#132 – A Week of Ancestral Meals: what we really ate

What was the last thing you ate? This is the question we always begin our podcast episodes with. The reason is because we always want to know what the other is fixing and cooking! What’s going on in your kitchen these days? What’s fresh and good? One of our earliest episodes recounts everything in our refrigerators at the moment! That was a lot of fun to record.

Part of what drives this interest in what we are eating is developing the ideas and understanding of what a day in the life of ancestral food looks like in a world where you may be the only person you know who is eating anything like an ancestral or ancestrally inspired diet. A world where once upon a time it would have been the norm to eat this way, but now you are trying to create a life, habits, rolling tasks, completely on your own, and without the benefit of examples from your childhood or the people around you or expert cooks who live nearby and can give suggestions and show you a good way to use up chicken carcasses or how to feed a lot of small children filling food day after day. And another reason why is – there is something intangible we learn when we travel to a place, stay in a home and break bread with someone. It is an intimate communion that tells us something about that person.

For this episode, we decided to track our meals for an entire week so you could see the shape of them – where some were more interesting, some were new and exciting, and others were leftovers, scraps, things we were just trying to use up. An ancestral diet is often made up of the mundane and simple, but exquisite foods. Pure in their sourcing, flavour, freshness but simple in their preparation and humble in their serving.

To create a supporter bonus, I reached out to our supporter community and asked if they were willing to contribute a week of their meals  as well, to be published as an accompanying booklet to the episode. The incredible booklet for podcast supporters that accompanies this episode includes at last count 50 pages with about 20 delicious menus, real menus made by families eating ancestral and home prepared meals ranging in size from empty nesters to 7 children in the home, including a special weekend with 12 children to be fed!

There is also an aftershow – we wanted to go over some details from these contributed menus and we were really pushing the limit on podcast length so we continued recording some of those discussions as an aftershow which supporters can find in the podcast feed. Now without further ado, let’s find out what is on the menu in ancestral homes today.

What we talked about:

• What we ate
• A lovely review from a listener
• Why talk about a week of meals?
• An incredible download for supporters, contributed to by supporters!
• The beauty of the mundane
• Where our concept of mealtimes came from
• Alison’s upper-class menu style
• Alison’s notes on her menu: low histamine, gluten-free, and more
• Andrea’s notes on her menu: winter fare, gluten-free, an outdoor week
• Our week in meals, alternating days
• The most common concerns listeners had about their menus
• Sharing samples from some listener menus
• Supporters can visit the private podcast, Kitchen Table Chats, to see the aftershow for this episode and hear more from the listener menus.

Resources:

• Supporters can download A Treasury of Ancestral Menus, Volume I in the downloads section today!
• The Evolution of Mealtimes
• Why and How to Study Food History – hour long YouTube lecture
• The Little-Known Evolution of Lunch
• The Regency Town House: Mealtimes
• Megan’s Ranch Seasoning
• Sending in a menu? Include how many adults/children (and the children’s ages!), any special dietary needs, and roughly where you are in the world (country/state or major city if you like), and Firstname/Last initial. Any other details you feel are pertinent such as sourcing, what you grew, special processing info or food prep, is all delightful and adds to much color! Photographs and recipes or instructions are welcomed. We are most interested in the menu you actually ate, not the menu that was planned – it’s what actually ends up happening that tells us our story! We cannot guarantee your menu will be used in a future volume, and we are honored to receive it regardless! Volumes may be available for sale in the future and submitting information implies you consent to your material being included. Menus can be sent to info@ancestralkitchen.com.

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Hello Alison I am so ready to talk to you today excellent.

Alison:
Excellent so am I I’ve been wanting to talk about this for quite some time like maybe.

Andrea:
I was gonna say years as long as the podcast has been but.

Alison:
We um but we haven’t actually got around to doing an episode and we’ve got kind of an enhanced episode because we’ve got so much content from our supporters as well in this episode so it’s very exciting um have you eaten.

Andrea:
I did i did indeed i had a simple breakfast i had a hard-boiled egg and a slice of fermented pickle on each one and then i made this gluten-free pita dough that britney had shared with me like a recipe and i just kept the dough in the fridge so this morning i took off a little piece of it and rolled it into a ball and smashed it in the tortilla press and fried it in a little bit of lard and then ate that with my egg and pickle and some coffee. So yeah, I’m ready for a marathon episode. How about you?

Alison:
Gosh, excellent. Yeah, well, I hope I am. Yeah, we did eat. We had leftovers from yesterday, purposeful leftovers, you know, I cooked double yesterday so we could eat today um lamb meatballs which had um, Lamb, dried cumin and coriander, fresh coriander and parsley and some dried paprika and oatmeal in them. Make them go a bit, make the meat go a bit further. And fried in tallow with yesterday a sauce that had tomato, onions together. I mean, yesterday we had it with some spring greens, which are my second favourite type of green after broccoli. I’m sorry, after Brussels sprouts. but there weren’t quite enough greens left so I found five mushrooms in the fridge that were left over and a bit of cauliflower and I fried that up before then dumping the rest of the sauce and the meatballs into the pan putting the lid on letting it heat up a bit bit of extra water to kind of break up the sauce a bit more and I had mine with leftover rice from yesterday and the boys had theirs with spelt sourdough really delicious yum perfect exactly question so yeah when you put oatmeal in.

Andrea:
Your meatballs or meatloaf or whatever do you cook it first or do you put it in dry.

Alison:
No put it in dry okay yeah the meatballs were fried for quite some time so i’m happy that that oatmeal was um cooked through it was actually, medium stone ground oats or medium oatmeal as we call it in this country um so it’s not quite as fine as flour but it’s not chunky like steel cut somewhere in between all.

Andrea:
Right i’ve just used rolled in i i think i’ve.

Alison:
Okay like if i’ve had a little leftover oat.

Andrea:
Flour from making something that day i’ve dumped it in before but.

Alison:
Yeah typically.

Andrea:
So interesting all right.

Alison:
Oats are so versatile i think you know i sometimes i would use fine oat flour sometimes i would use pulsed rolled oats But sometimes you just use whole roll darts. It’s absolutely fine. So, yeah, it was very nice. I have a review. Would you like me to read it? Yeah, so this is from Apple. Thank you to everyone who leaves us reviews on Apple. We appreciate you greatly and it helps other people find the podcast. It’s a five-star review titled My New Haven from someone called Peace Garden 365. And Peace Garden 365 says, I am a bulk herbs and local meats buyer at a small long-standing health food store in Connecticut. I’ve been a Sally Fallon devotee for 20 years, referring to my Nourishing Traditions book for methods and recipes often. So happy to have found these two dedicated women to learn from and tune into to keep me inspired and sane in these mightily chaotic times. I’ve learned tons more. Thank you, Alison and Andrea, for creating a haven and community around these wise, healthful and grounding traditions. Many thanks too for the troves of valuable resources. I’m excited to become a more active part of these conversations.

Andrea:
Oh, yes, do.

Alison:
Thank you peace.

Andrea:
Garden first of all love the name sounds like you’re in the community i think yeah peace garden 365 that’s what i’m talking about that is an awesome boy if they’ve been, reading sally fallon for 20 years that’s basically since that’s like years about right that’s a that’s like early adopter that’s awesome.

Alison:
Yeah, it’s wonderful to have you here.

Andrea:
I like thinking of this as a haven.

Alison:
Thanks for being a listener.

Andrea:
That is how it feels, isn’t it?

Alison:
Yeah, a little space.

Andrea:
A little safe place where everybody’s at least as weird as us.

Alison:
And I think the community members feel that, you know, because there’s a deeper community available in there. You know, you get to chat to people and see people and talk to people and it feels like this safe space.

Andrea:
I agree.

Alison:
Where you can just be you, which is really nice. okay um just before we start today’s topic we’ve got so much to talk about so i’m not going to hang around for very long but i just wanted to remind people that we do have a newsletter and if you go to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com you can get at the top of any page on our site, our 20 steps to an ancestral kitchen free and you also get signed up to our newsletter which at the moment is coming out about once a month um so don’t forget about that lots of interesting stuff in there andrea i’m gonna push the mic over towards you so you can introduce the topic today which is very exciting today.

Andrea:
Is something you and i have long wanted to talk about and it is well worth talking about for many reasons and what we wanted to do today was write down over the course of a week everything that we were making for our meals and then share it with you guys so, Most of us did not grow up eating ancestral foods.

Andrea:
We get a lot of our exposure to them through paintings or pictures or old books or flipping through old cookbooks or, you know, now looking at things online, Instagram or Pinterest or wherever people are with food and pictures of food. And many of us don’t even know people in our real life who cook the way that we all cook here. So, we’re often on our own, basically developing our family culture, our food culture from the ground up and trying to recreate it maybe from little snippets of things we’ve seen in the past or things we’ve picked up from people online. And looking online for inspiration, I find to be a very daunting and overwhelming experience.

Alison:
Absolutely.

Andrea:
Thank you for agreeing. I feel like and there’s no reason to say people shouldn’t do this but oftentimes what is shown online is the best of the best really good looking pictures of food really great displays most exciting dishes you made and it seems like food must be very complicated and I hear people say all the time I couldn’t do that type of food it’s too expensive it’s too complicated I don’t have the time I don’t have the money when in reality there are special feast days or meals that are quite exotic or elaborate, but most of the food is pretty mundane. And I felt like if we actually wrote down our meals, we could illustrate that in a positive and healthy way. Now, I put the call out, Allison, to members of our supporting community, and I said, I just posted it in Discord. I don’t think this went out over email, but I posted it in the Discord and said, if anybody wants to…

Andrea:
Write down the meals you make for a week and send them in, then we would love to share them with our listeners at the end of the episode in the form of a download.

Andrea:
Well, they did. 13 people sent in menus. And so, including yours and mine, we now have a book called A Treasury of Ancestral Menus, Volume 1. And these are 15 real life menus, yours and mine, and then 13 of our members. There’s a number of recipes included in there. Some people actually typed the recipes for what they’re making in line with the food description. And a couple people sent in extra episode or extra meals that they’d written down. And this is food that real people really ate and really made for their families. And the range includes our listener Lizzie sent in her empty nester dinners. And then we also have Rachel and she and her friend who both have, they each have a number of children got together and she wrote down their weekend menu, which was 12 children and three adults. And so we have kind of a range of meals here.

Andrea:
And you’ll see there’s some repetitive days. And then there’s a couple of people there, meals overlapped with Easter. So you’ll see some Easter food. And a huge thanks to all the supporters who sent things in, as well as all the supporters who were just keeping the lights on while we worked on this project. And of course, all the listeners who are listening, sharing, reviewing, and making this podcast so successful. So we look forward to putting out another volume in the future.

Andrea:
So, Allison, why talk about a week of meals?

Andrea:
Seeing the true ebb and flow of food over the course of a week, seeing that sometimes it’s interesting dishes and sometimes it’s repetitive, how it changes from each season or as you move across the globe when you look at the different menus that are sent in, and how each family also has their repetitive favorites. I noticed lots of repeating breakfasts in the menus that people sent in. I felt like this was…

Alison:
That kind of makes sense.

Andrea:
Doesn’t it.

Alison:
You know you if any meal is going to.

Andrea:
Repeat I.

Alison:
Mean our supper repeats.

Andrea:
Quite a.

Alison:
Lot but it tends to repeat as in it’s just leftovers and so that’s why.

Andrea:
It repeats.

Alison:
So some days it’s different but it’s always leftovers whereas breakfast you know some days you just I just want to get on with the day I’ve just got to

Alison:
get breakfast done you know and so understandable that breakfast is is repeating often.

Andrea:
Yeah I agree and we’ll talk a little bit about we’ll go a little bit more into that the breakfast and repetition um farther on but before we go very far you know i want a history minute so i wanted to talk about the ancestral menus of the past and what meal times might look like in literally what times would meals have been in the past and it it’s there’s a wide range you know you’ve got an entire globe to look at and you’ve got thousands of documented years of people to try and suss this out so I can’t really tell you the whole world but I will say that by and large there were not three meals a day up until fairly recently lunch was invented more recently and lunch the way we think of it today is actually a result of industrialization. So the word that we use called dinner, what meal of the day does dinner feel like to you?

Alison:
Oh, we have this discussion quite often. Gable tells me off for calling it dinner and not lunch. And I think dinner means the evening meal.

Andrea:
Okay.

Alison:
Traditionally for me.

Andrea:
For me, we also use the word dinner for the evening meal.

Alison:
Yeah. And sometimes it’s dinner and tea in this country. So sometimes dinner is lunchtime. I just said lunchtime, but 12 o’clock or noon. And then tea is the evening meal. but some people use supper as well.

Andrea:
But some people.

Alison:
Use supper as an as a snack before bed so it gets really.

Andrea:
Complicated and the fact that we can say lunchtime and we know what that means actually is a result of factories having bells and that wasn’t in that was an interesting invention so let me back up just a moment and say that dinner used to be a word referring to the first meal of the day, we kind of still use that word because dinner seems to be descended etymologically from Romance language words that mean basically de-fasting, unfasting, or break fast. And so we do say breakfast, but we also kept dinner. So English of us. Let’s just collect all the words. So… If we look at medieval England, then upper class or people living in the city, so not necessarily all upper class, but people who were not agricultural, the first meal of the day, which was dinner, was taken fairly late in the morning. It seems to be around like 10-ish or something. For one, upper class people could sleep longer, whereas agricultural workers have to take advantage of the sun shining. But working, they would need to all go to chapel first if you lived in the city or in a great house or something.

Andrea:
And traditionally, you would not take communion. After you’d eaten you would want to take communion fasted so no food before chapel working people didn’t have chapel they had to go right out to the fields and start work, so they would it seems eat something but fairly small before they headed out and then a midday meal would be brought to them and do you have something in england called a plowman’s lunch is that a term you’ve heard yeah yeah so that’s kind of based on this idea of maybe some fruit some bread a shelf stable cheese maybe even pottage that you could be eating yeah um so.

Alison:
That’s really popular.

Andrea:
Now that’s.

Alison:
Where you see the term plowman’s lunch you can go to a pub and you can have a plowman’s lunch and it’s cold and it’s always bread a pickle and then you can either have cheese or meat or something.

Andrea:
Like a.

Alison:
Scotch egg and then salad on the side and it’s a cold platter that you.

Andrea:
Would have that seems to have come about again because of factories and people needed now nobody was bringing you food you had to get out when the bell rang find food quickly and then get back before the machinery started up again um supper which is the word a super er, the super, was later in the day, and so you can imagine what they ate, soup. So this would be, this was considered usually a lighter and less formal meal than dinner, and then you were in bed at, So, lunch seems to have been, lunch as an idea of an express midday meal for all classes was invented later for most. If you were a worker, you needed that extra fuel to keep going. If you’re a rich lord in a house somewhere, you could just have your servants bring you a little snacky snack, and you don’t have to really fuel yourself. And according to the food historian Ivan Day, lunch was a very rare word up until the 19th century and it seems to have been invented as a more general

Andrea:
concept around the Regency of Georgian period. There’s a ton of interesting history around lunch and I have linked a lecture in the show notes if you want to hear about lunch for an hour from a lady who wrote a bunch of really interesting sounding books.

Alison:
You said Ivan Day. I saw Ivan Day last weekend.

Andrea:
Which is a coincidence, isn’t it? Oh, well, now I know how to pronounce it. Is it a he?

Alison:
So he, yeah, he is, oh, he’s written a lot about oat cakes. He’s written a lot about oats. Who liken them? And he has re-sort of made old oat cake breads. He’s kind of the only person who’s crazy enough to do it apart from me.

Andrea:
Well, how hilarious.

Alison:
We both encountered him within a week. He was at the Leeds Food Symposium that I went to on Saturday wearing my Ancestral Kitchen podcast sweatshirt. And he generally opens the morning session and he was opening the morning session.

Andrea:
Alison, we…

Alison:
Yeah, that’s really weird that you brought his name up.

Andrea:
We like run on the same vibration, I swear. We just can’t escape it. That’s amazing. Well, in this episode, Alison, we’re going to learn that you are part of the very moneyed upper class. Because you are indeed during the Victorian period, I quote… An article linked in the show notes. It was not uncommon for the wealthy, leisured class to be partaking of breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. I saw how many meals you put in a day.

Alison:
Breakfast, breakfast, elevenses, lunch.

Andrea:
Afternoon tea, dinner. Maybe not quite that many.

Alison:
That’s like six meals a day. No, not six.

Andrea:
I was lucky if I pulled off three. I actually feel like, well, we’ll talk about that as we get farther. But if anybody’s wondered, you know, I’m a mother with a bunch of children. Why? How? It’s so hard to have breakfast and then a snack and then lunch. And then I really want to pull off tea somehow and then supper. How? Why can’t I do it? Well, because that was a concept invented for the very wealthy, aka people with staff to do the work for them and run things up and down the stairs for them. And for peasants, which is most of us, then it was actually two larger meals, a large dinner, or what we would call breakfast and an informal soup supper with a field snack in between.

Alison:
What’s really interesting is that you know those people who were the wealthier class obviously weren’t moving around that much you know it’s the people who were running up and down the stairs giving them the food that were running around and i wonder if they’re eating breakfast snack lunch tea and supper, All of those meals, six meals a day, they must, they weren’t burning those calories off because they weren’t moving around much. So they must have been really small portions or they must have ended up like really big.

Andrea:
Allegedly, their breakfast was gigantic.

Alison:
Well, maybe that’s why you had gout. And how did they eat it all?

Andrea:
I have no idea.

Alison:
I don’t understand. So the reason that there are my second breakfasts, and I didn’t quite know what to call it. I was going to call it a snack and I thought I’d just call it second breakfast. um because the reason it’s there is i never used to eat second breakfast or just used to have breakfast lunch and dinner generally unless you know i was extra extra hungry and then i’d have a snack but what i found works for me is that generally i struggle to get enough calories in to have enough calories and to sleep well i’ve noticed if i don’t eat enough i generally wake up in the night.

Alison:
And so for, you know, for many years in different ways, I’ve been trying to address, you know, waking up in the middle of the night and lots and lots of theories and lots of experiments. And that’s for another episode. But eating more has helped me. And I’ve not been able to do that by eating bigger meals. I can only eat a certain amount of meal without feeling too full and uncomfortable and you know i’ve talked to several people in the community about this who are who have similar a similar kind of situation so you know whereas the boys or rob in particular might eat a lot more than me at meals i i just can’t do it and in the past i’ve been like well i should eat these you know two slices of bread and i should be eating this much because it’s um.

Alison:
And I just thought, no, this is not good. I’m making myself uncomfortable just in order to make sure I’ve got enough calories because I’m scared of waking up in the night. You know, all the health problems. I’m sure that listeners have experienced with health problems.

Alison:
If you find a way that you can mitigate them, you want to actually do that because it makes a difference. But I was like, well, I’m making myself uncomfortable trying to get enough calories. This is just ridiculous. so I found that my body works better if I have two breakfasts in the morning my digestive fire is stronger in the morning and I get hungry I don’t particularly get hungry in the afternoon so much and so I have my first breakfast quite early usually seven but I don’t have as much as the boys might have and then I’ll feel comfortable and that’s great but then when it gets to about 10 i get hungry again and then i eat and then i’m hungry again for lunch so i’m having like rather than having one big breakfast i’m spreading that big breakfast over two meals and it’s made a huge difference it’s meant that i’m not making myself uncomfortable and yet i’m still able to give myself enough calories to um feel like i’ve got the right nutrition for my body um so although I might be emulating the Victorian upstairs I’m doing it because it’s kind of worked for me and I feel like you know in the past we’ve talked about how.

Alison:
You know snacking was invented and snacking wasn’t a thing and and I feel for some time I felt like oh I shouldn’t be snacking but I feel like you know we’re all in different situations and we’re We’re all faced with different histories and places we’re in. And we should listen to our bodies and try and work out what works for us.

Alison:
And so that’s what works for me.

Andrea:
Well, I’m tending to think that a snack itself, while the term did not seem to be widely used and the word doesn’t have that long of a history itself, there was it probably existed but under the guise of something like a light tea or a refreshment right so the maid will bring you a piece of sponge cake and some tea or something you know as one’s maid typically does or if.

Alison:
You’re if if you’re if you’re in the lower classes then it’s just what’s ever left over you know and is on the side and you can.

Andrea:
Grab there seems to be some evidence too that sometimes women didn’t take the same normal types of meals because they were in operation with the food more often so they could eat those bits as they went, and maybe that speaks in some ways to the you know the way some women’s digestion works i don’t know you’ll notice when we do ours that we tend towards two larger meals and we don’t do like three huge full meals in a day um do you so before we jump right into the, actual menus which we’re just about to do i will say first i linked some interesting articles in the show notes if you want to learn more about the or read more about the um, origin of lunch and different meal times in the day. And then I would like to ask you, Allison, by the way, we both started our menus on a Monday, which I guess isn’t that weird, but I had thought, oh, you might start yours on a Sunday. I didn’t know how you counted your weekdays. So why don’t you start before we begin by giving me.

Alison:
Give.

Andrea:
Me a couple notes about your menu and I’ll give you a couple notes about mine.

Alison:
Yeah okay okay great okay so I’ve got a week’s worth of food starting on a Monday like you said um when I um did this I’ve been I’ve been meaning to do it for ages and I knew I was going to see Nicole um a supporter and friend who lives in Italy and I thought I’d just have to go to Nicole’s first and I’ll do it when I come back so I did it the week immediately from returning from Nicole’s so there wasn’t so much freezer food um, as there is usually in my diet, because I hadn’t been there the week before, so I hadn’t been making anything. And I was really busy because I hadn’t been there the week before, so I didn’t really have much time to experiment that week, other than you’ll see a few oats experiments, which are part of the book and just always going on.

Alison:
I’m not taking any form of fermented food or probiotics at the moment, so you will not see that in my menu.

Alison:
I am working back towards them in a frustratingly slow arc after experiencing extreme histamine issues that were just impacting my life too way too much so i had to pull right back i haven’t put tea in any of the menus i do drink tea it’s always herbal um this week that i documented was the first week that i started taking digestive enzymes and because of that i felt my appetite was a bit higher which was really great yeah that is interesting that i felt has helped me eat more which is good um what i ate and what you’ll hear about what i ate is not what necessarily what gable and rob ate i didn’t write down what gable and rob ate very often i’m making separate side dishes for them you know so sometimes i have potato they don’t eat that i often have my gluten-free bread they’re having you know spelt bread or rye bread sometimes they have different proteins to me rob eats a lot lot more cheese than me so often i’m sort of the meals have something that’s similar you know something that’s the same on all three plates but then there are variations depending on what leftovers are or you know what the carb is etc etc so this is just my version so those are my i think that’s all my notes what what do you want to pricey yours with andrea um.

Andrea:
Preface my notes with i am myself still eating gluten-free. So like you, there’s going to be some variation between what I eat and what the family eats, but that’s actually all captured in the menu. And I’m still cooking a mix of gluten and some gluten-free for everybody else because we just have so much. We have a lot of spelt, mine corn and things in the house. So I’m still using those. Any meat that we come across in here, we raised, and any veg comes from a neighboring farm. Interestingly, this is actually a version of our winter, of a winter menu for us because I recorded it in the very beginning of March, and it’s still quite cold out here, you can still expect snow at that time, even though this is coming out in, I think, May. But I had the idea and I instantly started recording my nails because I couldn’t wait to start writing this episode. All the dairy comes from our neighboring dairy, except there is going to be an incident of ice cream in this, which came from a little place in town.

Alison:
An incident of ice cream. I love it. Just an ice cream incident.

Andrea:
This happened to be a extremely busy outside working week for all of us. We barely came inside of the house and i was patching together meals very quickly it wasn’t a week where i had meal planned and had a whole bunch of stuff laid out it was really a week where like the night before i was just grabbing random packages of meat out of the freezer and then seeing what i could come up with in my head during the day and the food was very repetitive and is going to show a lot of what i call my speed foods okay and this was also our third month of not going to grocery stores or buying in any food for any reason. So we didn’t have things that I would often use to make those fast meals like rice. Just some of our, some of our, like, things that I order from Azure had run out and I wasn’t resupplying them. Still haven’t. So I just want to see how long i could go using things up so um those would be my notes okay now i want to start with your monday and then i’ll share my monday so let’s hear what you had and we’ll give okay let’s give a little more detail um in these days as then i think as we get to later days in the week you’re not going to have to repeat like sources and things but i do want to know where you got the things if you can share that.

Alison:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Monday, Monday morning, and it’s like, oh, it’s the beginning of the week. I’ve got to get up.

Alison:
My first breakfast, my main, my seven o’clock breakfast was venison sausage that comes from the farmer’s market here at Stroud from the game stall. And they make a really simple venison sausage, which I really like. Carrot salad which i made which has carrots sunflower seeds nigella seeds salt pepper and olive oil in it i didn’t have any vinegar in it because of the histamine i eat carrot salad a lot because grated carrots are a great sponge for excess estrogen i am perimenopausal and so i like to eat grated carrots every day they’re also grated carrots are good for so many things so I had my venison sausage then I had the carrot salad on the side then we had the porridge pot which Gable and Robert had porridge and there were scrapings left in it so I just scraped around it and put the you know a few spoonfuls of porridge that were left on the side and then linseed we have brown linseed which we buy as whole seeds from Hobmodod so it’s grown in the UK and we grind that probably every three or four days in our glass coffee grinder, which goes on a Kenwood food processor. And then we keep that in a container in the fridge.

Andrea:
Does it grind into it like a paste?

Alison:
Yeah. Oh no it grinds into very very fine powder yeah I don’t I could act extra oil and make a sort of a pasty thing but I don’t I just it’s like a powder and so I tend to put that over my porridge so that’s my first breakfast second breakfast was leftover polenta I’d come back from Nicole’s with some locally grown to her corn which was amazing it was so flavoursome and I ground it in the mock meal first on number 15 if people have a mock meal then know how to get to number 15 probably to crack it and then put it finely through the mock meal and then made polenta with that i think i must have made it on the sunday um so i just had a couple of slices of that with again some of that linseed on it some olive oil and then one square of 100 cocoa chocolate that chocolate and all of the chocolate this week was not made by me although often my chocolate, is made by me as people who’ve listened to chocolate episodes will know that I make my own chocolate and I have a course that can help you do that and that chocolate was from a company called Montezumas who do the most amazing chocolate and they have a 100% cocoa which is very strong and I like to have a piece of that every day.

Alison:
Did you hit it? Yes, I did. Yeah, I didn’t have the time to fry it up. Usually what happens is in the morning I have my first breakfast before Gabriel gets up and then I go and wake him and then he has some time to kind of come to and, you know, get his breakfast, etc. And then I do some homeschooling with him from 8.45 to 9.15. And then at 9.15 I come upstairs and work. And then I’m working until I have to go downstairs and prepare lunch, depending on if I’m doing a you know a kind of a process heavy lunch then I might be coming down at half 11 might be coming down at 12 depends and so usually I just I get hungry I run downstairs I find whatever there is left over for my second breakfast I eat it and then I go back upstairs because I’m you know I wouldn’t spend the time so you don’t really plan for.

Andrea:
It per se it’s just kind of.

Alison:
No yeah no it’s what there’s always some leftover yeah in the in the fridge you know it might be leftover porridge you’ll hear the rest of them later but there’s always something left over so I never plan for it I just have whatever’s there you know um so that was second breakfast then lunch was for me um homemade gluten-free sourdough spread with lard and then leftover a lamb patties a bit like the lamb i just talked about that i had for lunch um with an onion and tomato sauce and cauliflower that was my lunch the boys would have had fresh cauliflower cooked or.

Andrea:
How do you.

Alison:
Yeah that would have been steamed that would have been steamed i would have heated up lamb patties and the onion and tomato sauce because i prefer to have them reheated um and then the sourdough bread probably would have gone in the toaster unless it was really fresh i tend to eat my sourdough bread fresh the day it’s made and then after that i like to toast it, because i like also the lard to melt oh.

Andrea:
Yeah for sure.

Alison:
That whole sensation i like the crunch and then the melted lard, Usually I put a bit of salt on it. And then evening meal, supper, dinner, I don’t know what to call it.

Andrea:
When about do you… I’m confused. Call it whatever you want.

Alison:
Good question, I’m not what you’re going to ask.

Andrea:
This final meal.

Alison:
Yeah, so that’s interesting. Our lunch is 12.30. I’m nothing but consistent. Anything but consistent. No, I am consistent. and generally I will always try to get our lunch on the table at 12 30. Our evening meal ideal ideally would be five o’clock. Sometimes we get hungry earlier and it’s 4 30. Sometimes we’re super busy and we don’t get to it till six. It’s rarely later than six. It’s usually five.

Andrea:
Okay.

Alison:
So that Monday my supper was rice which again was a present from Likol a heritage variety of rice which was creamy and tiny tiny tiny grains but really creamy and i cooked that in chicken, meat broth so you know because of the histamine things i’m doing meat broth rather than bone broth are you freezing chicken meat broth.

Andrea:
Or when did you make it okay.

Alison:
Yes yeah it might well have been just in the fridge overnight i leave it one day in the fridge and then you know i leave enough for the next day i kind of have it in my head oh i’m going to do this the next day we’ll leave you know a liter a quart or whatever and then the rest of it are freeze so it may have been frozen i can’t remember um two eggs fried in butter only salad leaves and mayonnaise yeah only two only two i can only manage two eggs you try i go i’m not i’m not i’m not a world champion like you did you make the mayo um salad leaves um no i did not make the mayo i have tried to make mayo but, You know, I found this brand of mayo called Hunt and Gather, I think it is, in the UK. And it is 100% avocado oil. And it is so good. The ingredients are egg, apple cider vinegar, Himalayan crystal salt and avocado oil. And that’s it. And it is such good mayonnaise that I, at the moment, I mean, I do make mayonnaise sometimes. At the moment, I haven’t got the space to make mayonnaise. So I’ve got a jar of that in the fridge.

Andrea:
The only thing that I like more than making mayonnaise is not having to make mayonnaise. Yeah, exactly. I’m with you on that.

Alison:
That’s kind of how I feel. So that was my Monday. Let’s hear your Monday.

Andrea:
Andrew. Well, I’m also, I’m taking note. Anybody who’s listening, take note. You said you come down to prepare lunch between 11.30 and 12.

Alison:
Oh, yeah.

Andrea:
And that you eat at 12.30. So everybody, mothers like me who are like, how do I make a quick lunch? During school we are listening to your lunches because these are going to be quick uh i like that.

Alison:
Yeah they are.

Andrea:
I like that okay our get ready to hear what you’re going to hear 400 times till the end of this episode for breakfast i we have had this week pancakes and i make okay two types of batter like one with grain einkorn spelt wheat whatever or in this case the very last of our buttermilk pancake mix from Azure standard, which is all gone now. And then I make myself a gluten-free pancake mix and I keep containers of those in the fridge. So then when we want breakfast, I get out the batter and I make everybody as many pancakes as each person wants.

Andrea:
Whatever reason, I have developed a family of snobs and none of us like day-old pancakes, so we have to have them all fresh. And we make the mix out of lard from our pigs, eggs from our eggs, sour milk from our friend’s dairy farm, and then whatever the flour’s mixture would be and some salt. Served with honey some of our homemade sausage some eggs fried in lard or probably scrambled in this case I didn’t note it down and then there’s also coffee raw milk blackberry jam and surprise broccolini I know that doesn’t usually appear with pancakes but I don’t eat pancake sweet anymore you’ve kind of got me hooked on the savory idea like a salty pancake but, But still, you can still serve broccolini even alongside sweet pancakes.

Andrea:
In my opinion, because I love broccolini. But what you’re going to notice through this menu, which you and I were discussing before we even started recording, this is right in, there’s, there’s an absolute lowest point out here in Washington, I would say between like February and the end of March, when it seems like there is nothing that you can eat anywhere. And so towards like between October, November, December, January, I was making gallons and gallons of kraut because I knew that it would take a lot to see us through. So when you see the kraut pop up in this menu later, I’ll explain what’s in it and how I was trying to keep a lot of a wide range of nutrients available for everybody.

Andrea:
Um lunch my mom brought a loaf of einkorn bread and the kids had it with some peanut butter and then some homemade jam for some reason i didn’t write down what i ate but i would bet money it was just another pancake um and then for dinner or supper which is a regionally exchanged term then we had blue corn tortillas that i made we had shredded cabbage i think i had at this point two cabbages left cabbage with lime juice salt and pepper so you shred the cabbage and then you put on the juices uh taco beans that i had made and canned um some months ago pork sausage, cilantro which for some reason sticks around until like the middle of march and then disappears and then comes back in the middle of April, and Swiss cheese from the dairy farm. And Camille really wanted to make lemon pie filling, so she made a pan of lemon pie filling and served that as a dessert. Wow.

Alison:
So that’s like the yellow, kind of the lemony bit of a lemon meringue pie,

Alison:
is it? Is that what you mean?

Andrea:
Yeah. Okay. So that was our Monday. Let’s take a quick ad break and then come back with Tuesday. All right, Alison, let’s hear what you had on Tuesday.

Alison:
Okay. So the first thing I’ve kind of thought about listening to your Monday and hearing it against my Tuesday is that I don’t know if listeners.

Alison:
Long-term listeners know that I don’t eat sweet things. I don’t eat any sugar and I don’t eat sweet things so I’m kind of making up for that by using different things in my menu trying to give myself enough different textual kind of contrast and, you know that the whole thing that I talked about at the beginning about having two breakfasts and splitting them up and making sure I’ve got enough calories for the day is impacted by the fact that I don’t eat sugar you know because I know that the boys can get their calories from eating fruit or something sweet whereas I can’t so I have to be more measured with how I use complex carb because it’s more difficult for us in general to digest complex carb than simple sugars so by splitting it into four meals I’m helping my digestion to accept that complex carb in a way that is not going to put too much strain on it that that I just wanted to add that okay Tuesday so um Tuesday early morning breakfast was venison sausage again and then leftover rice which was from the evening before which I’d cooked in chicken broth and then carrot salad and you’ll see that that’s just it’s a very simple meal the carrot salad is the same as the day before and I make that carrot salad in batches okay and it just stays in the fridge in a bowl with a plate over the top and we have it you know for four or five days and then I make it again so literally what I did was put the venison sausage in the pan yeah they do.

Alison:
They do. I put the venison sausage in the pan and just watched it as I was doing other things because there’s always, you know, a million things to do in the kitchen in the morning. And then when that was ready, I just took bowls out of the fridge and put the rice on my plate and put the carrot salad on my plate. So that was a simple breakfast.

Alison:
My second breakfast on Tuesday was three seeded oat cakes. They were not made by me. They were shop bought ones, although you will see some oat cakes made by me later on. And they’ve got, they’re just oats and sustainable palm oil and different types of seeds i think there’s chia and linseed and maybe sunflowers in them they’re really nice um with nothing else on just the oat cakes then lunch again was homemade gluten-free sourdough bread spread with lard again that would have been toasted and then meat from a chicken carcass that had previously made stock So that morning, whilst I was cooking that venison sausage, I can see now from this menu, that I would have put the big stock pot on and put chicken carcass in with lots of water, some carrot and onions and black pepper and whatever bits of celery or whatever I had left over. And I cooked that for an hour and a half to make stock, to make meat stock, which is the same stock that that leftover rice and that same method would have been cooked in. And then I shred the chicken off the carcass and usually I do two carcasses in one go and that chicken serves us for two days so the first day I usually um.

Alison:
Just put it on our plates. And then the second day or the second serving I will use to make a risotto. Sometimes I leave the chicken in the fridge and make the risotto with it the next day. Sometimes I just put it in a container in the freezer and then it’s in my head, it’s risotto chicken. And then when I want to make that risotto, I just pull it out and use that second helping of chicken from the same carcass for risotto. So back to lunch, I had sourdough, bread, gluten-free, spread with lard meat from the chicken carcass and steamed kale very simple um my last meal for the day my supper was two eggs the eggs come from the farmer’s market i didn’t mention that for monday um i am the only person in the house that eats eggs but generally i will buy at least 12 a week if not um 18 because I often put eggs into my gluten-free sourdough bread and use them for other things as well so I had two eggs which I scrambled I love scrambled eggs I don’t overcook them I like them really runny and I like to scramble them mostly in olive oil that’s my favorite fat to use to scramble eggs I usually put salt um I’ve been using the garlic salt that Amelia, the podcast supporter who lives close to me, she made out of garlic scapes.

Alison:
So I’ve been using that. And I put white pepper on my scrambled eggs as well, which makes them kind of really zingy. And then I had carrot salad with that, a big pile of greens. And we cooked some millet in the chicken meat stock from lunch that I’d made at lunch. So everyone would have had that millet for that last meal of Tuesday.

Andrea:
So you kind of aim to have the carrot salad once in a day, but it might be a different meal. It’s not always…

Alison:
Yeah, it’s not always breakfast, but I do try and have it once a day. Often it’s just supper, you know, it goes with the salad or whatever veggies we have for supper.

Andrea:
All right. Well, our Tuesday. Okay, let’s hear about your Tuesday. Our Tuesday is, well, that’s when we record the podcast. So, if somebody goes back, maybe they can find that lunch you had.

Andrea:
And I had, before we started recording, I made Earl Grey and put raw cream in it, and I made coffee for Gary. Um then when i came upstairs i had a breakfast of overnight oats which um overnight oats which i’d put a bunch of spices in when it soaked and then i cooked it with some milk in the morning and then a broccolini toasted and lard and scrambled eggs and sauerkraut so when i make our crowds i make a kind of a range of them i make i like to have a kind of a i don’t know bland isn’t the right word but just a plain kraut with maybe caraway seeds and cabbage and salt. And then I like most of my krauts to be very, very full of variety. So I put in all winter, I buy the ginger and turmeric from our farm stand and I shred in massive amounts of ginger and turmeric. I put in beets and shredded carrots because we go without carrots. For unless I were to be able to grow a bunch of my own and keep them in the ground which I can do and I just haven’t done yet integrating I’m still buying them from the farm stand then I only have them when they’re putting them out which means that they end around Christmas time and then we’re not gonna we don’t get them back until okay like April, um so there’s that that stretch of time is very lean um but that’s okay.

Alison:
Yeah i have to say the cat the carrots that we’re getting at the moment from the from we were getting for this that they are a bit ropey from the market you know you can tell that they’ve been in storage yeah so even though you’re still getting them you’re looking forward to.

Andrea:
Those fresh ones.

Alison:
Yeah the new ones exactly yeah nothing like it.

Andrea:
So the kraut has that golden beets red beets colored beets daikon radishes. I mean, you name it. When all those winter veg are coming in, I just shove everything into that kraut. So then when we have it, we’re getting kind of bursts of flavor, color, variety, even though it’s just listed as kraut on there, we’re still getting a nice range of things. Sometimes I name them, you know, Christmas kraut or Epiphany kraut or something, you know, whenever I made it. So then I kind of know what was happening at that time.

Alison:
So I’ve got a question about this breakfast. You’ve got oats that are spicy with milk. You’ve got broccoli, you know, the broccoli, the greens and lard. And you’ve got scrambled eggs and you’ve got crab. Are they all in one plate? Do you eat them at separate times? Do you eat them? How are you eating that?

Andrea:
No, I prepared it all at the same time. So the oats, I think if I’m remembering rightly from this day, somebody started cooking them before I even came upstairs because I had, I just make the pot and I leave it. And so then it can be started before I come upstairs. Sometimes I’m organized enough to get my podcast day breakfast, something that I, you know, even can turn on and bake in the morning while the generator’s banking up the house. Okay, what listeners might know, I can’t remember if I said this on our behind the scenes episode, but we have to like, fill up the batteries before we start recording. So sometimes you have to start the generator like three or 330 in the morning, and then shut it off before we start because you can’t turn off the generator during recording or cut off the episode no please don’t do that.

Andrea:
I’m too much trauma around that even the technology god can’t fix that one but anyways so sometimes i’m organized and i get things done in that window of time but usually it’s just so busy trying to, get the fire going and get things ready. So anyways, after breakfast, then there was a morning snack because my mom came that day. She comes on Mondays to pick up her milk or Tuesdays. She comes on Tuesdays to pick up her milk and any dairy that I picked up for her. No, she comes Mondays. That’s right. She comes Mondays. She usually brings a loaf of vine corn bread, which my kids love. And then she also brought some canned peaches. So we had a snack. There was some had applesauce, some had canned peaches, There was a little leftover ironcorn bread and there was eggs. I don’t know if I hard boiled them or I just wrote eggs. I’m not sure why. And then we were outside this day, pretty much the entire day. I came in at one point and I had the night before just pulled out of the freezer some random packets of pork ribs.

Andrea:
So I came in at some point and I seared them on the stove. And then I had a little tiny bit of homemade barbecue sauce, which is like a sweet ketchup, basically, in a jar. And I kind of spread it across the top of those ribs. And then I just covered them up and then went back outside and let them cook. We came in for a fairly late lunch, but still within the realm of lunchtime. And I made a gluten-free gravy with pork broth, salt and pepper, milk, and a gluten-free flour. And then we had some kind of greens with a kefir ranch dressing. I’m trying to remember what greens I would have gotten. I think there was probably spinach around this time. And then I made myself a gluten-free buckwheat pancake. And I made everybody else some penne pasta. And then there was sauerkraut. So we had a plate with, you know, we kind of slid the meat off of the bones and then put gravy on top of it. And everybody had their carb on the side and then some kind of greens, which Kenton and Adelaide just ate like out of the salad bowl.

Andrea:
And then I had to leave with the baby for a chiropractor appointment. So everybody had more of the same for a lighter dinner. So in Gary’s home and we’re all working outside, what I’ve noticed we tend to do is we have, big lunch and then dinner is just bits of whatever it was that we had.

Alison:
Yeah and.

Andrea:
Then while I was in town I had found this little tiny shop that sells ice cream.

Alison:
In pints.

Andrea:
And I brought some home and everybody went crazy so this was the ice cream incident Tuesday early.

Alison:
March I see the ice cream incident all.

Andrea:
Right how was your Wednesday let’s see what you had on Wednesday.

Alison:
Yeah okay so let’s to look at Wednesday the notes we made for Wednesday so yeah my first breakfast was a naked oat porridge but you were clothed so naked oats are yeah I was clothed yeah I was I might have been in my dressing gown possibly okay okay um but the oats our naked oats are different from normal oats in that they instead of having a thick tight adhering hull they have a thin paper thin hull that’s easy to get off and because of that they do not need to be kilned in the same way that standard oats are kiln so they’re actually raw whereas most oats are not raw we get naked oats from hobnodds um from a farmer in lincolnshire i think which is kind of the middle of the country and we absolutely love them we just we so much so prefer the flavor of them to any other oats that we get um and rob uses our marcato marga and hand crank roller meal to flake them into rolled oats, so he does that in batches and so usually a kilo at a time um just over a pound, And then we keep them in the fridge, again, in a bowl with a plate on as a lid. And then we get, you know, get it out and put it, this would have been cooked in the instant pot. We just get it out the night before, soak them in the instant pot overnight, get it all ready. And then he just presses a button in the morning, which he absolutely loves. Just bing, breakfast.

Alison:
So naked oak porridge, which I stirred two teaspoons of collagen powder into. I do use collagen powder semi-regularly to just up my protein a little bit in the morning. I find that I like to have protein in the morning, which is why you see that I’ve had sausages quite a bit.

Alison:
When I have those sausages, the boys aren’t necessarily having meat. But I find that I do reasonably well with protein in the morning. And I like to have protein with oats in the morning. I wouldn’t have oats without any protein. you know i wouldn’t put oats with sugary things for example if i ate sugar i like to have something that feels more stabilizing yeah so i stir the collagen powder in which i can’t taste and then i like to put linseed on my um porridge and i generally probably more linseed than most people would think to put on their porridge quite a lot um sunflower seeds and a few soaked nuts not many um some salt um and olive oil and they mix it all up wow that sounds really good do.

Andrea:
You grind the soaked nuts.

Alison:
Or is whole.

Andrea:
Soaked nuts or how’s.

Alison:
No they’re whole they’re whole if i have time i put them in the oven we used to dehydrate them but the dehydrator got accidentally thrown down the stairs so we don’t have a dehydrator anymore that.

Andrea:
Happens to dehydrate.

Alison:
Sometimes you know um Um, so sometimes I like to put them in the oven and roast them at a low temperature and… I haven’t done that. I didn’t do that that week because I was away the week before. And so they just would have been put in with some salt and water, you know, the night before, the night before.

Andrea:
Food after you.

Alison:
We keep them in the fridge when we’ve soaked them. You know, after they’ve soaked and been drained, we keep them in the fridge for a few days.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
So what are you going to say?

Andrea:
I was going to say, food after you travel is interesting. It makes you realize how much we rely on the rolling over of processes day to day. And it makes me think when people say, you know, we ate organic for a day or organic for a week or we, you know, how that is just not representative of the way the lifestyle is. It’s so difficult to do something for just such a short time.

Alison:
So, yeah, the rhythms and it’s a rhythm. And when your rhythm is broken from being away, it takes a while to get that rhythm.

Andrea:
It does.

Alison:
It really does. It would have taken me more than a week to get that rhythm back up, you know, because I was. I think i sprouted some seeds when i got back so you’ll see sprouts later on but you know that was broken the bread was broken the bread for the boys was broken you know oat cakes was broken and it’s a little hard to just jump right.

Andrea:
Back in you know you have kind of ramp the systems back up and build your momentum.

Alison:
Yeah yeah and you’ve got to have the goods in in the pantry you know when i when i was away i came back on a saturday i remember and so that meant Rob and Gable went to the market to do our weekly shopping at the farmer’s market by themselves. And, you know, they try hard.

Andrea:
But they’re not me. They’re not thinking in the way you are. Yeah. No, I totally get it.

Alison:
And so I didn’t have in my fridge what would have been there if I had gone to that market. So then it takes me another week until I can go to the market again to get the things that I would have got. And so it takes a good couple of weeks to get back to it.

Andrea:
All those problems could go away if you just bought everything in a cardboard box at the grocery store. I’m just throwing that out there.

Alison:
I could do an order online, couldn’t I, from a Nicole’s house.

Alison:
I could have had it shipped and arriving at my door for the day I got back.

Andrea:
Oh, shiver. well your second breakfast.

Alison:
Is something that I want to eat.

Andrea:
So let’s hear about this.

Alison:
Okay so good second breakfast was two oat cakes with butter I’m in um which I generally have goat’s butter because I like that and then oat milk heated with two squares of 100% cacao chocolate in it oh that is my now luxury really is because you know without having a sweet in my life I look for as I said earlier ways to satisfy myself and that does it oh my gosh oh 100% cacao chocolate in oat milk is just delicious it’s not the same as putting cocoa in oat milk it’s just not the same because it’s got the cocoa butter in it as well as the cacao and it’s just creamy and deep in a way that is very different so yeah with oat cakes and how do.

Andrea:
You do you make this or do you purchase it?

Alison:
Okay, so oat milk, because I do not get on very well with straight animal milk at all. We buy goat’s milk every two weeks when the goat’s milk lady comes to the market, but we kefir the whole lot. Literally, we buy four litres of it and all of it goes into kefir.

Alison:
Occasionally, I make like a rice pudding with straight milk, but generally, I don’t drink straight milk because I can’t drink kefir. I don’t drink milk.

Alison:
Um but i do like the the creaminess of milk you know i like that sensation and i like having a warm cup of something to hold and kind of nurture and feel like i’m treating myself you know um so i’ve tried various different oat milks i do make my own milk with nuts and seeds but not all the time because it’s expensive and it requires a lot of extra thoughtful it’s not in it’s not in my rhythm you know if it was in my rhythm like I know people who Katie who is a supporter is in her rhythm and she makes um nut milk all the time but it’s not in my rhythm um I have made oat milk before in the past um and I’ve made it which is a long story with koji because in order to get the sweetness of oat milk that you the people who’ve eaten oat milk that’s been made by a company um it’s sweeter than just cooking oats so you can this is a long story you can soak oat groats and put them in a blender to make milk and then strain them but if you heat that oat milk it won’t taste sweet as normal oat milk as you buy in a shop.

Alison:
It will be a lot blander. And it’s nice. It often also thickens depending on the size of the sieve that you’ve used to strain it through. I do sometimes eat oatmeal like that. That’s more what I would call an oat gruel, like what might be considered an atole in Mexico.

Alison:
But it tastes different. Oat milk uses enzymes, protease and another one that I’ve forgotten the name of briefly. Um and that changes the complex carbohydrates into simple sugars and makes it sweet so oat milk made that way is the only sweet you know obviously sweet thing i have in my diet okay and all the rest of the sugar that i’m kind of eating is complex carb so i can see with the chocolate how complimentary that would be with the if you look at the packaging there there is not high amount of simple sugars but it’s not all complex carb there’s a little bit of simple sugar in there as well so heated with chocolate it’s not too sweet because i’m now used to not having sweet things um i have as i said i have made it with koji because koji produces the two enzymes that are used commercially to make oat milk by just being koji which is amazing.

Alison:
Um but i didn’t make this particular oat milk i bought it from a company um in the uk who make it in the uk from uk oats and they don’t put any oils in their milk so a lot of plant-based milks have sunflower oil in them and other added they have sunflower oil to as an emulsifier and they also have added you know fortified things you know with vitamins made so i don’t want any of that stuff and um neither do i want the sunflower oil because i don’t like what it does to the milk and i don’t want to eat random somehow amazing that that company does that wow yeah and it’s it literally says on the front uk oats no oils no additives so it’s just salt oats and water.

Alison:
Which is i love that really really nice that was a long explanation of oat milk um so that was my second breakfast two oat cakes of butter oat milk with two squares of chocolate melted into it and i kind of froth it up with a with a you know a whisk to make it extra luxurious yes.

Alison:
Really nice um lunch was homemade gluten-free sourdough this time drizzled with cold pressed local rake seed oil two poached eggs poached eggs are close to my favorite type of egg um second scrambled eggs and brussels sprouts oh the end of the brussels sprouts now i’m lamenting the brussels sprouts gone um i love poached eggs and i love making sure that the yolk is still really runny and it going all over my bread when i when i eat.

Andrea:
It that is.

Alison:
Um so that was a deal, and then supper was chicken carcass risotto so that would have been either chicken carcass that i had you know the meat that i had in the fridge or i might have taken out the freezer, um and i fry onion in tallow and then i put the rice in which is arborio rice and then i put chicken in and then we put kale into it i put whatever greens are in the fridge i can find sometimes i put mushrooms in sometimes you know whatever whatever i’ve got goes into it and then i used the chicken meat stock to be the liquid for the chicken carcass risotto that day i actually had a snack before bed as well so i almost made the victorian six meals a day i made it bye i had a large piece of homemade oat cake i obviously made oat cakes that day um i make really big oat cakes like eight inches and then i’ll just break them off and they’re all crispy and lovely so that was my bedtime snack okay let’s go to you Wednesday Wednesday you’re.

Andrea:
Gonna be shocked we had pancakes for breakfast.

Alison:
Oh gosh what a change fried.

Andrea:
Eggs sauerkraut jelly for those who wanted it I had earl grey tea and honey presumably.

Alison:
Gary had coffee.

Andrea:
But I didn’t write that down now.

Alison:
Yeah the pot.

Andrea:
That I made the ribs in the day prior to this was a fairly big one And I left the bones, the drippings, any scraps in the pot. And then the next day I put that pot back on the stove for lunch. I heated it up and then I poured in a quart of pork broth that I had made in canned previously at some point. Probably when we butchered the pigs, I roast any bones we’ve scraped to make a ton of broth. Yeah. All at once. And then I added in lamb, beef, egg, meatballs. So, I just made a big batch of that meat, like ground meat, and I just kind of stood there while the pot was bubbling and threw in meatballs. I put in some coconut aminos, some ginger, dried ginger. I chopped in bok choy, which does hang around. I think it was just starting to come back at this point, if i’m remembering right okay uh just like little little ones uh we served it with kraut, radishes salt and more chopped cilantro so that was a fairly big soup lunch and then for dinner we had more of the same trying to think why i didn’t write some kind of a if i had some kind of a bread with this because typically yeah.

Alison:
I was just thinking where’s the carb.

Andrea:
Yeah well i’m I’m sure I must have made some kind of a noodle or something, but I don’t see it written here and I’m not sure why. Probably something was served. Maybe it was just leftover pancakes. I don’t know.

Alison:
Yeah, from the morning.

Andrea:
Yeah, I’m not sure. But there probably was. And dinner was just a repeat. So, you know.

Andrea:
So, we’re going to take another ad break. And when we come back, we’ll go through our Thursday through Sunday. More repetition from me. More interesting things from you. And then if we have time. And I actually want to highlight a little bit from the listener menus because they’re astounding. And this book, I think, is going to become a tradition that we have to repeat. And when we get to that point, I want to share about some of the concerns that people shared, which actually you mentioned also when you introduced your menu. And so did I. So, there was some concerns that people had when they shared their menus. And I also want to talk about a concept that I think is behind why I wanted to hear all of these menus. So, let’s take a quick break and come right back.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
All right, Allison, let’s hear what you had for Thursday.

Alison:
Okay let’s whiz through these because there is some repetition so first breakfast was a leek and potato soup um the boys don’t eat potatoes and sometimes i just i need to have potato and i love leek and potato soup and i remember about a couple of weeks before that thinking i have to make a leek and potato soup look at these lovely leeks at the market i cannot go any longer without eating leek and potato soup so i made a big batch and then just i ate it and i portioned it in little you know single portions in the freezer and then the super cubes got it out and enjoyed it so i had that um yes in super cubes yeah and enjoyed those for breakfast so i just had that i got it out the night before heated it up that was my first breakfast second breakfast was one slice of homemade um gluten-free sourdough with linseed sprinkled over the top and then olive oil over the top of it and one square of that same 100% cacao so this is.

Andrea:
An allison’s home uh chocolate croissant that’s what i’m seeing.

Alison:
Yeah yeah like it yeah exactly you find that that that gluten-free sourdough and the linseed and the olive oil come out a lot um you know i eat linseed almost every day one loaf of that sourdough bread a week every day and.

Andrea:
It sees you through.

Alison:
Usually so.

Andrea:
You have it fresh the first day.

Alison:
And then toasted after you said, yeah well no actually usually what i do is i make a loaf and i freeze four slices of it because really it doesn’t last longer than four ish days and so i usually freeze four slices you know fresh and then i’ll get those out later in the week and toast them that’s usually my routine um lunch was a treat bacon sandwich what which the bacon comes from albert the farmer at the market is a treat gable absolutely loves bacon sandwich that’s a treat for him with for me homemade gluten-free sourdough for the boys it would have been spelt or rye brussels sprouts again tomatoes um which would have been canned um followed i was obviously hungry that day an hour later by oat milk which was thickened um with left over fermented oatmeal which i had left over from making wait for it humry which is a welsh fermented oat dish which is not i was I’m not even pronouncing it right. Khmer. Khmer is not right. But it’s spelled L-L-Y-M-R-U.

Andrea:
Have that.

Alison:
And not pronounced as I pronounced it. You’ve got to go and find a Welsh speaker and ask them to pronounce it really.

Andrea:
Really.

Alison:
To not kill the word like I just did. So I was working on that recipe for my book. So I had leftover fermented oatmeal from making that. And I put that inside the oat milk and stirred it up and it thickened it into a really kind of thick kind of tasty drink. Then, in the evening, I had the khumri, which is fermented oat, which is a fermented oat jelly. So you ferment oats and then you strain them and then you cook up the liquid that comes through and it sets into a jelly and then you can slice it. So I had that with seeds, pumpkin, linseed and sunflower seed. And then I had the rest of the leftover fermented oatmeal which was strained out of the mixed with an egg and onions and then fried in would have been lard I guess to make a pancake, I had carrot salad and I had a very small portion of a goat’s cheese that the lady at the market makes which is a bit like feta not quite but tastes a bit like feta.

Andrea:
Did you put it on the salad or you just ate it?

Alison:
I just ate it separately I doesn’t you often if I have a small piece it doesn’t even make it to the.

Andrea:
Table i’ve eaten i’ve taken a plate same so not arguing your thursday was far more interesting than my thursday allison can you guess what we had for breakfast.

Alison:
Um i’m thinking maybe you had pancakes.

Andrea:
Wow you are a mind reader we had pancakes we had eggs we had crap there was tea and coffee had so that was breakfast lunch i took a whole bunch of leftovers out of the refrigerator not sure why i didn’t write down what those were but you’ve probably already heard about them because they would be from the last few days and i made more eggs to go with it because this is also the time of year when eggs are starting to happen again and so we’re getting a lot of eggs in the door, Like 20 a day. Okay, for dinner, there was, oh, I took out the leftover pork soup. I did not serve that at lunchtime. So I took out the leftover pork soup. I added more broth to it because it kind of thickened a bit. And then I put in more meatballs because you can always have more meatballs. So I had not cooked all of the meatball batter. I don’t know what you call it.

Alison:
Yeah. And I just added more in as I cooked it. I don’t know. Mix.

Andrea:
Those are astoundingly.

Alison:
I don’t know. exotic thursday simple was your friday simple okay friday friday first breakfast was porridge again this time it was fermented overnight with a tiny bit of milk kefir in it um i had salt on it and then seeds sesame this time which i like to toast i can’t remember if they were toasted this time sometimes i don’t get around to it sunflower and linseed olive oil and two teaspoons of collagen all mixed in simple first breakfast again that would have been done in the instant pot and the boys would have had very very similar things maybe slightly different topping they tend to pour milk kefir on their porridge afterwards you know and eat it to make it really creamy and my second breakfast was leftover porridge from that porridge making session you sound like me sunflower seeds and half a teaspoon of miso sometimes i um have a tiny bit of miso um and i think i can balance my histamine you know if i haven’t had bacon or something else that day then then i allow myself a little bit of miso which i love um with olive oil lunch was frozen wild salmon we really don’t eat yeah i know we really don’t eat much fish and um because we can’t i can’t find a source of it here that i’m i’m happy with um but we do buy wild salmon that’s frozen.

Alison:
Um because i love the taste of it and because i think that it’s a really good fish to include in my diet every now and again so i had that the boys didn’t have salmon i can’t remember what they had maybe some kind of leftover or something else um and then kale from the garden which was amazing because we have we don’t have a garden basically but um amelia the garlic salt lady, brought a kale plant over a year and a bit ago and we planted it in the garden of our own house.

Alison:
Our old house back then and when we moved I was like well there’s this there’s this plant yeah can we take it and so we found a pot and we just got some soil and we put it in the pot and we brought it here it’s like one of the only plants we brought and I put it in the patio at the back and it’s been giving us kale not as much as we eat obviously but still some so I went out and got some of the kale off the plant which is still going now we’re recording you know nearly may and it’s still it’s growing back um so it felt really nice to have our own kale um carrot salad with that and then rice again nicole’s rice which was still going cooked in chicken meat stock um supper that day was homemade gluten-free sourdough bread because i hadn’t had it for lunch so i had it for supper spread with butter two soft boiled eggs on the top and a large green salad the green salad comes from the market from our vegetable lady called ros that was friday perfect okay guess how my friday started should i should i say i could actually do your i reckon you i reckon you had pancakes for breakfast on friday possibly some eggs maybe some kraut and a tea you you know me allison.

Andrea:
You just know me There was also jam for anybody who wanted it. So, let’s not forget that. And lunch was the same. Okay, but before I… Trod my meals too far under the table, allow me to say they are exquisite. It is not hard to eat. It is not hard to eat repetitive food when it is literally the top of the line. The eggs were gathered that day. The lard was raised here.

Andrea:
The jam was picked in our own wild berry fields and made here at home and it’s not insanely sweet we sometimes we put honey in it although now katie’s got me thinking i shouldn’t be heating honey um and sometimes we put sugar in it sometimes you do pectin sometimes we don’t it it’s not really always very precise sometimes i put lemon juice in it sometimes i put lime juice in it but we just end up with a range of these delicious jams and when you open them you literally feel like you’re standing outside picking the berries again, and so everything is i i could serve this to anybody and it would be top of the line meal although it is simple and it is repetitive but it’s not hard to do when it’s really good and dinner is again not that creative but i have to say i remember this week every time we sat down to eat i thought this has got to be the best meal i have ever made and yet you see you see how boring and repetitive they are but again it was all just exploding with flavor and it was i mean everything that you’re hearing was except the corn and the tortillas was raised like within two miles or a few miles of our house so blue tortillas um with the very last of my blue tortilla or blue corn flour from hacienda um taco beans that i had canned chorizo um.

Andrea:
We made ourself uh shredded swiss and gouda from our friends dairy and salsa that i made using the very last of our jarred tomatoes some of the fresh cilantro some stored garlic frozen jalapenos from this just adorable little farm down the road i bought all their jalapenos in the summer and just shoved the bag in the freezer salt cumin and cayenne pepper um which is a pepper that our friends grew they smoked the peppers they dried the peppers and they ground the peppers and then they gave me a container of it delicious so i mean nobody was complaining nobody was complaining even though it came over and over again the same thing all right and we’re almost to the end of the week allison let’s see yeah we are what happens in our weekend and how crazy we get what did you do for saturday.

Alison:
Saturday saturday first breakfast was porridge cooked in oat milk so i would have done that separately for me because the boys generally don’t have that sometimes i just like to put.

Andrea:
In my.

Alison:
Porridge makes it a little bit um a little bit a different flavor.

Andrea:
Does rob do you do and and he does the kefir you said he pours that on his porridge so that’s right i can both okay yeah.

Alison:
Yeah, they have different things in the porridge that I don’t, mainly the milk heave here, but sometimes they have fruit as well. Gabriel was obsessed with porridge with miso, so he’ll stir miso into his porridge if you give him the opportunity to get some miso. Two teaspoons of collagen in the porridge and then sunflower, sesame and linseeds. Second breakfast was a large piece of homemade oat cake spread with butter and a handful of soaked walnuts.

Alison:
Lunch was pork liver pate which i remember i made after we got home from the market that day because i found pork liver at the market from albert that had pork liver onions mushrooms bacon and i had that with homemade gluten-free sourdough spread with lard and steamed cauliflower on the side and, which was delicious supper was um oh sourdough bread’s not there because i had it for lunch isn’t it two hard-boiled eggs um sometimes i softball eggs sometimes i hardball them those were hardballed a green salad carrot salad and then some sprouts here they are started some sprouts when i got back from nicole’s and they’ve made it by saturday um fiona who’s a podcast listener who lives um quite close um donated me and gave me a seed sprouter i used to have one when i was eating raw because i was a sprouting fan then but i melted it my mistake by is it’s the it was a victim of having a tiny kitchen you know because i’ve got all these things and i’ve always had tiny kitchens and i remember in our flat in empoli which is in tuscany when we lived there I picked up the sprouter and I put it on a ring of the electric hob because there was no other space for it and then unfortunately later on in the day I turned the wrong knob on on the hob and then I melted it so you threw the dehydrated on the stairs you torched your.

Alison:
Seed sprouter this is this is what happens in our house I have to say I didn’t throw the dehydrated on the stairs gable did i did as children as children do exactly yeah um yeah as allison does i melted the seed sprouter so thank you to fiona for giving me a new one and i sprouted broccoli alfalfa red clover and sunflower seeds together so we had a mix and i love putting sprouts on um my oh yeah so good i will sprout batch put it in a container in the fridge and then every couple of days rinse it before i start using them again because they can tend to go a bit kind of um gunky if you don’t rinse them and then we had roasted vegetables which we do at least once a week while the roasted vegetables are around um we had pumpkin celeriac parsnip um and we put tallow on it and the tallow is hard when it comes out of the fridge so we have to stir it like 20 minutes in because then it’s melted and i always put lots of different spices and herbs depending on my mood um i noted what i used um, That day, I used ground clove, anise, because, oh, I had no anise for ages. And then when I went to see Nicole in Italy, I saw anise in the health food store. So I got some anise. So ground clove, ground anise, ground allspice, pepper, all of those would have been freshly ground, and salt all mixed over them. So they had real beautiful spicy flavours with that pumpkin, and the fat helped carry those flavours around.

Andrea:
You cannot, you cannot overestimate the power of freshly ground. Spices it is a world to itself it just puts pre-ground in the shade.

Alison:
When i when i put the anise seeds in the ground in the grinder and then.

Andrea:
Opened it and smelt them i was like oh.

Alison:
My gosh this might be overtaking nigella as.

Andrea:
My favorite spice now we want to i.

Alison:
Was completely in love with it and for about week i put.

Andrea:
Anise on everything literally on everything butter.

Alison:
Anise you know sausages annies yeah just put on everything.

Andrea:
Okay now i’m going to tell you something weird allison um saturday and sunday were at the bottom of the piece of paper and somehow they got lost so i wrote down what we had this last saturday and sunday so we’re kind of jumping forward in time which was not my intention but i also didn’t want to leave the days empty so, So, but you can still guess what I had for breakfast.

Alison:
Yep, pancakes.

Andrea:
Okay, you’re there. There was a variation on this pancake in that I put butter on it, which is extremely exquisite and sacred right now, because if we’re not buying things, then the butter is slowly dwindling down. So I’m kind of saving the butter for the most precious things. But since I had got some out to make cookies, there was a little tiny bit left over for the pancake, and it was like…

Andrea:
Exquisite and i just read jane air where she talked about how they had their bread with really thinly scraped butter over it and i’ll and she said oh it was such a treat and i was like i get you jane i feel this yeah um i made the pancakes with lard that was from a batch i had burned and we did talk about this in the fats episode if you burn fat it does leave a flavor in it but I wasn’t willing to throw it all away so what I do is I put it in things and I just obscure it with spices so I made pancake mix and I put spices in it and then there was jam coffee honey cream the usual suspects lunch was absolutely incredible it was duck salad so uh we raised ducks We butchered Dutch ducks and then I cooked the ducks and shredded the meat off. And then our friends own a little catering place in town that does not use soy, does not use any sugar, does not use gluten, does not use seed oils, and operates under all sustainable premises. So, it’s an amazing, amazing little store. And she has a refrigerator inside where you can go in and buy, you know, little things that they make in-house for their catering, but then they, you know, have enough that they put on the shelf.

Alison:
I see.

Andrea:
She’s never had this before, but she had mayonnaise. And so that was actually part of what inspired me to make the duck salad because I brought the mayonnaise home. And in my head, I was like, I already know what I’m doing with this. So I had a little piece of cheddar from our dairy friends and I cubed that. And then I had boiled eggs and I cubed some of those. And then I made a sauce with mayonnaise, the mustard, a red wine vinegar, some salt and a little bit of Megan’s ranch dressing. So Megan is our resident garlic farmer, and she makes amazing herb mixes you can buy online. So I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. And then I had made kamut rolls for the kids, and I had made the gluten-free flatbread dough that I talked about earlier, but I was too tired to make one for myself. So I just had the duck salad.

Alison:
I know that.

Andrea:
And then as a snack that day, I had made a batch of browned butter oatmeal cookies. And I decided.

Alison:
So that’s why you had the bus.

Andrea:
Yeah, exactly. I decided to put this recipe in the menu booklet because it is really tasty and it’s, well, it is sweet, Allison. I’m sorry to tell you. But as molasses in it, I had actually been making it because I wanted to bring something to a friend who just had a baby. So I wanted to make something with a lot of oatmeal. I wanted to make something with sweet. I wanted to make something with like molasses high in minerals and salt and all those things. So that was where those came from. And then for dinner, it was just simple kamut rolls and jam, boiled eggs and… Like in cups. It’s very, very simple. All right. How was your, we’re at the end, Alison. We’re at the end. Last day. How was your Sunday?

Alison:
Yeah, Sunday. My first breakfast was girty milk. It was what? Which, of course, everyone knows what it is, don’t they?

Andrea:
Most people do, Alison. Oh, sorry. Wrong century. No, no one knows what that is.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Well, if you’re in Discord.

Alison:
They might know what it is. And if you lived in Cornwall. Yeah. If you lived in Cornwall in the 1800s, you know what it was. Um it’s a milk thickened with um malted naked oats so it’s going in my book and i’m writing around in my book i found out about it from a lady called harriet gendall it’s written about in a book called um folk stories of west cornwall by william bottrell and i basically sprouted naked oats and then toasted them and then ground them and then use them to thicken a milk in a saucepan warm I used a nut milk that we’d made because I prefer goatee milk with nut milk not oat milk and I had that with half a venison sausage I think the goatee milk was quite a lot of it so that’s why I only had half the venison sausage my second breakfast was the other half the venison sausage simple and three oat cakes drizzled with olive oil lunch was a minestrone style soup in it was venison hearts that i got from the market game stall stewing beef that i got from my farmer albert onions leeks butternut squash kale chicken meat stock and canned tomatoes i absolutely love making a minestrone soup and putting in whatever vegetables i have and I really like it with butternut squash in or you know with pumpkin in.

Alison:
And all the boys love it sometimes I just put ground meat in it’s not always stewing beef just absolutely delicious I had that with homemade gluten-free sourdough bread with lard on it, Then supper was a large salad, which I mixed in some leftover of the roasted vegetables that we’d done the day before. Also in there was greens, the carrot salad all mixed up, sprouts, mix that all up. And then I topped it with one hard boiled egg, some cold pressed rapeseed oil and a drizzle, tiny drizzle of vinegar.

Andrea:
Do you chop up that egg when you put it on or slice it or?

Alison:
Usually half it, just half it.

Andrea:
Oh, very fancy.

Alison:
And then put salt on, put salt on the top.

Andrea:
Okay well our how about you sunday we have broken the pancake trend no pancakes on sunday you.

Alison:
Run out of.

Andrea:
Pancake flour no i ran out of time i can’t do pancakes that fast on sunday um it was sausage and scrambled eggs which i made in pans in the kitchen and people could just take go in and take some between you know taking turns using the bathroom to get dressed and whatnot and then i I made coffee with milk and then I just got some collagen, trying to take a cue from you. And so I had whipped some of that collagen into, I warmed the milk and then I put it into coffee. So it was kind of like coffee, collagen, milk mixture. And then dinner when we got back from services was I took out a bunch of stew beef and I, So I kind of toasted the beef in the pan, and then I put in lamb broth and duck broth. I made a paste of fresh parsley, lemon juice, and garlic, and then I served that. Stew with the leftover kamut rolls and i there’s a bakery that just opened in town like two doors down from our church called millet bakery and it is a gluten-free bakery and i thought i better show my support and i got a bag of bagels there and so i had a bagel what.

Alison:
Were they like.

Andrea:
So delicious unbelievable because.

Alison:
I made gluten-free bagels as you know.

Andrea:
When i see nicole from aaron.

Alison:
Go yoga’s book and absolutely delicious and i want to make them again for my birthday which is.

Andrea:
Coming up soon so.

Alison:
And fingers crossed we can do that.

Andrea:
The exciting thing about the bakery is i have no problem with baking things but it’s fun knowing that there’s a place where i could buy something if i really.

Alison:
Yeah definitely i would like one of those.

Andrea:
Yeah so there’s our week allison it’s interesting seeing the amazing seeing the flow of the food and how repetitively things come up for both of us. And, you know, like the sourdough bread is going to make an appearance every day and the carrot salad, or in my case, the pancakes, the eggs will make. Well, both of us had eggs, I think, every day. So…

Alison:
Yeah, I have eggs most evenings, literally. I mean, that’s my evening. I’m going to have eggs tonight with gluten-free sourdough tonight and the salad, carrot salad that’s in the fridge, it’s still the same, you know?

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah, and it’s familiar and comforting in many ways, having those things. Now, in the beginning of the book, I’m just going to call it a book now, it’s gone past booklet stage into a book stage. In the beginning of the Treasury of Ancestral Menus, where you can see, Alison, your menu is written out, mine is written out, not with all the annotations that we just gave.

Andrea:
Are our menus and the ones that were sent in. In the beginning of the book, I was trying to, I wrote a short introduction, just trying to articulate why it was so important to me to hear what people were eating for a longer period of time and to get a real picture of it. And when I was doing research for this episode, I listened to the lecture as aforementioned, which is linked in the show notes. And the lecturer quoted someone who, regretfully, their name I did not write down, but you will hear it very early on. It’s in the very beginning of the lecture if you listen to it. And she said there’s a researcher who describes what she calls your food voice. And this is your voice as expressed through the food you make, not just the recipes or the things that are local, but the way you express your voice through your meals.

Andrea:
And when I was writing the introduction, I was trying to explain how when I really get to know somebody, I really want to know what they’re cooking and eating, because I feel like I can see you better in that way. And I realized that it was, I wanted to hear your voice, the voice of the people who sent their meals in, in a more clear and longer way than just an Instagram post, which is just a snippet of words or a picture, but a longer monologue from somebody of their week.

Andrea:
And I’m so thankful to all of the listeners who sent their menus in, because it is a lot of work to write your meals down. And the most common concerns that people shared were people kept saying, I’m sorry, well, I would do it, but our menu is not very exciting and it’s very repetitive. And I kept reiterating no that is actually part of my hypothesis behind this project is that all of us aren’t eating these super elaborate fancy meals our daily meals are much simpler than what I think some people have in mind for what people eat and collectively looking at all of these menus they are beautiful I can see why when we got together last summer for a camp out with a bunch of listeners. The food was outstanding because these were the people who were cooking and bringing food. Like I said, in the beginning, this treasury is like 50 pages long. So, there’s recipes and some extra content in there. But the other concern that almost everybody said was that the week they were recording, they were in some unusual life circumstances. So, for instance, you said, I just came back from a trip, so it’s not really showing how I have frozen food. I said, this is an extremely busy week for us. We barely even came inside to eat.

Andrea:
Um, Hannah sent in a recipe or a menu and she said we were traveling back starting in the beginning of the menu. You know, people had all kinds of things going on. Lizzie just had a grand baby born. So she’s been traveling and supporting with that. So just everybody had something going on. And my conclusion was, it’s always unusual. There’s always going to be something disrupting what maybe mentally we think is our more specific routine but by documenting it we’re able to get a better picture of the things that are important to us that pop up anyways like for you carrot salad was coming up no matter what presumably rob knew that and he was buying carrots even if he maybe didn’t know what else yeah what designs you had in mind absolutely for me even though i was saying there was no vegetation there’s nothing that we could we weren’t growing anything and there was nothing that we could purchase, we had.

Andrea:
Crowd you know like we we had our weird accommodations so so i’m gonna just share briefly a couple selections allison yeah what i did was i just went into the menus and i just randomly pulled some out like i did not pick through the.

Andrea:
Days or try to pick representative or anything like that i just i just chose a bunch so you ready i think i’ll get a few okay maybe like two or three in and then we’ll just jump to an after show and finish the week there because i actually assembled an entire week yeah of um different listeners menus okay interesting so first i’ll share hannah’s monday so they’re a family of four and they’re in arizona for breakfast they had over easy eggs with hot cross buns and fresh berries raw milk for the child with dairy intolerance and americanos no without the dairy intolerance and americanos for the adults i noticed hannah had over easy eggs pretty much every day with some kind of a bread okay for lunch they had toasted rye from the freezer sound familiar spread with lard and salt they had raw cheddar assorted vegetables with a kefir ranch they had berries again and raw milk for those who could tolerate it and dinner was a soaked brown rice bowls with shredded leftover lamb leg i think this was right after easter um roasted carrots and beets sauteed beet greens gravy made from the stock of the cooked lamb and sauerkraut and they drink that.

Alison:
Sounds really good.

Andrea:
That whole menu sounds amazing, I am happy to visit anytime. Bridget.

Alison:
Yeah, this is what I feel like with this. You know, it would just feel amazing to read all these menus and think, I could go there and I would so love all of that food. And, you know, that doesn’t happen very often out in the real world.

Andrea:
I agree.

Alison:
And it just feels, again, like it’s another thing that brings us together as a community. This just shared like, oh, I could go to the house, you know, it would be lovely.

Andrea:
Yeah, if we think of food voices, then, of course, you and I don’t have to talk about voice for very long before we start thinking of the choir and harmony and how some voices can blend together quite well. And I felt like reading this, when I put together this menu assembled from a mosaic of different people’s days, it didn’t look incongruous.

Andrea:
There was no sudden leaps to, you know, highly processed foods. And I did tell people, if you’re using processed foods, I want to know. Like, that’s fine. I would actually love it if somebody wanted to send in a menu of me during the transitioning period, because we need more of that as examples. And there was some consciousness, I think, some people felt like they didn’t want to send in their recipe or their list because it might not look like the ideal. I see.

Andrea:
That’s exactly what people need to see. So if somebody is wanting to send in their, you know, transition, I mean, if I could go, if I had been recording recipes for my meals for years, it would be really fascinating to go back and see how it shifted, you know, first from grocery store, more traditional into, you know, more purchased, better, perhaps options of things, and then gradually more and more homemade. And then from there, gradually more and more homegrown. um we had two bridgetts sending in menus so we have a bridget t and a bridget d so this tuesday is from bridget t who is in washington state and she actually has come out to the farm before family of three she started the day with sourdough french toast and chicken breakfast sausage yum and then lunch was a skillet pizza sourdough discard poured directly in the cast iron, cooked on both sides, then topped with marinara, ground beef, green peppers, pineapple, cheddar cheese, and broiled until gooey. Ah, yes, please.

Alison:
Oh, great idea.

Andrea:
Right on the stove. And then dinner was tuna or sardine sandwiches on sourdough bread. There was tomato soup, which was sauteed onion, a jar of diced tomatoes, blend and add a pinch of sugar and salt to taste, and seaweed on the side yeah you don’t hear that every day i like that she put the seaweed with the seafood yeah yeah okay there’s more allison but this episode is um i’m gonna stop the main feed recording and jump into okay an after show because there’s, This is just so wonderful to read. So if you’re listening and you want to share your food voice, I do want to hear menus from people. And the whole week is important, I think, because I could show you a day or a meal and give you just a taste. But I think the week is, it’s a more full story. And I mean, in reality, seeing a year is going to give a real shape, but that’s a lot.

Alison:
Don’t ask me to do it for a year.

Andrea:
Please. I can’t. But a week is enough.

Alison:
So you’re going to carry on in the after show with a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday of different people’s meals. Each from different meals. Wow. Okay. And if people want to send you in their meals, their week, should they just send it to our email?

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Where do you want it to go?

Andrea:
I think they can just send it to the podcast email. Is that linked to the show notes in any way?

Alison:
It’s info at ancestralkitchenpodcast.com.

Andrea:
All right.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Well, Alison, it was good.

Alison:
Thank you so much for all you’ve done to pull this together.

Andrea:
It’s been an amazing learning experience and so inspirational to me reading these menus and thinking, you know what, that is simple. And I do have that around me and I can do that. And maybe I’m overthinking some things.

Alison:
It’s just the inspiring things. You know, it feels like just hearing someone else’s menu. And I’m sure that listeners have felt this through the episode. You just think, oh, yeah, I could do that. Oh, yeah, that’s simple.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
And it just gives you little ideas which is nice.

Andrea:
Yeah which can be hard to get yeah you know when everything everybody else is eating you’re like i don’t know i couldn’t really do that so it is yeah well thank you allison for sharing your meals with us all and um i’ll see you in the after show thank.

Alison:
You yeah will do.