butter, a little bit of, You had some… I had some rapeseed oil, some cold-biss rapeseed oil, with the soup and the gluten-free bread, which is from Aaron’s book, The Art of Gluten-Free Baking, which we will talk a little bit about later, because I’m hoping we’ll have time to talk about what we’ve cooked this week.

And, yeah, that was it. And a cup of tea. That’s right. A little bit of herbal salt. And Allison tried for the first time. The infamous seasoning brag. Yeah. Which is, we were trying to figure it out. It’s not, it’s not a soy, it’s not soy sauce. No. Sometimes I think it’s soy sauce with water added to it just because it’s a lot. Okay, not as strong. Not as strong. Yeah. But anyway, I can’t get it here. So when I go home to Canada, then I top up. Because mom always used it in her cooking. It was kind of the last thing she added sometimes to a soup to add a bit of a flavoring. And i just kind of like it yeah so that was the first time i tried that it was also, the first time that i’ve eaten something that i was involved in the kill of right oh i think i’m trying to think i mean i haven’t even had any fish that i’ve been involved in some of fishing, i don’t think i’ve ever eaten anything that i’ve been involved in the kill of So very briefly, a couple of days ago, you had one rooster left and a lady who works here.

Comes from bangladesh and she showed us both how they kill chickens in bangladesh with her own equipment and it was amazing literally just went and got the chicken and then she did it quite differently to the way that potentially someone here would with this knife so it was it she was sitting down low with a knife that had a sort of a stand on it which she put her foot on to keep it stable and then it curved back towards her quite a sharp like a half moon blade with the sharp bit being on the inside so then she could sit put her foot on the um end of the blade to keep it stable and then utilize the curve the inside sharp bit of the blade to push the chicken against to cut it so she pulled off the um feathers and the skin in one go rather than taking the feathers off separately that’s right yeah and then she butchered like she’s skinned like she’s skinning it like you would skin a hide off of a goat or something yeah which i’ve never seen before uh we were planning to use i was planning to use the rooster for soup anyway this time so i wasn’t too concerned about you know having that perfect um roast chicken look in that in the oven but um yeah Yeah, so that was really interesting for me to see.

I used to being killed, which I’d not seen before, and to see how I responded to that. And I was worried that maybe something would kick in and I would be squeamish or upset about it. But it just felt kind of natural.

And the broth and the soup that I had this morning was delicious. So, Nicole’s Kitchen, before we get on to the next bit, I wanted to say that you designed the kitchen yourself. And it i can see working in it makes me think that because all of the kitchens that rob and i have managed to design ourselves have been made up of old bits all put together um and, so you know when you want something and it’s at the back you have to bend down go right to the back move anything out the way get it out stand back up again and.

Seeing the way your kitchen works which is really smooth makes me, perhaps value more the idea of having a modern kitchen because you have a wonderful walk-in pantry that doesn’t look like there’s even a pantry there you open the door and the light comes on automatically and then there’s a little corner for the grain grinder and all the grains and then there’s all the shelves and the cupboards open you know just by pushing in and then there’s those little shelf things in the cupboards where you pull them out and then you don’t have to go delving back to try and find the thing and everything falls out and all of that. And so, you know, thinking that I’ve always wanted a kitchen that’s kind of old and rustic, it’s just so much easier to have one where you open the drawer and then there’s another little drawer at the top and you can keep extra things in rather than just rooting around and trying to find enough drawer space to put all the stuff in. It’s a very beautiful kitchen. Thank you. And I’ve also, it’s been amazing to see the…

The work that’s going on with the apple pressing so nicole and her husband run a business that grows apples presses them and makes juice and vinegar mainly and the activity going on every day and the scale of it is not something that i could imagine until i got here you know um do you want to talk a little bit about that about that or do you want to go into your um list of things that we potentially talked about uh sure i mean i came to the farm my it’s my husband’s now it’s my husband’s farm it was his parents farm and um and his parents when they were they were apple growers and they felt that uh they were too much at the whim of the market and the market prices for the apples. And, you know, you can have five terrible years where you’re trying to do everything right and grow the apples and have the most beautiful apples. But from, you know, as a result of kind of market pressure or because of what’s going on in other countries, you might still not get paid for that.

For the cost of it. And then there might be some other years where, regretfully, it’s because there’s some kind of catastrophic event that’s happening somewhere else. So there is a scarcity of the product on the market, and then you get more money. So you’re kind of in this boom and bust phase the entire time, and you don’t really know what’s going to happen. You actually get paid out the way they have it here, is you get your final payment for your apples a year after. You’ve harvested them.

Yeah. So they wanted to diversify their business and they thought to themselves, why don’t we try making apple juice? They had made a little bit of apple juice just for themselves and for the kids because my mother-in-law wanted to have something to give the kids. It wasn’t, you know, Coca-Cola or Fanta or some kind of fizzy, carbonated, super colored, high sugar, high aroma drink. And she says, we’ve got all of these apples, let’s make something out of these apples. At the time, the only apple juice that you could get was the kind of from concentrate, like very highly concentrated. And so they thought, well, let’s make this for our family. But then they couldn’t make enough. Everybody, and then the friends would come over, the kids’ friends would come over, and then the apple juice would be gone again. And then they would make some more and thought, okay, that’s going to be enough for the season. And then a couple weeks later, it would be gone again. And so they thought, we might have something here. And so they got together with another two farmers, and they invested in the first tiny press, and that’s kind of how things went. And right around that time, there were a couple of other people that were starting to make cloudy apple juice, so not from concentrate and not from…

The worst quality apples because apple juice that’s from concentrate the apples are often the apples that fall off of the trees at the end and they’re picked up from the ground and they’re all dirty and they’re moldy and what have you but they um and they still they still press into concentrate yeah they still press them into concentrate and then they and then they adjust it accordingly with you know different flavorings and acidity yeah okay yeah sugar sometimes too even though they’re not allowed to. Okay. Yeah, crazy business out there.

So they started this business and now it’s in the second generation. New York took over and I joined, I fell in love with my husband, but I also was studying business. I had studied business at the time and I had always thought to myself, I might like to be an entrepreneur, but in hindsight, I would have been a terrible entrepreneur because I get these ideas and then I’m all like, oh yes, I’m going to do this. It’s going to be so much fun. and then and then you know when the going gets hard it’s like oh this is a terrible idea yeah I don’t know if I can do this yeah I know that so it kind of worked well that it was already an established business and I couldn’t, my little touch on it too so um and the reason you’re here in the first place at all because you’re canadian is that that if when i look out the window now there are mountains surrounding us and really high ones one of them still got snow on the top of it and your grandmother your omar.

Lived very close to here up in the mountains so that’s why you ended up coming to this place in the first place in canada yeah yeah and um yesterday we sat and talked about her a little bit and how she was a subsistence farmer living halfway up a mountain and just reflecting on how different her life must have been well i even think of my mom i mean my mom grew up there my mom grew up in uh feldos it’s called the town and when i look at the pictures from her childhood i mean they didn’t have a toilet they didn’t have a running toilet there was a whole bunch of kids in a very small place and um to think that my mom grew up you know maybe there was a bit of electricity at the time but they didn’t have running water the rooms weren’t heated and it was very i mean we’ll get down to minus in the winter time she remembers telling stories of how it would snow so much that they would have to they were able to climb onto the roof of the house and slide off of the roof of the house onto the snow and they had to kind of um dig out of the door to get out of the door yeah so pretty crazy to go from that and now she’s living in canada and so how did she driving a car and how did she get to canada my dad my dad so she she met him yes he was traveling the world he was a bit of a hippie okay traveling the world and they ended up working at the same.

At the same alpine lodge ski lodge I see and then she they fell in love and then yeah exactly and then they fell in love and then but then he went back to Canada he’s in Canada she’s from here obviously it’s not gonna work etc etc and then he goes back to Canada, and missed her and asked her if she could come and visit and she did and the rest is history okay, cool okay let’s talk a little bit about the things that you made a few notes the things you thought would be interesting to talk about let’s talk about those before we go on to talk about what we’ve been cooking so do you want to um to kick us off with something okay well i um.

Allison and i met in person when you were still living in italy yeah i had found the podcast because I was looking, trying to find a recipe online for % whole grain rye bread. And that’s how I stumbled upon the podcast. Then I started listening to it. I was like, oh my gosh, this is fascinating. I’ve always been interested in nutrition. I’ve always been interested in how we feed ourselves. And, you know, I’d been jumping around from one superfood thing to the other to this to that and and it really just made so much sense this idea of living ancestrally and I loved how you brought in the sustainability aspect of it too and so it really just resonated with me and then I wanted to learn more about this sourdough bread so I took your rye sourdough course and then the starter wouldn’t start and it wouldn’t start and it wouldn’t start so we were you were helping me troubleshoot that and I was sending you videos and I was sending you pictures and what about this and what about this. Seems like yesterday. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Anyway, it finally worked and I’ve had the same sourdough ever since, which I’m ever so grateful for.

And because we had been kind of having this conversation back and forth, I thought to myself, I’m going to write you an email and just kind of tell you about myself and that I’m also living in Italy and there are some things that I felt that we had in common. And so we kind of started emailing back and forth. And then I had invited you to come and visit me. And you had looked into the trains and saw how that was. And that was really, that was going to be feasible. But then the big decision came that you were going to be moving back to the UK.

So then i thought well gosh she’s still here in italy i’d really love to meet you, how are we going to do this and a friend of mine was staying in florence at the time and i wanted to visit with her so i asked if it would be okay if i come and visit you at the same time, so i did and since then we’ve known each other in person not just me listening to you on the podcast and i’m really grateful for that and i like i said from the beginning i had invited you to come over and then we saw each other last year at the uk meetup at fiona’s house that was amazing yeah and then we were talking this year about you maybe or last year but you may be coming for a visit and we set the time and then you booked the flight and all of a sudden kind of the shoe dropped. It’s like, oh my gosh, Alison is coming to my house. And then I’m looking around my pantry and I’m looking around my lifestyle and I’m thinking to myself, oh goodness, Alison is like so much more driven and dedicated. And what is she going to think of me when she sees that we’ve got Coca-Cola in the house? My husband buys Coca-Cola and what is she going to think? And we’ve got this powdered soup mix that we use sometimes to add a little bit of a flavor to things or if I don’t have time to defrost some stock or just want to make a.

Or this, that, and the other. And I’m kind of looking through my entire house with, like, this X-ray vision. Like, what is Allison going to think? And I’m starting to panic. Like, oh, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no. She’s not going to like me very much. Like, this is going to totally backfire. Why did I invite her over? So I sent you an email kind of confessing all of my inhibitions.

And you reassured me very much. Yeah, I reassured you saying, well, you know, when you meet someone in person that you haven’t necessarily been to the home before, There’s whole other layers that come down. And you said, you know, you came to our house and you saw the Amazon books. And you thought, well, actually, look, they’re real. They exist. And coming somewhere for a week, obviously, I had concerns that you would just think I’m crazy when you learn about my life more. So it’s just that’s a part of getting to know people. Yeah, yeah, it sure is. yeah and um yeah seeing your kitchen and seeing the the way that that we’ve made things today and and also killing the rooster i mean that that’s far more than than i’ve done so each of us is on our own journey and we’re going down the paths that are the easiest for us yeah i think that’s a good thing to note because there are some things that i might want to do or have you know, aspirationally but you kind of start off by by doing the thing that’s that’s most accessible to you or the easiest so i i mean i i like i said i’ve never killed a rooster and that’s something i’d like to do i’d like to have animals and i’ve done all this other stuff because i haven’t done that if i’ve been doing that then i wouldn’t have had the energy to do all the other stuff um and um.

Yeah, in reality, it’s always a case of looking for a compromise in the end because we will have busy lives and we have kids and we have people who want things from us and it’s not possible to be perfect. And it’s been reassuring getting to know you in person over this time and finding out more about your life. Obviously, we hear podcast, Allison, I’m just going to say, where you’re always acting as an inspiration to me, both you and Andrea, with different, always bringing different ideas. Maybe you can look at this. Maybe you can, you know, there’s the bokashi that we tried out that might work nicely for you. Or there’s, you know, this dish or all kinds of inspiration comes from that podcast. I’m always so grateful to the little tidbits that you give to me, but then that can also transfer into having this image of you like you’re this.

Prophet is the wrong word, but like this person who’s doing all these things and is getting it perfect and we’re never going to reach that. And so I found it kind of reassuring. What did you say today? The other day you’re like, I had a fight with Rob. And I’m like, what? You guys fight? You know, I get this image that there’s this, and it is extremely harmonious in your household when I’ve had the pleasure to be there and see this joyous unit that the three of you are. Really, really lovely. But it’s also kind of nice to know that there are marital disputes in your house as well or that, yeah, when we were in, when I visited you in Florence, there was some water there and I thought to myself, oh my gosh.

You buy water? I would have thought that you would never in a thousand million billion years buy water and drink it out of a plastic bag. But you are not out of a plastic bag, out of a plastic jug. But you explained. I’ll let you explain the reason for that. We were getting water from the, because we don’t have a car, so we can’t go to springs. We can’t bring like liters of water back. Although Rob could carry it. It would be just a trip just to go to the spring. He’s carrying like or liters. That’s harsh.

And so we were getting water from the municipal fountain thing, which was apparently okay, but Rob was really struggling with it, with digesting it and thinking he was having some problem with elimination and maybe it was that water, maybe it wasn’t, we weren’t really sure. But he’d had it all the time that we’d been using that water. And so at that stage, he was like, this is not acceptable. I have to try and find out what the problem is here. And I think we maybe we’d been away back to England for a week and he had he’d had the bottled water and he was like oh it’s not happening maybe it’s the water yeah and so we then were like right okay we have to continue this experiment at home and the way that we’re going to do that is by buying the bottled water to see whether actually there’s something in the water that’s coming from that municipal spring that is causing him problems and it was I mean we continued having that until we left he didn’t go back to that water and so i feel like um you know i only talked to andrea and we only record like an hour hour and a half.

A week only two of those episodes go on that main feed but life happens in all the many hours that are behind it yeah and and it’s always just making the right decision there the right decision was rob had something that wasn’t working in his system and so the right decision was okay this isn’t ideal but this is what i’m going to do for now you know i i wish that at some point in the future I didn’t buy anything from Amazon but at the moment without a car it’s really hard and so this is what we’re doing for now I think we try and we try and hold in our heads that the compromise is a compromise but it’s not forever because if you if you start thinking oh my gosh I’m doing this thing and it’s not right and I shouldn’t be doing it and you think you’re gonna be doing it forever then it’s easy to get depressed over it yeah but there are phases you know when the kids younger they’ll eat different things to when they eat when they’re older and then things are changing things have changed with gable a lot that he would eat a lot of stuff when he was younger.

And he won’t now and so i’m having to find compromises for him to keep him sane and to keep rob and i sane because in in the end of the day we all just need to be sane and as a family unit we all work together better when we’re when we’re happy and we’re not overstressed and we’re So when Gabriel was younger, he really didn’t have much sugar. But now he likes to make his own cookies, and they’ve got sugar in them, and he’s making them. But he’s in the kitchen, and he’s making it, and he’s eating it. And hopefully it’s keeping him away from much worse things that have much worse sugars and goodness knows what else in. And so it’s the best thing for us right now. Rob’s really good at that. He’s really good at saying, you know, we could do it this way, but then all of these other things will suffer. And you’ll end up getting too stressed, and I’ll end up getting stressed. No, for now, we have to do it this way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, yeah, you come into my house, you see whatever the compromise is at that time. Yeah. You actually see it. Well, it’s nice to know. Like, it kind of brings out the human aspect of things, too. We’re all kind of bumbling along here. Yeah. We all have aspirations and things that we believe in and things that we want to do. And we also all have just the realities of the day-to-day and the energy that we have in our bodies. You know, there’s always kind of a compromise there. And I think for me right now, thinking of, okay, where am I going to put my energy? My next kind of project is to get breakfasts, you know, get better breakfast for my kids going. And how can I do that? And how can I make something that works for my husband, who’s usually the one with the kids at that point in time of the day, So that it’s simple for him, something that they’re going to eat, but something that they’re going to eat that I’m feeling more confident about, that it’s serving them better than what they’re eating right now, or if they’re even eating right now.

I think that what you said there is really important to moving forward because we really can only do one thing at a time and trying to tackle everything at once is just doomed to failure. And I think Andrew and I try and stress that again and again that, you know, we both started this lifestyle like years ago and back years ago, we really weren’t doing much. We were just doing a few things then and slowly slowly slowly they build and you know when you do experiment with the breakfast if you end up with a breakfast that works then that then doesn’t take all that energy and that can just go in the back yeah and then maybe it feel like the right time to start another thing yeah um because and that’s been that way for us it’s just been building layer layer layer layer but then something changed and maybe one of those layers has to come away for a little while because we’re moving countries or Gabriel’s going through a particular phase where it’s more difficult or we’re focusing on the homeschooling and so there’s not that energy, to do that I really want to get back to the making the ale but I have not made it since we moved, because there’s just I don’t have the headspace and I don’t have the time yeah um even if I had the time I don’t think I’ve got the headspace right yeah and I think it will be like that for quite some time now because I’m focusing on the book that feels like that’s ramping up yeah and And so, whilst I’m doing that, I really want to go and make all these other things from all these other cookbooks. And I can’t because I don’t have the time or the headspace. Right, yeah.

And it’s always this balance of… Is this the right thing to do? Can I do it without consequences? Can I do it without feeling rough afterwards or causing an argument with someone or causing stress? Can I do it and still feel like I’m not overwhelmed? I’ve got much better at that, that I used to just take on too much and then be completely overwhelmed. And I see what happens now when I get overwhelmed and how negative that is for me because i end up not sleeping i end up being you know more icky, around the boys and so often i will choose really hard not to do something i want to do.

Because i know that it’s much better if i’m just calm and don’t do anything even if that might just be reading something i really want to read this book i really want to do that but actually it’s better if i just sit here and do nothing because then my brain’s going to be in a better state moving forward i’m i really struggle with it i’m still definitely in the phase of like i’m doing all the different things and i’m constantly getting overwhelmed with them and i keep i have this like instinct inside me i’ve gotta i’ve gotta scale back i’ve gotta pull back but i don’t know what I can pull back from at the moment. That’s the thing. You know, I’m involved in this one club and this other organization, and it’s all in the choir, and they’re all things that I love, and I really enjoy being involved in the community.

And I’ve already scaled back in terms of how much I’m working at our company to kind of make room for more time with the kids. But then I feel like that time has gotten usurped and I’m using it for things, for other things in the community or for making this bread or that project, what have you.

It’s hard to kind of keep. I think I think that’s one of the hardest things to to say no and very often in my life it’s been my body and my health that said no you know when I’m doing too much my health goes just up the wall and it forces me to stop and that yeah I think the saying no thing is absolutely vital and so hard to do it’s especially because you’re really involved in the community you’re more involved in this community than i am in my community for sure and when you’re with people and you’re sharing time and things with them that are regular you want to keep going with those and like you said it’s so easy to say i’m going to set this time aside to do something it’s particular like maybe be with the kids and then all these other things push it and um i feel like oh that i remember what i wanted to say now about that um that often my body is a thing that tells me I have to stop and in a way I’ve been lucky and I’ve got that in air quotes because when I’ve been doing too much or doing the wrong thing my body has forced me to stop and that’s given me a perspective that makes me see the warning signs earlier and try and stop and also Rob is really good like that because he.

He will stop, he realizes he needs to stop and how important that stop is much more than I do. I think maybe because he’s a guy and he’s not got all of the different things going on, he’s not multitasking and thinking what’s happening with the washing and what’s happening in the kitchen and what’s happening with the homeschooling and what about that thing that we were supposed to pay for that we haven’t done yet.

And he is very protective of downtime, and it’s taken him like years of our relationship to get me to try to do less and be slower and be okay with being slower and not just put all those things in my life to stop me, experience and there’s this comfort of what it feels like to not do anything um but he’s quite good at not doing anything well I think maybe it might be a guy trait because also I find sometimes my husband I’ll be thinking there’s this and this and this and this to do and he’ll be watching television drinking a beer yeah and I feel like just saying that is giving you the wrong impression of my husband he’s running around doing all kinds of things all the time um but and then I’ll be resentful. But then a part of me is sometimes thinking, wait a second, Nicole, you should be doing more of that. I should also be the one kicking my feet up. And why do I keep doing all of these other things and picking up the slack? I feel like the resentment thing is the key, because when you feel it, you can just feel the resentment and be resentful. Or you can go, hang on a minute, why am I feeling resentful? Oh, actually, it’s because I want to do that. And why am I not allowing myself to go over there and do that?

So all of the little emotions that come up, to be able to step back and go, hang on a minute, why am I feeling that? It’s because I want to sit down and have a beer too, because it’s nice. It feels nice. That’s right. Okay. I think the time is running out. We don’t have much time. So let’s move on, if it’s okay with you. Sure. Yeah. To talking about what we’ve cooked this week. Yeah. Which is a lot. We’ve been in the kitchen a lot, which feels really nice, because that’s kind of what I wanted.

And Nicole has the book that I alluded to earlier, which is, what’s the surname of that lady? Aaron Goyoaga. I’m not sure if that’s how you pronounce it, but that’s kind of how it’s written. So we’ve talked about this book a little bit on Discord, because a couple of ladies have it, and then Andrew bought it. And Nicole has that, and also her previous books. and because I’m eating gluten-free as well at the moment, Nicole’s gluten-free, I wanted to look through the books. So when I arrived, Nicole had made gluten-free bread from the book with loads of seeds in a ball, which rose beautifully. And then we’ve made both the gluten-free bagels from the recent book and the gluten-free bread. But we kind of swapped a few things out with the gluten-free bagels, the tapioca and the potato starch which were together grams we swapped out for corn and sorghum instead, freshly milled and those, they came out really, really well, didn’t they? They were wonderful, the bagels. I put seeds on the outside on them the only thing is we didn’t make the hole in the middle quite big enough and they rose a bit and so they ended up with only a tiny little hole in the middle so I think if we do them again, we need to make the hole bigger.

Those were absolutely delicious and then the bread that we had this morning with the roost soup and, was another bread from that book no it was actually from a previous book okay so this one didn’t have seeds in um and instead of potato starch we used actual potatoes and so you showed me nicole how to boil potatoes in the skin whole like old potatoes not new potatoes which i’ve never done before i’ve for old potatoes i’ve always skin them and shot them and boil them it’s interesting that you call them old potatoes because for me they’re just potatoes there’s potatoes and there’s new potatoes. But I wouldn’t necessarily call them old potatoes. I think I’m saying, I don’t think we do call them old. I think I’m saying old to distinguish the fact that I would easily boil new potatoes with the skin. Right. Okay. Because that tastes really good.

But the big, big potatoes, normal potatoes, we boiled those with the skin on in order to keep the level of water in the carbohydrate minimal. That’s right. Also, it’s a traditional way of cooking the potatoes here. You just boil them with their skin on. That’s a kind of a meal in lots of areas. You’ll just have boiled potatoes, maybe some buttermilk, maybe a bit of speck and some pickles and different things. That would be a… And would they peel the potatoes? They’ll peel the potatoes. Then they’ll get this bowl of piping hot potatoes drained. Their water will be brought to the kitchen table. And then everybody will peel their potatoes. You’ll get a bit of salt, put it on your plate, and you kind of dip the boiled potato in the salt. And then you’ll eat it. and have cheese with it. Maybe when we were living on my aunt’s farm, we would often have buttermilk with it. If we had been making butter that day, then we would have the buttermilk with it. Drinking it. Drinking it. Okay. Drinking the fresh buttermilk.

Or also to make roasted potatoes. You take the potatoes and then you slice them and then roast them up maybe the next day. To make potato salad, you boil them that way. or if you’re going to make any kind of a potato dough, like a gnocchi, where you don’t want a lot of extra moisture, then you have the potatoes. So you just, you basically eat.

Take potatoes and put them in water and boil them. If you want salt to penetrate into them better, then we’ll usually kind of spear them with a paring knife first and then put salt in the water so that the salt gets a bit more clean. So while we’re talking about salt, I just wanted to say that Nicole has a whole drawer with spices in. So much nicer than my arrangement at the moment, which is just jam all the spice jars in a cupboard because that’s the only choice you’ve got. So you can see everything with a label on the lid. And in your spice drawer you have a lot of different salts which are really lovely a smoked salt a herby salt and you’re grinding that in the um grain mill yourself yeah so you’re buying the salt big coarse salt either uh the the sea salt that i use for it is usually a little bit coarser than kind of normal table salt is and i’ll go and get the herbs from the garden and then i I will blitz the herbs and the salt together in the food processor. Yeah. And then I’ll dump that out onto the dehydrator and I’ll dehydrate it. And then it’s all kind of clumps of scraggly herbs and salt. And I’ll keep that in a jar. And then when I want some, then I’ll just put a bunch of that through the grain mill. To make it really fun. To make it fine. So you can see the tiny little bits of green in them. Yeah. You’ve got smoked salt. And then when you came to pick me up, you bought some salt, which was…

Was it blackcurrant? Blackcurrant. And something else. Very delicious. I can’t remember. Somebody gave that to me.

Lots of different salts, which has been really nice. And the smoked salt I particularly like.

We just have, we have a garlic leaf salt, which Amelia made, and normal salt. And I want to get some more salts. So, yeah, we made back to the gluten-free bread. We swapped the potato starch for actual potato, which is obviously more hydrated than the starch. So we tried to, we looked up how much of a potato is liquid, and that was like around %. So then we adjusted the liquid in the dough to take account for, you know, the weight in grams of % of that potato being water.

And the dough you said came out, you brought me the dough up, and you said it was a bit more sticky than normal, yeah? It didn’t rise as much as normal. Yeah, and it didn’t rise. The stickiness was about similar. We also substituted millet flour for the tapioca starch. Ah, okay, I’ve forgotten that. Yeah, we were trying to make it without any powdery white stuff. Yeah, without all of our starches. And part of the reason why we swapped the bagel, going back to the bagel, is because I would really like a bread… That I can share with both Rob and Gagel. And Gagel can eat potatoes and we’ll call it buckwheat. And so we swapped out the ingredients in there to make it potentially something I can make when I get home, which should be really exciting. Do you want to talk a little bit about your, you’re calling them awful sausages? Yeah, because just because I think it’s funny, the play on words between awful and awful and awful. So I’m calling them awful sausages because if my kids knew what was in them, they would think they were awful.

No, so I got a fair amount of pork shoulder from the butcher. We’ve run out of the one that we got from our farmer, but it was local pork, so there’s at least that. And so when we were in the UK, we made haggis and I loved it. It was so good. And I thought to myself, I’ve got to make this at home. And then a farmer that we worked with, he had lamb. And so he provided me with lamb and I said, and I want all the bits. And so I got the lungs and the heart and liver with it. And I prepared the haggis up until that point. So I boiled the lungs and the heart and the liver. Did we do that? I think, yeah. In any case, and then I ended up grinding that all up in the meat grinder. And then there was just too much going on at that point in time. And I stuck it in the freezer thinking, we’ll do this on a rainy day. So then with Allison coming over, I thought to myself, oh, this is perfect. Yeah. We’ll get that out. And we’ll use it. And I wanted to create something. My husband does not enjoy the taste of liver, although I am starting, you know, with exposure therapy here. Okay. I’m starting to get him. Wear him down. Yeah, wear him down. He’s okay with chicken livers now. But we’re working together.

And the kid’s not so much on liver at all. So I wanted to make something with this. So I ended up grinding that pork shoulder up. That was about equal parts pork shoulder, maybe a little bit more pork shoulder to offal and to the ground offal. And then we toasted up some coarsely ground oats, naked oats, and added that. And then it needed more fat so i took some of the fat that i had used from a confit recipe that i learned about on one of your podcasts from meredith lay and i had bought her course on the confit and yay or whatever it’s called and i had some of that flavored fat fat left over in the freezer And that had already been kind of portioned up, so I put that through the grinder as well and mixed it all up. Yeah, they were pretty good. They were very good. The great thing is, I mean, of course, there’s always like, I would do this a little bit differently next time. I would do this a little bit differently. But you don’t tell people, right? I’m listening to Andres. Like, you never tell people. Your own critique. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

So we had that with a lovely salad. Nicole has quite a large garden here. And salad’s in like a cold frame. So we mixed up a salad and ate that with it. And some fried veggies, too. A bit of millet. I have just on the minute yeah I’ve just remembered what we ate with that polenta the first night we were trying to remember so the first night that we ate here Nicole had some polenta that she’d made um which we sliced up and fried and I was amazed by the depth of freshness and flavor in the corn um because polenta that I’ve tried in the past doesn’t taste that good it really doesn’t and that corn is from a local supply here and you ground it up I ground it up In the Coke grinder. We had that with hearts, remember? Right. The chicken hearts. Exactly. That’s right. Then you would add spices to the hearts. The chicken hearts. That’s right. And we had that with that. It was lovely. You made risotto in your gadget, of all gadgets. Oh, boy. The Thermomix. Talk about that a little bit.

The Thermomix, yeah. Peer pressure. No. No, no. It’s wonderful. It looks wonderful. It is. It is a handy thing. It’s a little bit indulgent. I don’t necessarily need it, if we’re being absolutely honest. There’s lots of other ways to cook. But it is very handy for lots of different things. Making the polenta is my absolute favorite use of it because I feel like it really just brings out all of that extra flavor. And because it’s continually mixing and heating at the same time, it’s really getting this lovely kind of smooth, gelatinous texture to it. And it solidifies really nicely. So that polenta that I ate was originally made in the thermomix? Yes, it was. Maybe that helped as well. Yeah, and I cook it. I usually…

Say to cook it for about minutes but sometimes i’ll leave it in there for an hour and a half kind of depending on what time i started at and i feel like it really adds a nice flavor to it yeah it was nice to see in action because i’ve heard lots about thermomixers and never seen one really um and then two other things that we we made we made um lumpy tums which is a dish that i’ve kind of created for my book just recently and it’s kind of tiny little balls of oats a bit like oak gnocchi and we serve those with a sauce of veggies and some minced um beef that we’d made stock with the day before um which was lovely wasn’t it it was and i was really happy that the kids liked that because usually those gnarly bits of beef like the rib bits and they’ve all got the sinew on them and bits of fat. And they’re not really pieces of meat that my kids are really, really going to go for, especially Peter. He has a real issue with meat at the moment because he doesn’t like the feeling of getting it stuck in his teeth. And so he tells everybody he doesn’t eat meat, which isn’t at all true because any sausage he will devour. Anything that’s kind of easier to eat, sometimes even a schnitzel.

A breaded cutlet, he’ll eat that too. So it was, when I ground it all up, he couldn’t really, the gnarly bits weren’t there. It wasn’t an issue. And there was a lot. I never would have thought that from those two or three pieces that we had that that much meat would have come off it. And then when it was grounded up, it looked a lot more as well. Yeah. So we added that with some tomatoes, some canned tomatoes, and some spices from the gardener. Mm-hmm. And it was delicious. Yeah. Very good. Garlic, onion. Yeah.

And the other thing we’ve made with oats is another dish that’s going to go in the book, hopefully. But it needs you to sprout oats. And I’m struggling a bit with it in the UK because the oats that I can get from homodods don’t sprout. Only like % of them sprout. So I was really interested to see whether Nicole’s naked oats, which she gets from locally here, would sprout. And so we did a little experiment and a good number of them sprouted. It did, yeah. And so then we toasted them, dried them out once they spouted, ground them through the grain mill and mixed it with some plant milk and served that for breakfast. And Peter seemed to like that, didn’t he? Yes. I loved it. He just kept scooping it up, scooping it up. Nora was a little bit iffy, but she’s always very skeptical of things the first time. So we can’t take that as a no. It was really nice to actually do that here for me because I can’t do it. How can I put this recipe in my book that I can’t actually do? So I was like, something’s got to give here. I’ve got to somehow find something. In terms of the sproutable oats, you mean? Yeah, I’ve got to be able to make it. Yeah. I made it like maybe , I think. I looked on the blog. I’ve got to be able to make it again. Right, right. How am I going to do this? Yeah. And so that was really nice. Now, we don’t have much time left because we have a little boy who we need to go and pay attention to. Do you want to talk a little bit about South Tyrolean food? Oh, that’s a big chapter. We should do another recording at some other stage. Maybe you can just dip the listener’s toes in a little bit.

Okay, so the food around here is based on what they were able to grow around here, which was grains and a little bit of fruit, mainly apples, some veggies, and then the meat that they would have had available. But a huge amount is milk with milk products and with eggs. There’s lots of things that have, where eggs are mixed with grains. And one of the most famous ones, which probably I’ll just talk about this briefly and then if we want, we can talk about other Salterone foods another time, are the knudel. So knudel is a way to use up old bread, stale bread. And you chop it up into small cubes make sure it’s dry so you can either take fresh bread and chop it into small cubes and dry it or you can take older you know cubes of bread it doesn’t actually need to be in cubes but that just makes it a bit easier and you add milk to that and eggs and then you add in your flavorings so very simple knudel would be the speck knudel where we add I call it our version of bacon. It’s basically like a smoked, a cured and smoked bacon.

And little bits of that, which you fry up lightly with some onion and maybe garlic. Not everybody puts garlic in it. And chives. And then you mix that all together until it clumps together nicely. And then you roll balls of it. There’s a little technique to that. And then you put that into boiling hot water and you boil them for about minutes. And they come in all different varieties. So you can have spinach knudel, you can have beet knudel, you can have cheese knudel. One of my favorite ways is to have cheese knudel, where you put a little chunk of cheese in the middle. And then when you open it, then that kind of oozes out. That’s so good with browned butter and parmesan on top of it.

You can have liver knudel. That’s also very typical. call here traditionally the main meal is lunch and lunch would almost always be started with soup of some kind and the soup was almost always some kind of broth so meat or a meat stock and and then you would have knödel in it or maybe you would just have a little bit of, some rolled oats and some eggs and maybe one or two herbs in it or you would have, um there are all kinds of different things to put in this stock that you would eat so does that kind of mirror the the italian thing that you you know you cook the meat in and make a broth and then you serve the broth at the beginning in italy like with tortellini and then you have the meat for the main course that came from the broth with veggies is that sometimes yes yeah okay okay So I saw these knurl at the butchers that we went to to pick the pork up. And they had, like you said, the figata, the liver one, the green one with the spinach in, the beetroot one, the standard one, all beautifully ready made for people to take home and just cook. That’s right, yeah. Yeah.

Thank you. Do you want to end there? Because I know that there’s a time more we could talk about. Oh, gosh, we could keep going. The joy of having you here is, but also sometimes, you know, when we need to get cooking, it’s like, okay, what are we doing? Stop, stop, stop. Stop, stop talking.

Do we need to get something out of the freezer? Do we need to put a pot on to boil? Otherwise, we’re just going to keep talking. Well, the funniest thing is just doing, we were doing the breads and we were swapping out all these different things and we did it over two days and we were talking and talking and, And then we came back to her and I was like, what do we do? Did I measure this out? Did we swap that? I have no idea. Because it’s just not focusing on the bread. It’s just not focusing on the bread so we can do it properly, but we won’t. We will focus on all the other stuff in the talking. Yeah, yeah. It was funny. You had prepped the ingredients for the bread. We had made the sponge for one bread and then prepped all of the grains to be added to the sponge, but from the other bread. So the grains that were prepped were the wrong ones. so we had to put those after the thing until we figured that out, because with so many grains with the gluten-free book there are so many grains and you’ve got them all there ready and we can just grind them and mix them up and I was like this is just chaos I don’t know what’s going on here but it all turned out good in the end and it tasted amazing it did wonderful okay well let’s stop there and plan something in the future to do some more and share some more foods because I’m sure that people are very interested, and thank you ever so much Nicole it’s been my pleasure finding the time to come and talk to me with the record button press. Yes, well, thank you. While you’re just in the kitchen. Thanks for the visit.